Noah Hughes, creative director for Rise of the Tomb Raider at Crystal Dynamics.
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How Lara Croft celebrates female empowerment and adventure in Rise of the Tomb Raider

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Lara Croft has always been about adventure as the hero of the Tomb Raider series. But ever since her 2013 reboot in Tomb Raider, her story has also been about female empowerment, self-reliance, and determination.

That’s how Noah Hughes, creative director at game studio Crystal Dynamics, approached the design of the character and story for the Xbox One exclusive, Rise of the Tomb Raider, which debuts on November 10. We caught up with Hughes at a Microsoft preview event in San Francisco.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.