[Digital Foundry] Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 - DF Tech Review - The Next Level in Real-Time Visuals

Snake29 said:
Such a bullshit statement. You can say that NT sacrificed everything else only to look nice🤷🏽‍♂️ . And i don't think the majority of the gamers are asking for that.
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There's a review thread to discuss the 'everything' you claim was sacrificed. Thats not an argument that makes sense in any way in a DF graphics thread.

RPS37 said:
Honest question .
after this video has released and the weekend passes, does the CCU go up or what?
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Ozriel said:
There's a review thread to discuss the 'everything' you claim was sacrificed. Thats not an argument that makes sense in any way in a DF graphics thread.



Mr Rogers Clown GIF
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Seriously if I had a dope ass rig, I'd definitely consider pushing it to its limits.
 
As expected, best looking game of the generation so far. It raises the quality to standards we were not used at all, and finally shows what these new console are capable of. If I look at games like Horizon, Spider Man 2 etc, yeah, good graphics, but nothing close to this one.

The audio is top notch too. Sony advertised its tempest audio but again, this game raises the quality again even considering this field.
 
Kataploom said:
I'm pretty sure AW2 had it's equivalent to Nanite, my problem with Remedy games (and I haven't played AW2 yet but it looks prevalent there too) is that their shadows and reflections are full of noise, like it they were using some kind of dithering which breaks the whole IQ to me
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AW2 is a fine looking game, I'm not sure about a Nanite equivalent but IMO at least with these two games that HB2 has a significant advantage. Yeah the image quality is not the best but AW2 lighting is cutting edge that's for certain.
Antony1992 said:
As expected, best looking game of the generation so far. It raises the quality to standards we were not used at all, and finally shows what these new console are capable of. If I look at games like Horizon, Spider Man 2 etc, yeah, good graphics, but nothing close to this one.

The audio is top notch too. Sony advertised its tempest audio but again, this game raises the quality again even considering this field.
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It was my belief a good while ago that 2024/25 would usher in a significant graphics improvement over previous games this generation, HB2 is the first of many and you'll see over the next few years what we expected at the start of this generation.
 
Yes, the game has great graphics. But the reason why it's selling almost nothing is because it has no gameplay. And even the story is lacking.
Even the UE5 Matrix tech demo had more things to play and have fun than this.
 
Snake29 said:
While HB2 is impressive looking. These shots also show directly that it's just a game and why i think comparing it with HFW which already has high quality models with the scale of the game. HB2 shows what you can do with graphics if the rest of the game is limited and almost onrails. It's like you always walk on a small sidewalk and nothing more. HFW is in that case already a bigger achievement with all the different mechanics, enemies on screens, graphics, ai etc.

Not to downplay HB2, but it's not that impressive when the rest is just bare bones. At this point i'm curious if we are not here just complementing Epic Games with their Unreal Engine 5 instead of Ninja Theorie who is using their tools to create the game. Imo EPIC Games deliverd a flexible engine with flexible tools and a lot of assets with Photogrammetry assets. While devs can implement their own scans. Every capable developer can achieve this with the toolsets. And since Metahuman is almost plug and play. We've already seen a lot of UE5 tech demo exemples, and HB2 looks and feels like the first fully playable UE5 techdemo with all bells and wistles enabled, but for me again, it shows more what kind of work EPIC did with the engine then call it some "wizardy" from the dev itself".
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This is basically how I feel. The game is technically impressive, but severely lacking artistically.
 
Look, no matter how many times I bashed HB2 while playing it for taking the word "game" out of GAMEplay, it was undeniable that NT really did something truly spectacular with regards to the visuals and effects. It's the finest graphical presentation I've seen in a game thus far. I'll max the game out, just to hunt down all the achievements on steam and then I'm done with it, because despite the audiovisual orgasm it provides, it still feels like a walking simulator.
 
