It has been confirmed that Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 will be locked to 30 FPS on Xbox and will not have any additional graphic options for consoles, such as a performance mode.
The news comes as there is a month-and-a-half left until the full release of the game. The 30 FPS lock was confirmed by the game's VFX director, Mark Slater-Tunstill, who added that Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 will have dynamic resolution.
Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 Will be Locked to 30 FPS for Consoles
(Photo : Ninja Theory, Xbox Game Studios / Screenshot taken from official website)
Despite this, the PC version of the game will not be locked to 30 FPS and will allow players to achieve increased frames per second. The VFX director also explained that locking the console versions of Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 to 30 FPS to make the experience feel more "cinematic."
However, he did not specify whether this was due to anything else, such as technical limitations on the Xbox Series S. This choice comes as Xbox first-party studio Arkane Austin sparked controversy after confirming that Redfall, a multiplayer shooter, was to be capped at 30 FPS at release before it got a 60 FPS mode a few months after, according to IGN.
The lock to 30 FPS is also not the first controversy for Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 this year as previously, Microsoft and Ninja Theory revealed that on the game's release, it will be a digital-only release and will sell for $50.
The game, on top of running on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5, is using the company's MetaHuman animator technology in order to push the "boundaries of real-time facial animation." Some fans are considering the game to be "shaping up to be another riveting, haunting, and uncompromising immersive nightmare."
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Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 and its predecessor blend horrific, quasi-mythological action with a realistic approach to the psychology of their heroine, Senua. She is an eight-century Celtic warrior who has psychosis.
The two games both feature a photoreal visual style with a heavy emphasis on performance capture, which is an area that the developer, Ninja Theory, has specialized in since collaborating with Andy Serkis on the action game Heavenly Sword, which was released in 2007, said Polygon.
A Short, Eight-Hour Runtime
A lot has changed for Ninja Theory since 2017, one of which was being acquired by Microsoft in 2018. The studio itself has not grown much since that time and the majority of its workers were focused on Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2. But Microsoft's investment was evidently seen with new offices that have large, dedicated motion capture studios.
A spokesperson for Xbox also confirmed that Ninja Theory's founder and Hellblade writer-director, Tameem Antoniades, was no longer a part of the studio. This comes as he was involved in the early stages of development of the sequel.
Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 will be released on May 21, 2024, and it is said to have a short eight-hour runtime. The head of Ninja Theory, Dominic Matthews, explained that they always wanted to tell a story and planned for the game's duration to be appropriate for what they wanted to tell.
He noted that the runtime of the title was not about creating shorter experiences but telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The preview of Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 will feature a full mo-capped fighting system and the battles will be fought one-on-one and are slow-paced but very brutal, according to Softonic.
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