The first gameplay from Ninja Theory’s highly anticipated Hellblade II was unveiled last night at The Game Awards and it was easily the most impressive game shown during the lengthy show. What stood out the most and has carried the conversation about the game was the incredible graphical quality on display.
The most standout character showed in the gameplay was a very large, terrifying troll. This character was exceptionally detailed, and as revealed on newswire.com, took a lot of work to pull off.
We have learned that Ziva Dynamics, a character creation company, partnered with developer Ninja Theory to bring this enormous character to life. The character had to be quality to match the rest of the game, and that meant a lot of time and resources. “The tradeoff for the gigantic film-quality results, however, was a render speed of 6 hours per 50 frames, leading to hundreds of hours of baking on a 15 machine AWS cluster”.
The newswire story also reveals that the character used advanced technology to create a lifelike performance. “This technology used machine learning to train the troll asset to perform all of the animations along with novel poses in real-time while maintaining the rich dynamics of the original simulation”.
Ninja Theory have made always thrived to push the industry forward by utilizing advanced technology to create the most immersive and cinematic games. This latest gameplay demo of Hellblade II shows that their commitment to excellence is paying off.
