Lara Croft will not be returning in 2012.
The head of Crystal Dynamics, Darrell Gallagher, took to the Eidos Interactive Community Forums overnight to announce Tomb Raider‘s delay to the first quarter of 2013. Gallagher said:
A Message to the Tomb Raider Community
When Crystal Dynamics first set out to reboot the Tomb Raider franchise, there were two goals that we were extremely passionate about. The first was to create a modern Tomb Raider game that would surprise and excite gamers. The second was to make this the best game of our careers, something we would be really proud to be a part of. We truly believe that we have something very special on our hands and we can’t wait to share it with you.
Our priority now is to make sure we fully deliver the very highest quality game. In order to do this, we have decided to move the game’s release date by a few months, from Fall 2012 to the first quarter of 2013.
We’re doing things that are completely new to Tomb Raider in this game and the additional development time will allow us to put the finishing touches into the game and polish it to a level that you deserve. We believe this is the right choice and I guarantee it will be worth the wait. The game is looking amazing and we can’t wait to show it to everyone at E3 in a few weeks.
Darrell Gallagher
In order to tide fans over until their E3 appearance, one new screenshot was provided as a hint to what we’ll see in three weeks:
Looks like some intense upside-down-tree-swinging action right there.
Every time there’s a delay of a prominent title, my shock and disappointment tend to take over my better judgment. As such, I raged when I heard this last night. However, after sleeping on it I recalled Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous quote:
A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.
Sure, we’ll be waiting a bit longer for Lara Croft’s new adventure, and this news coming five days after the big delay of BioShock Infinite doesn’t help, but this can only be a good thing. We’ll see what Lara has in store for us in three weeks at E3 2012.
