Microsoft has announced details of its next ID@Xbox Digital Showcase.
04.04.2024 - 14:53 / gameranx.com / Atlas Fallen / Ninja Theory / Dom Matthews
Ninja Theory head Dom Matthews has a strange way of describing how he feels about making Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.
As Dom says in an interview with GamesRadar, he refers to the game as an independent AAA. I’m sure, when you read this, you thought to yourself, like a AA? But Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 doesn’t look anything like Atlas Fallen, as certified as a AA as any title you can think of.
Dom defines independent AAA as “AAA production values with independent creative risk-taking.” While that sounds like a pretty good way to make a game, it’s kind of hard to really accept that such games should be called both independent games and AAA games.
Really, independent games have often been taken to refer to the scale of a video game project, as much as how it acquires its funding. For a long time, we hadn’t thought of Borderlands as an independent video game. While Gearbox certainly always brought the series with AAA production values, the truth is Gearbox hadn’t been owned by Take-Two Interactive until recently.
Similarly, it’s really illogical to refer to any of the small scale titles published by Devolver Digital as independent, if you think about it. It’s certainly true that Devolver’s financial backing still isn’t enough to match the budgets that a big company like Nintendo or Sony could bring to a smaller project like Tearaway (remember that Vita title? Now you do) or Jupiter’s Picross series of puzzle games, which have sustained them for decades.
So perhaps the language with which we refer to these games is imperfect. But what we can at least take from this claim is Dom seeing his studio, Ninja Theory, as still making games like an independent game company.
It does seem, based on what Ninja Theory says in public, that Microsoft hasn’t tried to meddle or influence development of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 in any way. Instead, Ninja Theory’s decisions to ramp up from 20 to 80, to remove permadeath in the sequel, or to utilize 3D audio (which you would have to invest in and set up to really enjoy), all really came from within the company itself.
Dom made another analogy, which is certainly easier to agree with:
“If I were to draw an analogy with film production, to me, Hellblade 2 isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster – it’s a quality independent film.”
For sure, you may have already thought of a few movies that look like Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 (let me bring up 2005’s The Descent) or seem to thread the needle between independent and AAA (the original Terminator looked like a grimy grindhouse film, but had state of the art VFX.) It’s easy to refer to the Hellblade games as cinematic, but not in the same way Sony’s popular open world franchises are cinematic.
It’s nice to imagine if Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 c
Microsoft has announced details of its next ID@Xbox Digital Showcase.
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releases for Xbox Series X/S and PC on May 21. However, while it continues the first game’s story, it’s not quite the same creative team. A recent report revealed that Ninja Theory Founder and Senua’s Sacrifice Director, Tameem Antoniades, left the company at some point during the new game’s development.
The original Hellblade won widespread plaudits for everything from its authentic portrayal of mental health issues and its engaging storytelling to its stellar technical achievements and much more, but one of the areas where the game was on the receiving end of some criticism was its combat. That’s an area where developer Ninja Theory is seemingly looking to introduce some significant improvements with upcoming sequel Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, even if the general style of combat is going to remain largely the same.
It is often a minor controversy whenever a new AAA game comes out and is capped at 30 frames per second. However, visual effects director Mark Slater-Tunstill says there is a good reason that is locked at 30 FPS on Xbox Series X/S.
Tameem Antoniades, a co-founder of Xbox's Ninja Theory studio and writer and director of the imminent Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, has left the developer. As the first ever Xbox Series X game to be revealed, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 was announced alongside the unveiling of the Series X at the 2019 Game Awards and is the direct sequel of 2017's hit cinematic adventure game, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will be capped at 30 FPS and will not have a Performance Mode available on Xbox Series X/S. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is one of the most eagerly awaited Xbox games, and this news could potentially be a letdown for fans who want more options when playing on the console.
With Ninja Theory keen to push Unreal Engine 5 and the Xbox Series X|S consoles as far as possible with Hellblade 2, it’s been confirmed that the game will run exclusively at 30fps on console, and employ a dynamic resolution to do so. There will be no performance mode.