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I Waited Ten Years For This Tomb Raider PC Port

Here at last, with only one weird caveat

Alex Rowe
5 min readMay 4, 2024
Lara Croft contemplates a camcorder near a campfire in Tomb Raider Definitive Edition.
Tomb Raider Definitive Edition PC screenshot taken by the author.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about 2014’s weird “definitive edition” re-release of 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. This slightly updated build of the game was crafted on a short timetable to get some extra cash out of the iconic property by retooling it for the at-the-time brand new PS4 and Xbox One consoles.

Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics leaned in to the more powerful hardware, adding in new assets, improved dynamic foliage, and additional physics effects. They also radically changed Lara’s character model to make it more detailed and realistic, but at the cost of some animation fidelity.

In that recent piece (which you can read in full right here), I complained about how the “definitive” improvements were never rolled back into the PC version of the game, or released for PC users at all in any form. This was strange, as the PC version still managed to run better than the newer consoles back in 2014. I didn’t understand why the large PC user base shouldn’t have the option to try out the new graphical niceties. PC gaming and graphical oomph are two proverbial peas in a pod, after all.

I know that console games don’t always come to PC right away, but this game already had a version out for the platform. Also, the…

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Alex Rowe
Alex Rowe

Written by Alex Rowe

I post commentary about gaming, tech, and sometimes music. I’ve written professionally about games since 2005. Look mom, I’m using my English degree!

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