New Tomb Raider Lara Croft Design Revealed

thegamer.com:

Tomb Raider is expected to make a return later this year, with fans having waited almost six years for a new game in the series. While we haven't had a game announcement just yet, Crystal Dynamics has given us our first look at what may be Lara Croft's new design for the next title, combining her reboot and classic looks to form a "unified" Lara Croft for the first time.

Lara's new design was revealed rather unceremoniously in an image uploaded to the new Tomb Raider website, though it appears you'll need to become a member if you want to see it in the wild. You can also see the design in this article's featured image and embedded down below, which features Lara Croft in her classic blue tank top and brown shorts, wielding dual pistols while trekking around in the wilderness.

Even from one image, you can see that Lara's face is much closer to her reboot design, suggesting Crystal Dynamics has merged the two to create a new Lara, presumably for the next game in the series, which is currently in development. Of course, this might just be a fancy piece of concept art to celebrate the Tomb Raider website's launch, but it's clear from just a cursory glance that this design is made up of both classic and rebooted Lara designs.

Adding to the speculation that this might actually be Lara Croft's new in-game design is a new announcement on the Tomb Raider website asking fans to join the Society of Raiders. If you've been keeping up to date on yourTomb Raider news, you'll know that a series of story details surrounding the next game seemingly leaked a couple of years ago, which claimed Lara Croft would take on a role as a mentor for a group of young and inexperienced raiders.

Given that Lara has accidentally smashed up a few ancient relics and caused a couple of disasters in the reboot trilogy, having her become older and wiser makes a lot of sense from a narrative standpoint. This "Society of Raiders" seems like a good hint that the leaks from back in 2022 were right on the