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Antony1992 said:
The audio is top notch too. Sony advertised its tempest audio but again, this game raises the quality again even considering this field.
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Binaural audio mix is hardly a revelation, I would even say that the first game used it way more effectively.

Problem with binaural audio is that it bound to headphones and 2.0 stereo to work, plus it lacks truly dynamic positioning, that's why it used only in very scripted games. Tempest is a dynamic tech with audio ray-tracing that works with every type of output and absolutely channel-agnostic.
 
964p!! What year is this 1886?

Fantastic looking game will try on PC when I've finished off another game. The sound and atmosphere seems great.
 
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Balducci30 said:
Nanite works on foliage and soon it will be on characters. I don't know if they're using that version of UE5 tho
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Idk but they might not since this is an early UE5 title that was AFAIK planned and engineered around the pre-release of UE5.0 (IIRC Nanite foliage support = 5.1?).

It would be very interesting to know which feature sets the game supports, and how much NT possibly had to engineer themselves around "non-released" UE5 features. Hopefully there is or will be developer talks/presentations about the development of this game, it would be even more insightful than a DF video.
 
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Been playing on a 4090 at max everything and it's a very cinematic experience. Personally I wasn't expecting any more than the first game offered, for me I am just enjoying it as a tech demo of what UE5 is capable of. Like a tour of UE5's features.

Plus, I didn't pay anything outside of my Gamepass subscription so all in all I am enjoying it for what it is.
 
winjer said:
Yes, the game has great graphics. But the reason why it's selling almost nothing is because it has no gameplay. And even the story is lacking.
Even the UE5 Matrix tech demo had more things to play and have fun than this.
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The original game was identical in terms of gameplay and it was applauded as an indie AAA work of art. Fascinating how the series turned to shit so fast. Someone should do a study on it.
 
hussar16 said:
Trying to run the game on series s. It's why the game was delayed for so long and it looks so much difrent from first trailers
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In fairness, it only looks considerably different from the first trailer, which was a target. Outside of some fire effects, it matches all prior trailers visually.
 
ManaByte said:
The original game was identical in terms of gameplay and it was applauded as an indie AAA work of art. Fascinating how the series turned to shit so fast. Someone should do a study on it.
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The first game was original and unique. And had a good story.
So despite having bad puzzle and combat, it was still worth playing, because the rest of the experience was so good.

Also, because it was an AA game, with a small budget, people were willing to overlook some of it's flaws.
But this sequel has huge production values. Graphics and sound have improved significantly, over the original.
So now, there is no excuse for the gameplay to still be so lacking. They have the budget, so now it would be expected that gameplay would also improve.
It was expected that some of that production value would be spent in improving gameplay.

The other thing to consider, is that the story in the first game was good. It had a good structure, character growth, and a conclusion to it's theme.
This game is lacking in that department. The story doesn't have the same depth. And the ending is very lacking.
 
Are the black bars just in the console version? I don't have them and I looked at videos online and they don't have them either.
 
winjer said:
And had a good story.
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So does this one. Some could even argue it's better than the original.

winjer said:
But this sequel has huge production values.
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Huge? The game was made by 80 people.

winjer said:
Graphics and sound have improved significantly, over the original.
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I'm shocked that the cutting edge Unreal 5.4 is an improvement over Unreal 4.

The binaural audio is identical to the original.

winjer said:
So now, there is no excuse for the gameplay to still be so lacking. They have the budget, so now it would be expected that gameplay would also improve.
It was expected that some of that production value would be spent in improving gameplay.
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It did. They addressed complaints people had with the original. Some of the puzzles in the original went on for far too long and dragged you off the narrative too much. They fixed that in the sequel.
 
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An impressive display for sure. To me, it's still a tech demo though, isn't the game only 7ish hours long? This leads into another issue, this game had a lengthy development cycle for such a short game length. Which is disheartening, because we know what the engine is capable of, we just need someone to take that tech, and apply that to something larger in scope and scale, which I doubt we'll see anytime soon, looks like NT has about 142 employees as of 2024.

