Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
AI Games

2027's 'Tomb Raider' Remake: Unreal Engine 5 and AI-Assisted Assets 'Refined' By Humans (kotaku.com) 50

Posted by EditorDavid from the last-revelation dept.
An official trailer dropped this week for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. It's "a full-blown remake of the original 1996 Tomb Raider game," reports Kotaku, "rebuilt from the ground up using Unreal Engine 5." Developed by Flying Wild Hog (with assistance/guidance from longtime Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics), "it will also make some changes to puzzles, combat, platforming..."

The game's Steam page acknowledges that AI-assisted tools were used during development "to support some early exploration and temporary development content," but that any AI-assisted assets were "either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team." In a statement to Eurogamer, Crystal Dynamics clarifies that they "leverage" AI tools "to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted." (But are they considering AI-assisted assets "refined" by humans as "human-crafted"?)

Polygon reports that "The early response to the news has been mixed to negative on the Tomb Raider subreddit, ranging from vague hopes that the generative-AI craze will simply go away to grim resignation that this is the future of game development." Beyond labor concerns, art theft worries, and environmental issues, the most straightforward reason AI art has been unpopular is that many players find it hideous. We'll find out for sure whether Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis' use of AI is particularly blatant when it comes out in February 2027.
Its release date is February 12, 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

2027's 'Tomb Raider' Remake: Unreal Engine 5 and AI-Assisted Assets 'Refined' By Humans More

2027's 'Tomb Raider' Remake: Unreal Engine 5 and AI-Assisted Assets 'Refined' By Humans

Comments Filter:

  • As long it looks good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Saturday June 06, 2026 @10:55AM (#66178024)

    90% of the "AI art" problem is just that people doing it don't have a good eye for art and end up doing soulless deformed stuffs.
    Stuff like shopping mall advertising using characters with the wrong number of fingers and all that.
    If you're not even counting the fingers, you're probably just picking the first thing that pops out and plastering it directly.

    • For me the problem with AI art is that it is like putting a heavy wash over a miniature. It's something you do when you don't have the skill to really make good art.

      That's not just me being pissy it shows up throughout the entire experience. It's fine when I'm playing tabletop with my friends to use shortcuts like that that make the miniatures look kind of so so because we are just casual hobbyists but if I saw white dwarf doing that shit you can bet I would be looking for a different mini company.

      T

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        The worst part is that these game companies are not trying to profit, the whole point is making the stock price go up, which means making things that make the old boomers think the company is worth more, it's all marketing for a few people that barely understand what the company does and mostly guide themselves by buzzwords.
        However if the "AI buzzword" turns into a negative one for these individuals, you could see it being abandoned overnight.
         

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          make the old boomers think the company is worth more

          This "old boomer" follows Warren Buffett's advice: If you don't understand the business or the market, don't invest in it.

          The part of AI that I do understand is the data center construction, utility equipment, air conditioning, etc. Once that stuff has been paid for and installed, I wouldn't touch the operation part of the equation with a 3.05 meter pole.

    • No. The problem is that completely regardless of how good you are, AI art has a limited ability to generate images with truly unique aspects. While individual images may be mindblowingly unique when you first start, after you've used it extensively you start to see repeated patterns you can't avoid.

      We're well past shopping mall adverts with the wrong number of fingers being the result of anything other than a low cost Chinese slop machine, but that doesn't change the fact that most AI art generates an uncan

  • I watched the trailer, sure the visuals looks 'nice', but I wasn't blown away. The AI component is problematic imo.

    Maybe it was the way to trailer was put together but it feels like it's very a much a scripted, on the rails experience, which doesn't really interest me. Though it seems a lot of high budget 'pretty' action games are this way now.

    I thought the YouTube comments were interesting, they felt AI to me, every one a positive one liner, really? Thought it's the official TombRaider channel, so heavily

    • The original 96' game was basically on rails. It wasn't open world. You got dumped into a level, ran around solving puzzles that had you crisscrossing said level. It was fun. Now if it's more linear then that, it will be worse. Either way, I'm not interested in remakes at this point.

      As far as the AI goes. Get over it. That's the future and it's not going to change. If they hadn't said anything, most wouldn't have a clue. AI will get better and they may very well stop saying anything.

      It's sort of ironic. AI

      • It's not just the work issue. As TFA and other comments say, it also just looks like shit. Bland, average, featureless, samey. GenAI "art" always has that AI look. They can try to have humans hide it, but it's very difficult to add character to something when starting from an initial version completely devoid of character.

        There's a reason why many games with an amazing visual style had very influential art directors that often became famous in their own right. You can't get that with GenAI, your game will a

  • Lara should have 17 fingers just like AI intended!

  • Useful! (Score:3)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday June 06, 2026 @11:34AM (#66178078) Homepage

    The extra fingers will come in handy when climbing.

    • While I laughed a little there is a problem to perpetuating this joke. AI hasn't had a problem counting body parts in a long time now. By repeating these jokes we unfortunately make people believe that any image with the right amount of fingers *isn't* AI.

  • Looks way better than the new God of War gameplay trailer. (There's a cube named Frank in it. The writing is terrible, even for a game).

    It's interesting they're calling this one "Tomb Raider" since for a while they reserved that for the new series (Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider) and stuck with "Laura Croft: whatever" for the classic look. Of the new ones, the first one (2013) was good, but Rise was kinda the same and Shadow was so BORING.

    I guess they've given up on that very and

  • So this is Kotaku, the shit tier 2010 "new media" corporate blog with gaming focus that fired all of the writers after they ran it into the ground and replaced them with AI writers.

    Who are now farming clicks with AI hate.

    This is beautiful.

  • Tombraider died after The Last Revelation and even that was a bit of a shark jump.

  • a full-blown remake of the original 1996 Tomb Raider game

    But Tomb Raider: Anniversary is already that, and still looks perfectly good. And if you want it more strictly faithful to the original, there's the recent remaster. So this is absolutely unnecessary.

  • Slop Raider 2027, most likely?

    Don't get me wrong, I'll love to be proven wrong. Assuming I buy it and I buy on Steam so I can ask for a refund in a few hours after launching it and get disappointed by not be proven wrong.

    • If you are anything like the average Slashdotter, you are of a demographic with expectations that are WAY higher then that of the target audience. There's a very good reason the gaming world specifically caters to teens and 20 somethings. Everything is "new" to them and they don't have expectations.

      Us old Mills and Gen Xers have see all of this before and we expect the latest iteration to be both amazing and tick the nostalgia box. That bar is so much higher to achieve and people will still bitch and whine.

  • You supposedly increase productivity x10 with these tools, so the development must be much cheaper right? So I suppose you will be pricing the game accordingly, right?

  • As Ben Stiller once said, "here we go again... again".

  • Because I've bought my last ever video card, barring hardware failure.

    Idle bluff, you say? Nope. I have a motorcycle and a fishing rod. The resolution for both is fucking amazing.

    • With you there. My 3080 cost so much that I'll never upgrade (barring failure) and I'd rather play with my classic vehicles than buy another GPU.

  • You're not going to put this Genie back in the bottle.

    AI image / asset generation is going to happen because not only is it faster but it can be done far cheaper than humans can do.
    ( It's akin to arguing that cars put the horse and buggy industry out of business )

    You should get used to it because that is going to be the way forward regardless if you agree with it or not.
    There is far too much money involved for it to be ignored.

Slashdot Top Deals

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Close