According to Ninja Theory’s combat designer, the Xbox/PC-exclusive game has undergone quite a change from the first instalment.

Juan Fernández, Ninja Theory’s combat designer (who previously worked at Playground Games on Fable), gave an interview to Spanish Vandal, which was translated on the ResetEra forums. He talked about the work he did on the two Hellblades. We found out that the combat experience in the second part is different from the first title, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, as we have to use various attacks and combos during the fights.

Fernández says, “We’re raising the bar of doing more with less. We [have] more people [working on Hellblade II] than the first Hellblade, but the quality we’re giving versus the team behind it compared to similar games, I think it’s through the roof. What I like about Hellblade II is that it’s a unique approach. I think it’s going to have an impact like Hellblade but for other reasons, because there are a lot of things that were new in the first game that will have less impact in the second game, but there’s a whole bunch of other new things that will have that impact.”

In the first Hellblade, Fernández critiqued several aspects: “What I was least satisfied with within Hellblade 1 was the lack of enemy variety, the long-range combat was stifled. And the balancing stuff: the way the difficulty systems were tuned, the enemies had too much life, they had too much durability, and it got tiresome a lot of the time. We had a variety of attacks and combos, but the enemies didn’t encourage you to use one or the other: people found two or three moves they liked and repeated them constantly. There were very generous parries and story timings that could be balanced more intelligently.”

Lastly, he said that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, which is coming to Xbox Series and PC, will now be collecting feedback on the game outside of Ninja Theory, which was missed in the first instalment. Why? They had no time to do so, and the developers didn’t want to change their original ideas.

Source: WCCFTech