The next Tomb Raider game is in development on Unreal Engine 5

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During Epic's State of Unreal(opens in new tab) stream today, Crystal Dynamics announced that it's developing a new Tomb Raider on the just-released Unreal Engine 5.

"We have just started development on our next Tomb Raider game, powered by Unreal Engine 5," said Dallas Dickinson, Tomb Raider franchise manager at Crystal Dynamics. "Our goal is to push the envelope of fidelity, and to deliver the high quality cinematic action-adventure experience that fans deserve from both Crystal Dynamics and the Tomb Raider franchise."

Unreal Engine 5 has been available as a "preview" build for a little while, but today marks its official release, and a lot of game developers are working with it, including Remedy, Obsidian, Rare, Ninja Theory, InXile, Dontnod, and Eidos Montreal.

The last Tomb Raider game, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, was developed by Eidos Montreal, but Crystal Dynamic developed the two previous Croft games, Tomb Raider in 2013 and Rise of the Tomb Raider in 2015.

Crystal Dynamics is incredibly excited about the future of Unreal and how it will help us take our storytelling to the next level. That's why we're proud to announce that our next #tombraider game is being built on Unreal Engine 5! pic.twitter.com/UFMiWzJAZc
— Tomb Raider (@tombraider) April 5, 2022

Unreal Engine 5 introduces a bunch of features centered around streamlining game development while increasing fidelity. The Nanite geometry system, for example, allows devs to import and use "film-quality" assets without making our GPUs smolder—see this post for more on UE5's features.

During today's livestream, CD Projekt Red also showed up to talk about its switch to Unreal Engine 5, although it didn't reveal any specifics about the new Witcher game it's building with it.