Tomb Raider I-III Remastered features detailed

Developer Aspyr has finally revealed a host of details about Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, the highly anticipated collection coming in around a month, and there’s a massive amount of new info to get through.

Revealed on the Official PlayStation Blog, Director Chris Bashaar started by explaining how Aspyr didn’t want to alter the original vision of the Crystal Dynamics team from back in the day. “We wanted to both honor the foundations of the franchise and make accessible to modern audiences the original games in all their glory”, explained Bashaar, adding “What would the balance of preservation and modernization look like? We call it Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft“.

Bashaar explains that “Within pre-production, we divided the conversation into three buckets: engineering, gameplay, and art. With these categories in mind, we led our conversations in the same order”. Part of this was making sure you could toggle between the new vision and the original look at the press of a button, so that’s a confirmed feature for starters.

The Director added “We had a firm belief that the gameplay of Tomb Raider I, II, and III is timeless, and with our use of the existing source code, we had every jump, secret, enemy, and puzzle exactly as the original development team designed and intended. So the conversation evolved into: how do we surprise and delight these fans? And that’s where we started brainstorming additions instead of revisions”.

There are new controls (the tank controls are also an option), whereby the team has taken “inspiration from the Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld era of Tomb Raider. These changes are felt mostly in the way Lara moves – the right stick has full camera control and Lara moves directionally based on camera position”.

Another new change is boss health bars. On that, Bashaar said “One of Tomb Raider’s strengths was the minimal UI. However, this can be frustrating for tougher bosses with massive amounts of health. We added a health bar to let you know if you should swap to the grenade launcher or if you should keep soaking pistol damage”.

There are over 200 trophies for PlayStation users, a photo mode, real-time lighting effects, “new models, environments, and enemies”, a new model for Lara, and other adjustments. It’s all sounding pretty good, we think.

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is coming to consoles and PC on February 14th.