New tantalizing details about Crystal Dynamics’s upcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider is sure to make you hate them and publisher Square Enix for making the game a timed Xbox exclusive.
These new details come in the form of new screenshots and a Game Informer interview with Crystal Dynamics creative director Noah Hughes.
The screenshots give us a good look at Lara Croft, whose facial features appear to be based off the Definitive Edition of Rise‘s predecessor, Tomb Raider 2013.
We also get a look at Lara in her signature blue tank top in wandering around in a mountainous environment, suggesting that the game will take place in at least two distinct geographical regions.
Additionally, the Game Informer interview with Noah Hughes reveals that Rise will have a greater number of tombs to explore. Tomb Raider received some flak for the relative scarcity of tombs to explore, with many of them taking only a few minutes to plunder.
In response, Crystal Dynamics have made the tombs, which are still optional diversions from the main storyline, much larger and more complex:
We still take the approach of leveraging real world systems like physics and things like that […]and the ability to understand cause and effect within the world. So you’re not gonna find a ton of arbitrary logic puzzles necessarily, but you will a lot of ancient themed puzzle spaces that really ask the player to leverage their sense of how the world works in terms of physics and things like.
The design of Rise‘s puzzles will adopt a “nested” concept, in which players would have to explore different rooms or multiple sides of a room in order to solve one larger puzzle, as opposed to 2013‘s concept of having all elements of the puzzle in the same place.
In spite of this, Hughes maintains that “our intent is to challenge the player, but we don’t want players to get into stalemates with the puzzles.”
Rise of the Tomb Raider is scheduled for release sometime in late 2015.