Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis might be remaking Lara Croft's very first adventure, but the developers are instead ripping inspiration from 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider when it comes to difficulty options.
As you might remember (or not, it was eight years ago!), Shadow of the Tomb Raider had a really nifty approach to difficulty, giving players three separate sliders to adjust the difficulty of combat, traversal, and puzzles individually. Players with twitchy trigger fingers could make fights tougher, say, while dialling up how often supporting characters would give you hints about puzzle solutions, and vice versa.
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is following suit, game director Raul Siqueira told GamesRadar+ in an interview from Summer Game Fest.
"I think the biggest lesson that we took from [the Survivor Trilogy] is tuning difficulty based on players' expectations," Siqueira says. "One of the things I think we got really good at towards the end of that trilogy was we had a lot of different options for players that wanted to tune the experience to their liking. We found, because Tomb Raider blends a bunch of different things together, there are people that are really into puzzles and they want puzzles to be very difficult, but they're not great at combat, so they want combat to be easy."
Speaking on the individual knobs players could toy with in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Siqueira says the team at Crystal Dynamic wanted to do the same thing so fans could "customize their challenge to their liking" because someone who's great at gun fights isn't necessarily good at all parts of the Lara Croft fantasy.
"That was one of the things that we really wanted to preserve and make sure that players had a good foot. The balance of that is an ever-changing thing. We're tuning it pretty much until the end," the game's lead adds.
When asked how similar Legacy of Atlantis' sliders would be to its older sibling's options, which could even wash away the controversial guiding yellow/white paint out of levels, Siqueira simply says the knobs are still being adjusted and the team will have a lot more to share about accessibility options soon... "but, like, you can expect a very similar mode for it."
Could Legacy of Atlantis make it onto our list of the best Tomb Raider games of all time?
