Amazon Game Studios has detailed the character design work behind Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis in a new PlayStation Blog feature. The post, credited to Michael Lovan, Amazon Game Studios’ Global Head of Content and Community, explains how Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog rebuilt Lara Croft for PlayStation 5 while keeping the original 1996 design as the anchor. It includes direct comments from Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog staff, including Narrative Director John Stafford.
The game launches February 12, 2027. Pre-orders are live now on PlayStation Store. The feature names PlayStation 5 as the platform for Lara’s latest journey and does not name Xbox, PC, or Switch versions, so those remain unconfirmed by this post. It also does not detail editions, prices, or bonus items beyond telling players to secure an edition before launch.
The Polygon Count Problem, Then and Now
The original Tomb Raider in 1996 gave Lara “a few hundred polygons and a fistful of pixels.” Every decision was a compromise between her silhouette and the hardware. Crystal Dynamics now has far more compute, but the team still treats that old model as the reference point. Brendon Bengston, from Crystal Dynamics, described the question directly: “When the original Lara was made, we could only have a certain number of polygons, a certain number of textures… Now we have that technology and the computing power, so we ask, how do we make this the most realistic-looking Lara while sticking with that original design?”
That realism comes through specific modern techniques. Hair cards replace the old solid polygon shapes with thin, overlapping strips of semi-transparent texture, so Lara’s hair catches light and moves in separate clumps. Subsurface scattering makes light enter the skin, scatter beneath the surface, and glow back out, which gives her skin the look of living tissue in close camera work. Flow maps add another layer of surface response for skin. Custom blend shapes are sculpted facial poses that the game moves between. When Lara squinches, smiles, or frowns, the system produces bespoke lines on her face and forehead, which lets one face form thousands of natural expressions instead of a rigid mask. Those systems work together so that when Lara turns her head or stands under a different light source, the character remains the same person.
The feature credits Epic’s Unreal technology for the jump: “Using this technology from Epic in Unreal has let us take the characters to the next level, not just in their static model but in how they move and emote.” The techniques are active while Lara climbs, talks, and reacts to light.
The PS2 era gave Lara smoother geometry and more expressive animation through Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld. The Survivor trilogy pushed detail and realism further. Each generation added polygons, texture, and nuance, and the series has kept older entries alive alongside them, including a physical Switch 2 release of Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition.
Keeping the 1996 Silhouette as the Anchor
The team’s stated rule is that the 1996 design is the anchor every choice answers to. Aleksandra Skiba, senior character concept artist at Flying Wild Hog, framed the tension: “You want them to feel believable, but you also want them to look recognizable… You have to figure out what you can do now to make them better.” Higher fidelity cannot erase the parts of Lara that players identify from across 30 years.
Narrative Director John Stafford, from Crystal Dynamics, breaks the identity work into three parts. The team kept Lara’s intelligence, fearlessness, and thrill-seeking spirit. It deepened her emotional depth and relationships without losing her confidence, and it unified the mythic, grounded, and larger-than-life tones of multiple Tomb Raider eras into one Lara.
Lara has already spanned the PS1, PS2, and Survivor eras, and each generation layered a new interpretation onto a fixed core. Stafford notes that Anniversary was about retelling a classic through a modern lens, while Legacy of Atlantis is about synthesizing thirty years of Lara into something new. Stafford says players remember how Lara makes them feel more than individual plot points, so the team wants to evoke those same emotions across all previous eras.
The Survivor era showed that Lara works well when danger has consequences. Stafford says the team carried forward her physicality, emotional credibility, and sense of earned resilience. Even at her most confident, this Lara still feels human. For players meeting her for the first time, Stafford says the target is that she is “the smartest person in the room, and the boldest,” and that “adventure isn’t something she survives, it’s something she actively pursues.” The non-negotiable trait is curiosity. “No matter the era, Lara must always feel like someone who needs to know what’s behind the next door.”
The approach also keeps Lara’s acrobatics central to how she moves. The added facial and fabric detail supports that physicality.
Real Fabric
Early on, the team decided to use a scanning pipeline. They sculpted Lara’s base body, got it 3D printed at real scale, sent it to a vendor, put real-world clothes on the mannequin, and scanned that. They even hired a tailor to create an actual outfit for her. “They made it, we put it on a mannequin and scanned it, and now we have a real-world asset of the digital version.” Denim folds differently than silk, and silk folds differently from chiffon, cotton, or wool. That physical difference shows up in motion because the scan captures how the material behaves, which gives her outfit weight and movement cues that look like clothing.
