Crystal Dynamics has announced that a new Tomb Raider game has just entered development. It was also confirmed that the next entry in the storied action-adventure series will be built on Epic Game's newly released game engine, Unreal Engine 5.
The announcement was made during the State of Unreal 2022 presentation that aired early today, which was a showcase for the brand-new game engine. Among those that appeared during the event was Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider franchise general manager, Dallas Dickinson, who confirmed that a new Tomb Raider game from the studio is in production and will be running on Unreal Engine 5. In the announcement, Dickinson said, "Our goal is to push the envelope of fidelity and deliver the high-quality cinematic action-adventure experience that fans deserve from both Crystal Dynamics and the Tomb Raider franchise." No videos or images of the upcoming game were shown.
The previous Tomb Raider games from Crystal Dynamics were built on the Foundation Engine, developed in-house at Crystal Dynamics. This announcement comes shortly off the heels of another major franchise also announcing that they will also be moving away from the engine used in previous games in favor of Unreal Engine 5. CD Projekt Red announced in late March that they would be replacing their long-running, in-house REDengine to use Unreal Engine 5 in the start of a "new saga" for The Witcher series.
The Tomb Raider franchise dates back to 1996 and has a total of 12 mainline entries in the series as well as several spinoff games and several film adaptations. Crystal Dynamics' first game in the series was 2006's Tomb Raider: Legends. After a remake of the original fame and 2009's Tomb Raider: Underworld, Crystal Dynamics began their reboot trilogy of the classic series with 2013's Tomb Raider with Rise of the Tomb Raider releasing a few years later in 2015. The latest entry in the trilogy and series was Shadow of the Tomb Raider, though that title was not developed by Crystal Dynamics, instead, being made by the studio behind Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Eidos-Montréal, though it also used the studio's Foundation Engine. It was announced in October 2021 that the two timelines would be bridged together with the upcoming Tomb Raider anime series coming to Netflix.
There are no further details of the new Tomb Raider game currently available. Unreal Engine 5 is now out.