The first three Tomb Raider games — first published between 1996 and 1998 — relaunched as Tomb Raider Remastered I-III back in February, and while the remasters have been met with praise, there have been a fair few glitches and mishaps when porting the old into the new.
One bumble not entirely expected by fans involves a set of pinup posters starring heroine Lara Croft in the locker room preceding the “Sleeping With Fishes” act in The Lost Artifact add-on for Tomb Raider III.
Eagle-eyed fans noticed that these pinups were on show just as they were in the original game but, if the player switched the game to its updated and remade visuals, they vanished.
The Lara Croft pinup posters for example were completely removed from Tomb Raider 3 in the latest patch, leaving players to assume that Aspyr was deliberately censoring the game. However, it appears that this wasn’t an intentional removal and instead, it was a simple developer error.
Debunking what most thought to be censoring in the HD version, Aspyr actually thanked passionate fans for bringing this to their attention. The studio stated that the “posters in Sleeping With The Fishes (The Lost Artifact) were inadvertently removed in the HD version of the game”, suggesting that not even the developers had an idea this occurred.
These posters will make a return to the game “in Patch 3” but when this will be is currently unknown since there has been no official announcement for the release date of this next update.
If we were to look at the past updates, these have been pushed around the middle of the month, so if the trend continues, we could see Patch 3 hit our screens between May 10-18.
Not all want the posters to return though due to their somewhat lewd nature. A user on Tomb Raider Forums suggested that they are “incongruous” and actually “broke the immersion” which others also agree with. Whether you’re a fan of them or not though these images will be making a return.
Maybe a toggle option could be included in a further update to allow those offended to remove them intentionally for their playthrough.
