Fine tombing your play style
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is only a month away and it looks like you’ll be able to tinker the game’s settings in incredible detail. The blog post released yesterday evening shows off a bunch of, quite frankly, impressive options which put to shame the traditional Easy, Normal & Hard standards that we’re used to.
A list of accessibility options includes (amongst other traditional options such as inverted aim):
- Reducing Camera Shake
- The option to center the camera horizontally so that it is ‘soft locked’ on Lara’s back, requiring the use of only one stick for movement. The other stick can still be used to move the camera if desired.
- The option to use right (default) or left stick to aim, when looking down sights (left trigger)
- The option to hold button press prompts rather than repeated tapping
- The option to push the stick directionally for crank control prompts rather than rotate
Adjustable aim sensitivity
The last two items on the list are particularly interesting to see as it’s not usually a choice that crops up in a game’s options.
Alongside the accessibility options are of course the difficulty options and whilst they do offer the aforementioned ‘easy’, ‘normal’, and ‘hard’ there’s a lot of fine tuning that can also be made.
Rather than having a global scale for the difficulty you’ll be given the option to choose individual scales for the following areas: combat, exploration and puzzle. Tweaking the last two difficulties will alter the game’s artwork and visuals. Campfires will be lit on easy exploration, for example, whereas on normal and hard they will be unlit. Clues for traversal points and puzzle interactions will also become less obvious when playing on harder difficulties.
It’s an awesome inclusion for the game and allows players who may not be great at shooters to still have a challenging time with the exploration parts. Or, of course, vice versa. Hats off to Eidos and Crystal Dynamics for including this stroke of genius.
You can view all the information on Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s accessibility and difficulty options here.
