The sequel to 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice will soon be released by Ninja Theory, which joined Xbox Game Studios in 2018, but be prepared for a less than stellar frame rate and a shorter game than usual.

Mark Slater-Tunstill, the visual effects director for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, told German publication GamePro that both versions of the Xbox series will run at dynamic resolution and a maximum of 30 FPS. This will be a compromise of sorts for the visuals, but Slater-Tunstill also pulled out the somewhat ridiculous “cinematic” card. He told IGN that Unreal Engine 5 has been great for the studio because of the new narrative elements and special effects they’ve been able to create. Real-time lighting has also had a positive effect on the latter, making everything in the scenes more cohesive, which has been helped by more realistic rendering of costumes and objects.

But the game will be very short. Only eight hours! Why is that? Dominic Matthews, head of Ninja Theory, told IGN: “I think what we always set out to do is to tell a story, and the length of the game should be appropriate to the story we want to tell. So it’s not really that we set out to make shorter experiences. I think it is… There is a story that we want to tell here with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and what is the right shape and size of experience to tell that story? So that’s kind of where we start. What I would also say is that I think since digital distribution has become a thing, it has opened up the industry to games of all shapes and sizes, which I think is really great.

So I’m really happy to see that there are a lot of people who really enjoy a shorter experience, something that they can sit down on a Friday night, whatever it is, put their headphones on, turn off the lights, and kind of immerse themselves in an experience, and players who don’t necessarily want something that’s 50 hours long, 100 hours long, so it’s as long as it needs to be. And I’m one of those people, I like shorter games. I think there’s a lot of pressure on people’s time these days and I think our fans, from what we’re hearing from them, enjoy a shorter game where our intention is that every step of that journey is meaningful… There’s an audience of people who want games that are focused,” Matthews said.

Matthews thinks of Ninja Theory as a boutique studio. If he were thinking in terms of filmmaking, Hellblade 2 would not be a Hollywood blockbuster, but a quality independent film. But it’s not just the narrative (and frame rate…) that will be cinematic, it’s also the combat: “We’ve gone really realistic, there’s no camera cuts and there’s no HUD – we’ve given ourselves a really hard job, but those are all decisions we stand by. We only had one piece of photogrammetry in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and we used over 370 in Hellblade 2. It all adds to that sense of immersion. Even if you’ve never been to Iceland, we want you to feel on a subconscious level that our world is a real, lived-in place,” said Dan Attwell, Environmental Art Director.

According to combat director Benoit Macon, the motion capture (mo-cap) for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was shot in two days, while the sequel took seventy-five (!) days. Sixty days were spent in the studio and fifteen on location: “You will not see any animation in this game that was keyframed. Mo-cap is completely different. However we want to stage combat in the engine, we can film it right on the stage and there is no retouching at all. That’s what we’re going for, to give a cinematic feel to our combat – to create combat in the same way that the narrative team creates their cinematics. When Senua gets hit, it triggers something; when she kills an enemy, it triggers something else, and so on, building these stories in each battle we create.

Senua’s actress, Melina Juergens, and the crew wore period costumes to better immerse themselves in the experience. Senua has learned to deal with the voices (Furies) in her head and is now focused on making sure no one else suffers as she did for sacrificing her partner to the gods. So he ventures to the root of the problem to stop it. Battles will still be 1v1, so they will be intense and personal.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II will be released on May 21 for the Xbox family and PC, and will also be available on Game Pass.

Source: WCCFTech, GamePro, IGN, Gamesradar