Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition leaves a sour taste

Later this month the much discussed Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition will be hitting stores around the world. I say much discussed because it has sparked a tiny bit of debate since being announced late last year. How much can you charge for a next-generation version of an older game that only brings a new lick of paint and a new character model to the table? Well, according to the guys at Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics, you can go ahead and charge full price.

I can't be the only person this grates with. The Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 versions were great, they offered a compelling origins story for Lara Croft and introduced a whole new generation of fans to the world of Tomb Raider. It's understandable that Crystal Dynamics wanted to go ahead and port the game to the new consoles so that players can experience the game in the best-looking way possible, but to do it without adding any new gameplay at all? No new tombs, not even any multiplayer content, just the post-launch DLC that you can readily buy for cheap on the old systems.

It just doesn't seem right. Crystal Dynamics has made no secret of the fact that they could have added some more content, they even thought about it for a while, but then they quickly dismissed the suggestion because "we already had the story we wanted to tell". But they have no problem charging more than double the price of what you can pick up last year's version for.

PC gamers are also having a chuckle to themselves at this being labelled the Definitive Edition. Definitive for consoles, maybe, but last year's PC game ran at 60 frames-per-second, while the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions will be stuck at 30 FPS. Something just doesn't seem right.

At the end of the day it's completely up to the developers and publishers whether they want to upgrade their games to next-gen. But Square charging full price for a simple visual upgrade could set a cruel precedent that might flood the market with 'Definitive' editions of titles that are almost exactly the same as their last-gen predecessors. This isn't what the next-generation was supposed to be.