I'll be curious to see what The Coalition can do with UE5 and GOW.
 
ManaByte said:
So does this one. Some could even argue it's better than the original.
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You are probably the first person I have seen saying the story in the sequel is better.

ManaByte said:
Huge? The game was made by 80 people.
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Huge, compared to the previous game. Going from 20 to 80 people is an increase of 4x.
Any company growing like that, is huge.
But the point is, they should have hired someone to improve combat and puzzles.

ManaByte said:
It did. They addressed complaints people had with the original. Some of the puzzles in the original went on for far too long and dragged you off the narrative too much. They fixed that in the sequel.
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But what they did is have fewer puzzles and make them even simpler.
I'm not saying they should make something like the Talos principle. But don't make puzzles that are so bad.
And let's be honest, removing the puzzles and combat and we would be left with just the walking and listening to stuff.
 
rickybooby87 said:
An impressive display for sure. To me, it's still a tech demo though, isn't the game only 7ish hours long? This leads into another issue, this game had a lengthy development cycle for such a short game length. Which is disheartening, because we know what the engine is capable of, we just need someone to take that tech, and apply that to something larger in scope and scale, which I doubt we'll see anytime soon, looks like NT has about 142 employees as of 2024.

I'll be curious to see what The Coalition can do with UE5 and GOW.
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Hellblade was made for 80 devs according to the game director. And yes, I also think it's unquestionable that the level reached in HB2 (also taking into account that UE5 is just now starting to be optimized for consoles) should be surpassed by Studios of 250-300 devs. We're going to have the answer soon as there are many Studios using UE5 and they have projects to show.
 
winjer said:
Yes, the game has great graphics. But the reason why it's selling almost nothing is because it has no gameplay. And even the story is lacking.
Even the UE5 Matrix tech demo had more things to play and have fun than this.
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Everything after the first sentence has no place in this thread.
Are we going to get this same crap when the DF thread for MSFS 2024 shows up?

hussar16 said:
Trying to run the game on series s. It's why the game was delayed for so long and it looks so much difrent from first trailers
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The cutbacks to make Hellblade run on Series S wouldn't lead to a delay. They'd have been optimizing for XsS all through development.

There's zero evidence of any 'delay' for Hellblade 2, except you're claiming the Series S caused the pandemic.
 
Gaiff said:
Are the black bars just in the console version? I don't have them and I looked at videos online and they don't have them either.
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I have them. Is there an option to turn them off? (Will probably keep them on but I want to check with and without).
 
SlimySnake said:
This is the fifth ue5 game and nothing has even come close to this level of fidelity. if it was this easy everyone would be doing it.
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HB2 sacrifices resolution, framerates, physics, gameplay, and locks the player into tight hallways to achieve its incredible visuals.

Achieving the visuals of Hellblade 2 without making these sacrifices will likely require a studio of 300-500 people with an unlimited budget working for 8 years.
 
winjer said:
Give me a break. As if pointing out that a game has lacking gameplay is an issue.
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In a DF (Tech ) graphics thread it is off topic though? Not what the thread is discussing so it's just shitting up threads as usual. Especially if Xbox is involved
 
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djjinx2 said:
In a DF (Tech ) graphics thread it is off topic though? Not what the thread is discussing so it's just shitting up threads as usual. Especially if Xbox is involved
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Another user pointed out why the game is failings to resonate with gamers. So the question about gameplay and story in this game had to be taken.
And no thread is completely linear and on point. There is always divergence, especially on gaf.
 
Balducci30 said:
Nanite works on foliage and soon it will be on characters. I don't know if they're using that version of UE5 tho
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"According to its executable file, Hellblade 2 uses Unreal Engine 5.3.2.0. However, it does not take full advantage of what Epic Games introduced in that version. And while the game uses both Lumen and Nanite, there are noticeable pop-in issues with the grass and some smaller objects. In short, Nanite is not applied to everything in the game."


I believe Nanite foliage support was added in 5.1.
 
