Rumor: New Tomb Raider Will Be Open World, Have Teams Of Allies, Non-Lethal Combat, And More

We have a surprisingly detailed set of rumors about the next Tomb Raider game.

The last time we reported on an upcoming Tomb Raider title, Crystal Dynamics was on hand at Epic’s State of Unreal event in 2022. As you may have guessed, they announced that the game would be the first in the franchise to run on Unreal Engine 5. That set expectations high, but we didn’t know that much about it beyond that.

V Scooper has now emerged with a set of tweets dropping a lot of information about the game. We’ll go through the rumors for you below.

The first thing V Scooper said was that it would be a full open world title set in India. As such, Lara would get to use a variety of traversal methods, including motorcycles, parachutes, on top of how Lara usually gets around, to travel around the country.

V Scooper follows this up with more details on the setting. Lara will mostly be in Northern India, looking around the ruins of Ashoka’s empire after a natural disaster, or a cataclysmic event, exposes the ruins.

Lara then has to contend with a Society of Raiders, a separate group of treasure hunters also going through the ruins. This group is apparently ‘inspired’ by Lara’s own achievements, but it’s not guaranteed they will help Lara. V Scooper says the Society will be connected to a new feature, where you can recruit allies and form teams, to help you in fighting rival treasure hunters and accomplishing your missions. Subsequently, you will have non-lethal combat options, presumably because you can recruit the people who you fought with.

V Scooper does not say this is multiplayer, but if it isn’t, then Crystal Dynamics has put forward an ambitious next gen concept. The execution will be what matters, but it is absolutely credible that Crystal Dynamics has stepped up to create a true next gen concept, post Square Enix, even if they are owned by Embracer, and soon, Middle-Earth and Friends.

Addressing the first questions fans would ask, V Scooper does not know how Lara will look like, and they also doubt she will be revealed this early. However, V Scooper does say that the current timetable is for this Tomb Raider to release in a year!

That timeframe is not guaranteed, and it’s probably likely that the release will get delayed, as practically all the games that have released in the last two years, even smaller projects, did so. But V Scooper suggests that this game is far ahead in development, and we won’t have to wait that long for its release at all.

But then, if this is the same Tomb Raider announced in 2022, then Crystal Dynamics started work on it in that same year, or possibly even earlier. It’s believable that work on this game started in 2021 or even 2020, and is about to wrap up soon.

We can’t wait for this game to be announced, hopefully with a proper reveal. The timing of V Scooper’s rumors happens to conveniently come close to a very good time for a big game company to reveal new games: June, the month when E3 originally happened.