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Hellblade 2 has been a long time coming. The original won plaudits in 2017, and seemed to be a solid foundation to build upon. It was a little short, and maybe too prescriptive or reliant on tropes in places, but it was a good game. For a fairly small studio, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was impressive in both its graphics and its quality, and the sequel could have used it as a comfortable springboard. Six years later, we’re still waiting, and now we’re being told the game will “push boundaries” of facial animation. My question is ‘why?’.
I’m not against ambition. Art should strive to push boundaries. But in Hellblade’s case, it’s talking about facial animations - less art, more tech. It seems more like vanity than anything else, and in an industry of bloated budgets and huge development times, I’m not sure it helps anyone. The first Hellblade was ten hours long, and it was fine. I’d expect the sequel to double that, perhaps even come close to triple. But any more and you’re not making Hellblade anymore, it’s just a generic triple-A game that thinks size matters more than how you use it.
It’s a difficult line to tread. None of us have played Hellblade 2, so there’s no end product to base our opinions off. All we’ve seen is a vertical slice at The Game Awards in 2021, which claimed to be a seamless transition between cutscene and gameplay but had no HUD or any other markers a player would react to, and ended up seeming false. Impressive, but false.
So here’s where the line comes in - this is Ninja Theory’s baby, and it’s up to the studio exactly how it builds it. For the rest of us, the proof is in the playing. And I’m reluctant to complain about long development cycles for individual games because that only encourages crunch. However, across the industry games are taking longer and longer, costing more and more money, and that doesn’t feel sustainable. Hellblade was positioned as an indie game that had the appearance and gameplay of a triple-A but without the fat - it’s similar to Stray, in that sense. Now with investment from Microsoft behind it, I worry Hellblade 2 will just be a triple-A game with the fat, and I don’t think it will be worth the six year wait just to have more fetch quests.
Then there’s the topic at hand - boundary pushing facial animation. Frankly my dear, who gives a f***? It feels as if everyone is trying to push the technology as far as it can possibly go and audiences are repeatedly underwhelmed. Faster loading times are great, but Ghost of Tsushima could pull that off on the PS4. Nothing has set the gold standard this generation, and I don’t think a game that’s designed to play on the Xbox Series S will either.
Even if it does, faces look fine in games. At the top level, they have for a few years now. I’m sure they can always improve, but why is no one striving for boundary pushing gameplay, immersive worlds, or player experience? Why is it whenever games brag about what they’re working on, it usually boils down to tech that the average player doesn’t care about?
Take your time and it’s ready when it’s ready and all that, but maybe if Hellblade 2 was trying to be Hellblade 2 and not Hellblade: Ragnarok, it wouldn’t have taken six years and would have been significantly cheaper to make. What it comes down to is that Hellblade has always been embarrassed, like the private school kid on a scholarship who doesn’t want their trust fund friends to know their mother waits tables. It called itself an ‘independent triple-A’ the first time around, and now it’s desperate to shed that prefix.
Hellblade 2 is still one of my most anticipated games because of the affection I hold for the first one, and I’m curious to see what this increased budget and development time has led to. I just hope it still is a Hellblade game, and not Xbox’s attempt at chasing Sony’s prestige exclusives with the misguided belief that the reason players love The Last of Us Part 2 is because of the facial animations.