Balducci30 said:
Nanite works on foliage and soon it will be on characters. I don't know if they're using that version of UE5 tho
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From Epic's own dev site:

Differences Between a Nanite Mesh and Static Mesh

A Nanite mesh is a Static Mesh with Nanite enabled on it. A Nanite mesh is still essentially a triangle mesh at its core with a lot of level of detail and compression applied to its data. On top of that, Nanite uses an entirely new system for rendering that data format in an extremely efficient way.

All that is required for a Static Mesh to take advantage of Nanite is a flag to enable it. Authoring content for Nanite is no different than traditional meshes except that Nanite can handle orders of magnitude more triangles and instances than is possible for traditionally rendered geometry. Move the camera close enough and Nanite will draw the original source triangles that were imported.
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dev.epicgames.com

Nanite Virtualized Geometry In Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation | Epic Developer Community

Overview of Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system to achieve pixel scale detail and high object counts.
dev.epicgames.com dev.epicgames.com

============

My mistake. It seems you're right. It has come a long way since last I was in the loop.
 
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nosoynadie22 said:
HB2 sacrifices resolution, framerates, physics, gameplay, and locks the player into tight hallways to achieve its incredible visuals.
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This level of trolling has gotten out of hand. It's the same type of game as the 2017 original that was lauded as a indie AAA masterpiece when it was a timed exclusive. That game was running on Unreal 4, this one is on the bleeding edge version of Unreal 5 making full use of the engine. It sacrifices nothing for that.
 
nosoynadie22 said:
HB2 sacrifices resolution, framerates, physics, gameplay, and locks the player into tight hallways to achieve its incredible visuals.

Achieving the visuals of Hellblade 2 without making these sacrifices will likely require a studio of 300-500 people with an unlimited budget working for 8 years.
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Digital Foundry tests games with their 30fps Quality modes too. And multiple games run with lower than 4k internal resolution.

You can worry about budgets in another thread.
 
nosoynadie22 said:
HB2 sacrifices resolution, framerates, physics, gameplay, and locks the player into tight hallways to achieve its incredible visuals.
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Thats ok. Plenty of linear games used to do that just a gen ago. no one cared. We can appreciate graphics without worrying too much about other stuff. If anything, image quality being that good despite rendering around 2.1 million pixels is something other devs should take a look at.

Not sure why you even bring up physics. only one AAA game in like the last 20 years has done anything with physics. Zelda ToTK was the only one after Half Life 2 did it 20 years ago.

Also there are plenty of levels that are not set in tight hallways. The game just creates lanes for you but it doesnt mean the game isnt rendering these massive levels in realtime. those arent pre-rendered backgrounds lmao. every rock, hill, grass, and geometry has to be rendered by the game even if you cant step foot in it.

If anything the draw distance and lack of pop-in asset streaming is one of the game's key strengths. Plus, they do these amazing realtime transitions at the end of each level as they transport you from one level to the next without cutting, without loading, and without any kind of pop-in. They sweep across vast stretches of land and then sweep back down to a completely new area. its amazing. its what UE5's original tech demo and Cerny's Road to Show promised. we finally have that.


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Only in a DF thread do we see people clogging it up with things that have nothing to do with how the video game in question looks, works, and the tech and people behind it, especially if it's an Xbox-made game lol. It's honestly a phenomenon at this point.

It was clear from the rip that Ninja Theory were going to use Hellblade 2 to push modern video game graphics as far as they could go, and that the game was going to be very similar overall to the first, but offer more in different areas. Not sure why that's suddenly a surprise or problem to some people, it is what it is. This is Hellblade, it was always going to be a tight experience that is rather niche.

Only this time, it now contains the best graphics ever put to screen in video game form. Having played all of the heaviest of hitters in recent years myself, I can personally say that with confidence.

What's next, are we going to try and downplay Flight Simulator 2024 because it's not offering that level of graphical prowess in an over the shoulder, third person action game?
 
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