It's going all in on graphics and story telling. With the photogrammetry, lighting, animation, audio, and attention to detail pushes the game to the technical limits. We still haven't heard if the game has raytracing or raytraced lighting or global illumination. Not always does a game require advanced AI or physics to be a truly desirable experience. I've played the original and it was great for what it was with a fairly deep and intimate connection with the protagonist. As of right now, I have no idea what Hellblade 2 has to offer to really defend it other than what I've seen, but the animation is top notch and is rarely paralleled by most other studios.
I'm not bringing up questions of HB2's scope to comment on its desirability, nor do I think those two things are interlinked. My reason for saying those things is because we have other games that have both gone "all in" on graphics & storytelling, and have grown their scope in other aspects while doing so.
Yeah, some of those games were made by much larger teams, and had somewhat longer dev cycles, but IMO given how Microsoft were using HB2 to market it as "their" equivalent of Sony's 1P AAA cinematic blockbusters (they kept showing it off in the same way Sony would do with say HFW or GOW Ragnarok), I was expecting the game to match those offerings in many areas, not just graphics and storytelling.
Get the feeling that many others were expecting similar. So, finding out the scope is no different from the 1st game, maybe even regressed in a couple of ways, despite having been shown off five years ago, hyped in some ways as doing things at a bigger scale than the 1st game, and backed by a $3 trillion company....that is somewhat of a letdown. I thought Hellblade 2 would be taking the IP into the pantheon of the big AAA cinematic blockbusters, I thought we'd see that type of growth.
That's not happening though, no matter how pretty the graphics may be. Because IMO while the graphics do look great, they're not far ahead of the biggest AAA cinematic games on the market to make up for the lack of growth in its scope with game design, mechanics, features etc. And I still doubt it's doing too much graphically to lock it at 30 FPS on the Series X; that sounds like a limitation imposed by the Series S (same with the choice to use dynamic resolution on Series X instead of a higher fixed resolution).
Sony does a great job with their exclusives, I love their games also and I would agree that overall their production value meets and exceeds that of Microsoft's exclusives by a long shot. However, it seems that many peoples hate here isn't specifically with the game but with Xbox in general and fail to give Microsoft credit where it's due. Hellblade 2 looks like the game where it my need to be given the benefit of the doubt.
Well, I'm giving them credit here for Hellblade 2. More specifically, Ninja Theory, but Ninja Theory are Microsoft now so it's much the same.
That said, I don't see how criticizing the lack of design growth for an IP that has the potential for it, especially given the context Microsoft leveraged it to show off their new consoles, is denying them credit for what HB2 looks to be doing right. I don't see how questioning the choice for 30 FPS on the Series X out of "artistic vision", while the PC version supports 60 FPS at launch (an obvious contradiction to the "artistic vision" statement), means denying credit for the things HB2 does well.
I'm just a bit confused as to some of the decisions with the game, and flustered that Ninja Theory seem to be rigidly locked in place in terms of no growth as a studio versus, say, Arrowhead, or Housemarque, Blue Point or Insomniac, etc. Studios that have all grown in their ambition and scope from game to game, while still retaining their studio identity.
Game runs on UE5, it's obviously using lumen and nanite so you can say that RT is used in some form (software or hardware variant).
If Forza Motorsport's shown anything, it's that a game doesn't suddenly look better than its competition simply because it uses RT.
No dig at Hellblade 2, as it looks like a much better game. But, worth considering.
And Rich really drank that TFLOPs kool-aid. That Crytek engineer several years ago straight-up said he didn't know any engineer who used TFLOPs as a definitive measurement for console's power and got shat on.
The guys at Microsoft really convinced Rich that compute is all that matters and now his brain cannot process how untrue that is.
Well, Rich used to run SEGA Saturn Magazine back in the day so he probably also bought into the "8 Processors > 2 Processors" or whatever marketing stuff SEGA used in the West for Saturn promotion, too.
Jez Corden is this generation's Patcher - if he puffs out his chest and makes a bold claim, you can bet your life savings on the exact opposite being true. His recent spellbinder was telling people back in January that MS first party games on PlayStation was 'Hopium'. It was less than a month before MS officially announced it. That's how desperately out of the loop he is.
Actually I don't think Jez is "out of the loop" at all. He, and some others like Colteastwood and Parris, as weird as it sounds, I think they have direct lines of communication with Xbox PR. Because, they basically ARE Xbox PR. But they're PR in an odd way, playing roles of Xbox diehards, hence you have them acting completely against those initial multiplat rumors, because they knew that's how the diehard community would feel.
The diehard community of Xbox expect to hear takes from people like Jez when big news starts coming out, but people like Jez aren't meant to officially reveal things until they get the OK from Microsoft. People who regularly land interviews with Phil Spencer and other bigwigs at Microsoft are probably in the loop to a good extent, they just also have to "play" the character of an Xbox console diehard publicly. That's why they all start confirming news at the exact same time.
It's also why I'm not as spiteful towards them as I might've been in the past, because now I know it's just performative. They're acting. You could also call it a grift but there are
way worst things in this world to grift with than playground-level console warring, that's for sure.