“People obviously look at what the parent company is doing, but it never impacted on resources, never led to any changes on management for them, so they’re fine,” says publisher Amazon Games’ boss, Christoph Hartmann.
Officially confirmed to be in development a couple of years ago, the next mainline Tomb Raider title isn’t something that we’ve heard or seen too much (or anything) of in an official capacity so far, but developer Crystal Dynamics is continuing to make steady progress on the action-adventure title behind-the-scenes, even as parent company Embracer Group seems to move from one crisis to another, from mass layoffs to major restructuring.
At least that’s what Christoph Hartmann, vie president of Amazon Games, says. Amazon Games was confirmed as the next Tomb Raider’s publisher in December of 2022, and as per Hartmann, in spite of the chaos surrounding Embracer, Crystal Dynamics continues to make good progress on the development of Tomb Raider.
“People obviously look at what the parent company is doing, but it never impacted on resources, never led to any changes on management for them, so they’re fine,” Hartmann said in an interview with IGN. “I mean, doing a new Tomb Raider, the bar is so high. The longer you go, the expectation goes higher, so it’s a huge, huge task, but things are progressing. I mean, there’s some really great ideas here.
“Obviously, we’re not going to share any with you even if we would love to, but things are going well, things are moving forward. And from what I could tell, Crystal was pretty sheltered, because also when you look before… they went through a couple of ownership changes anyway before, it’s not brand new for them.”
Earlier this year, leaks claimed that the next Tomb Raider game was going to be set in India, and that it would feature an open world structure, while previous reports have also claimed that the game will star a more experienced version of protagonist Lara Croft.
It remains to be seen when exactly the next Tomb Raider will be officially revealed, but earlier this year, Hartmann said those details weren’t “too far away”.
