It's been more than seven years since Shadow of the Tomb Raider put a bow on Lara Croft's big reboot trilogy, and since then, series fans have been desperate for even a morsel of information on what's coming next. Now, finally, it seems relief is in sight, as a big Tomb Raider reveal has been teased for The Game Awards later this week.

"Did you miss her?" the official Tomb Raider account asks on Twitter. "She missed you." The message encourages you to tune into the annual TGA showcase on December 11 "for a look at the future of one of gaming's most iconic franchises." The news was initially revealed in Fortnite, as part of a TGA-branded island built for players to vote on their favorite fanmade creations in the battle royale hub.

The teaser includes an image showing a silhouette of Lara Croft posing proudly with the old-school dual pistols that helped define her appearance in the original 1996 game. If you squint just hard enough, you can just about make out pouches and holster straps around her legs that hint at the old costume, too.

It's possible that this reveal is tied to some non-gaming multimedia project, like maybe the upcoming Prime Video series, but I'm inclined to believe it's going to be our first look at the new Tomb Raider game Crystal Dynamics first announced way back in 2022. You don't tease "future of one of gaming's most iconic franchises" without knowing that fans are going to expect a video game reveal.

The most telling bit is the new-look Lara. As far back as 2021, Crystal Dynamics was talking about its intent to "unify" the old-school Tomb Raider timeline with the modern Survivor trilogy, and we've occasionally seen new versions of the character blending '90s camp costuming with a more realistic appearance for the character herself. The idea of a "unified" Lara Croft design has grown powerful in the minds of fans, and this new teaser certainly seems to suggest something along those lines.

For now, we have only two concrete bits of information on the new Tomb Raider game: it's being developed in Unreal Engine 5, and it's going to be published by Amazon Games. For a couple of years now, it's seemed that Crystal Dynamics only emerges from its silence to announce another round of layoffs before going quiet once again. Here's hoping this reveal at The Game Awards turns out to be a little more unequivocally positive.

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Jonathan Rogers, one of the co-founders of the studio behind Path of Exile, isn't afraid to call his own game too old to be the perfect action RPG. The first PoE had its moment and now it lives comfortably on updates made to please its most dedicated fans. It's not going anywhere, but it's also not going to be the next big thing.

Path of Exile 2, however, could be the game at the end of Rogers' "quest to make the perfect ARPG," he told PC Gamer in a recent interview. Despite its differences to PoE 1, some of which have gone away over the last year in early access, "it was never really about making it feel distinct," he says.

In the last year, Grinding Gear Games has been navigating the treacherous waters of making a sequel that veers pretty far away from the vibe of the first game. If PoE 1 is a rampage through thousands of monsters, PoE 2 is a dance with far fewer, but more threatening monsters—a fundamental shift in the feel of the game. And not everyone has been a fan of the pivot, especially when any class that feels remotely like PoE 1 inevitably gets gutted in a patch.

PoE 1 veterans want to feel like gods and go fast in the new game; Rogers wants combat to feel methodical. Despite those fundamentally different desires, he believes he can make everyone happy.

"It's been incredibly tricky to split the difference, just incredibly tricky," he says of balancing the game for players who want to slide through combat at blazing speeds and players who want an uphill battle. "There have been times where—in moments of weakness—I'm like, maybe we can't appeal to both of those groups … But I definitely believe that you can make an experience that has both good combat and delivers on the kind of feeling of like I feel powerful and good and can do these things as well."

Rogers thinks that the team is getting close to finding where the line is "in terms of speed versus methodicalness," although getting there hasn't been easy, as the frustrations around the nerf-heavy Dawn of the Hunt update earlier this year made clear.

In the current version of PoE 2, some of the roughest edges have been sanded off and replaced by things that work in PoE 1, like having more than one life in endgame maps. It's still its own game, but some compromises have been made to appease players who aren't interested in PoE 2's almost soulslike encounters.

According to Rogers, borrowing ideas that worked in the first game isn't off limits as long as they make it better. PoE 2 was only ever about "fixing the things that I perceived as problems we couldn't fix in PoE 1," he says, and to make something that isn't as dated.

"PoE 1's strategy is not attracting users now," he added: It's about pleasing the players that come back every three months for a new league. "The days of that game growing are much less likely than PoE 2," he says. "I mean just literally only for just graphics reasons. There's a lot of people who won't play a game that looks that old."

PoE 2 is about to add a class that never made it to PoE 1: druids. Everyone will be able to see GGG's take on the classic RPG archetype when its next update, The Last of the Druids, launches on December 12.

A new report on a lawsuit over canceled DLC for Aspyr's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 remaster has revealed some much bigger details about the KOTOR remake and what Lucasfilm Games has planned afterward. It seems a full remake of KOTOR 2 is also in the planning stages, complete with an array of fixes for the game's original, infamously unfinished ending.

That's according to Lucasfilm Games VP Douglas Reilly, who spoke about the project as part of a deposition over the missing DLC this past March. Reilly's comments have just surfaced in a new Game File report, where he discusses "Juliet," the codename for the KOTOR 2 remake.

"Juliet was the code name for a project where we were going to do a full remake of KOTOR II with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general—the general content of KOTOR II, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kind of things," Reilly explained. "It was something we were discussing with Aspyr."

The remake of KOTOR 1 was announced way back in 2021, but soon seemed to hit development troubles at Aspyr. Reports suggested that work had shifted to a Saber Interactive studio, but the details of the developer were never actually revealed at the time. However, Reilly confirmed that it has moved to Mad Head Games, the studio behind the upcoming Hellraiser: Revival.

Notably, the official site for Mad Head Games says that the studio has another "unannounced AAA game based on a famous and beloved IP" in the works, and a KOTOR remake would certainly qualify there. There have also been stirrings recently about an Old Republic-flavored game being revealed soon, and while those rumors have not been substantiated, the impending Game Awards on December 11 would be a perfect venue for the KOTOR remake to reemerge.

Such an announcement would be even more exciting if a remake of the sequel were to follow. KOTOR 2 launched in 2004 with an ending that many players – myself included – felt at the time was anticlimactic and unsatisfying. Soon after the game hit PC, modders discovered evidence in the game files suggesting that much of the ending's content, and some other elements of the game, were cut before release, likely due to time constraints put on developer Obsidian.

After years of work, fans eventually released the Restored Content Modification, which implements many of the story elements and other features the original devs cut from the game. When Aspyr released a KOTOR 2 remaster for Switch in 2022, it had plans to also release the RCM project as DLC – the first time console players would ever get the chance to play it. That DLC release was eventually canceled, prompting a false advertising lawsuit against Aspyr.

The details of that lawsuit are the primary subject of the new Game File report, but in short, it seems the DLC was canceled because Disney's lawyers got cold feet about their ability to fully secure the rights to the modders' work.

Even with the disruption to the KOTOR 1 remake's development, the project "is still technically on the road map," according to Reilly, and it won't be subject to the same legal issues that killed the restored content DLC. "The plan was we would remake the content that was in the RCM as it relates to Star Wars in that Juliet project," Reilly said. Here's hoping that plan remains intact.

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