This Xbox exclusive had its devs travel 2,500km for photorealistic gameplay
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Ninja Theory, the developers behind the third-person action-adventure game Senua’s Story: Hellblade 2are back with another Dev Diary full of exciting information about how they traveled the seas and skies to bring fans photo-realistic gameplay and better world building.
Ninja Theory realized quite early on that the Xbox is exclusive Hellblade 2 would take place in Iceland. After all, the story revolves around the Icelandic Senua and her quest to retrieve her lover’s soul from the clutches of the goddess Hela. That was all well and good when the team first started their journey developing ideas for this sequel, but eventually some distance-related issues arose.
“When we decided the locations would be based on real places in Iceland, we decided we had to have a pretty good reference for that,” said Dan Attwell, Ninja Theory’s environment art director, in a statement. Developer Diary (opens in new tab). “But you can only get that far by just going on the internet and googling images”.
After obtaining elevation data for the entire island of Iceland and using a service called Drone Deploy that allowed the team to map 3D models of more specific locations, the team knew there was one last step to take to ensure Hellblade 2 would be as realistic as needed. It was time to travel to Iceland.
Excursion
“We realized we had to get bigger,” Attwell said. “So we added 21 locations [to the trip], which equates to 2,500 km of travel in 11 days”. That is certainly no sinecure.
The Ninja Theory team was able to visit ancient man-made structures and see what life would have been like for someone living in 10th century Iceland. “We don’t want to make what we think it looks like,” Attwell said. “We want to be as faithful as possible to what it would have looked like in real life.”
In the end, all the planning and travel was worth it. This field trip to some of Iceland’s northernmost points allowed the developers to understand what it would really be like for Senua. This in turn will hopefully take care of Hellblade 2 to be photorealistic in its Xbox Series X|S graphics and location and in the stories it tries to tell.