A Hero's Legacy

If Xbox can't find the value in owning the beating heart of the first-person shooter, perhaps it shouldn't be in the videogame business at all.

Generative AI has been a very contentious issue over the last few years in the game industry, and as more and more developers make use of the technology, it's becoming more difficult to know just what was created by a human being. Next year's Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis will indeed make use of generative AI, but Crystal Dynamics wants players to know there is one area it was not used: the design of Lara Croft herself. Speaking to GameSpot at Summer Game Fest, experience director Jeff Adams clarified if generative AI was used in the creation of Lara. "No. Lara is 100% human-crafted," Adams

Overwatch's next hero is a dual-wielding cyberpunk demon named Shion, developer Blizzard has revealed, and she looks like she's ripped straight from Cyberpunk 2077. Shion is billed as "the most terrifying elder of the Hashimoto Clan," a Japanese criminal family that has ties to the global terrorist organization Talon and is behind the assassination of Sojiro Shimada, the father of Hanzo and Genji. That should make for some interesting story developments between the two brothers and Shion, with Kiriko and Mizuki also shown in artwork for the new season and presumably set to play a role as well.

I am not a Tomb Raider expert - my memories go about as far back as playing the bulk of the original and its sequel at a friend's house, aged something like seven to 10 years old, and attempting to break free of the same demo disc level for a few too many hours on end. But what I've always taken from my fuzzy recollections of late-90s Lara is that one of classic Tomb Raider's defining traits is its precision. Jump exactly here. Land exactly there. Manually press a button to grab the ledge. If you miss you die - or at least get very frustrated. Read more

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is up for preorder. Releasing next year on February 12, here's where you can order a copy and what comes with each edition.