Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.4 along with a video highlighting its improvements. Epic has been working on the Unreal Engine for a long time and as the developer has grown, so has the ambition of its engine. Unreal Engine 5 was released in 2022, and this iteration of the engine focuses on streamlining real-time 3D animation even further and allowing more complex work on geometry to be done.
Hellblade 2 will finally show us what an Unreal Engine 5 game can do
04.04.2024 - 08:25 / polygon.com / Tameem Antoniades
This console generation has been pretty short of “next-gen moments” — those dazzling, techy epiphanies when you see a game do things that were inconceivable on earlier hardware. You can make a case for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s lightning-fast loading or Starfield’s potato physics, but there have been relatively few instances where you can watch the future arrive in real time.
There are a few reasons for this. One is that console supply issues and pandemic-driven development delays led to an unusually long cross-generational phase. Until last year, most games were still being released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well as their successors. Another is that Unreal Engine 5, the latest iteration of Epic Games’ ubiquitous graphics engine, lagged a little behind the new console generation, and large-scale UE5 productions have been slow to appear, with a couple of exceptions.
All of this is why I wasn’t expecting to experience a next-gen moment when I traveled to Cambridge, U.K., to visit the Ninja Theory studio and play Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. But I got one. It’s an astonishingly lifelike narrative action game that applies UE5’s tech, Microsoft’s resources (the company owns Ninja Theory), and the unique processes of a smallish team of technical artists to create something at once grounded and vividly hyperreal. There’s nothing else quite like it.
This won’t come as a total surprise if you played 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Both Hellblade games blend horrific, quasi-mythological action with a realistic approach to the psychology of their heroine, Senua, an eighth-century Celtic warrior with psychosis. Both games have a photoreal visual style with heavy emphasis on performance capture — an area Ninja Theory has specialized in since collaborating with Andy Serkis on its 2007 action game Heavenly Sword.
Quite a lot has changed for Ninja Theory since 2017, however. In 2018, the studio was acquired by Microsoft. It hasn’t grown much since — with 100 people, around 80 of whom are working on Hellblade 2, this remains a modestly sized team — but Microsoft’s investment is evident in beautiful new offices with a large, dedicated motion capture studio (and, at the insistence of some extremely British local planning regulations, an in-house pub). On my visit, there was no sign or mention of Ninja Theory’s flamboyant founder and Hellblade writer-director Tameem Antoniades. An Xbox spokesperson later confirmed to Polygon that he is no longer with the studio. Antoniades was involved in Hellblade 2 in the early stages, but the game now has a trio of creative leads: environment art director Dan Attwell, visual effects director Mark Slater-Tunstill, and audio director David Garcia.
You would expect a
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