Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 [XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

[Charlietus]

is it new footage ?

Is it 5.4? It just came out

 

[eastmen]

Just a reminder E3 is dead and has no bearing on the industry any more.

Bro, E3 will always be around. June will always be e3. People still say they will tape stuff. Shit doesn't go away over night

Summer game event will forever be E3!

One of the weirder pieces of gaming nostalgia. I can smell the print from a freshly opened E3 special magazine when I close my eyes.

Exactly , June is E3 time , the name may change but i wont stop calling it E3 until I die. Doesn't matter what the King of Mountain dew and doritos tells me to call it.

 

[eastmen]

Launch trailer. All new footage I think. Oddly, it being out this week still feel like a bit of a surprise. It's pretty much the title that heralded the current gen and not a lot since has lived up to that visual promise.

Its out tomorrow. I have it downloading now

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 review - a triumphant return to a challenging story

Eurogamer's review of Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, which continues Senua's story with grace, confidence, surprising brutality and utter conviction.

www.eurogamer.net

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 review - a triumphant return to a challenging story

Really my main takeaway from Hellblade 2 is that it pulls absolutely zero punches. The violence is brutal throughout and, at times, the game strays into fully-fledged horror. I consider myself to have a fairly strong constitution, but at a few points early in the game I found myself feeling genuinely queasy. There's also a section later on which could have come straight from Neil Marshall's 2005 film The Descent, which made me very unhappy indeed. The story goes to some extreme places both in terms of Senua's past and the relationships those around her are trying to manage, and her reactions to those extremes are genuine and heartfelt. With all of this wrapped up with an intricately designed soundscape, supremely fluid action and outstanding visuals, it's not only a grand production, but one that delivers its message with absolute power and verve..

 

[Charlietus]

Washington Post: The sequel is a lesser game than its predecessor. There are fewer combat mechanics in play, removing the melee button and directional attacks and replacing them with nothing. Perspective puzzles to make background details match rune symbols return, unevolved from the 2017 model. The scale of the puzzles are also smaller, as the game's level design has shrunk. The former game had larger areas with vertical structures. This game's level design is mostly a straight line, with a few small puzzle areas to break up the pacing.

I don't understand ninja theory. Everyone complained about the puzzles, the exploration and the combat from the first, and what do they do? They double down on it. They didn't have to make it open world or shove in sidequests, but making the combat more interesting? Removing the perspective puzzles? More interesting level design? I'll play it and judge it for what it is, not for what I wanted it to be, but it's a bit disappointing nonetheless.

 

[RobertR1]

In game FPS counter is broken when using FrameGen. Game looks mediocre af all around.

 

[Karamazov]

See it as a modern days Dragon's Lair.

 

[orangpelupa]

Whoa whoa whoa! Just played the intro. Truly amazing.

Not just amazing looking but also amazing to play and the thunderstorm sounds so realistic on my entry level 5.1ch surround sound.

It's still far from perfect tho

- head clipping into rocks, when scripted scene clash with real-time gameplay position, I suspect
- 3d model and animation inconsistency. It's super obvious I was fighting a goon or a boss.
- npcs voices are not in 3d surround but in binaural only.

And there are also bugs and annoying design like

- random performance drops. Fixed by switching DLSS to ultra performance, wait for 1-2 secs, then switch back dlss to preferred setting. But need to repeat again when the performance drops again.
- no way to turn off chromatic aberration
- vrr tearing when it goes above 60fps
- no dualsense HD vibrator and adaptive triggers. Despite the gameplay and scenes are basically begging for HD vibrator and adaptive triggers

 

[trinibwoy]

- no way to turn off chromatic aberration

That's just crazy to me after all the noise about it on the first game. Why not make it optional?

 

[RobertR1]

- no way to turn off chromatic aberration

That's the moon lol

 

[Dictator]

- vrr tearing when it goes above 60fps

Are you forcing VSYNC in the control panel? You need to, to prevent that.

 

[orangpelupa]

Are you forcing VSYNC in the control panel? You need to, to prevent that.

I'm not. And even with the ingame vsync, it already solved the tearing.

But other games like cyberpunk 2077, runs fine without vsync. No tearing above 60fps vrr.

I'm using lg CX OLED 4k@120hz.

 

[Dampf]

Oof. Cloud rendering (volumetrics) is significantly worse using DLSS especially at lower settings. Even FSR3 does a better job here.

 

[Seanspeed]

That's the moon lol

You hardly need to point out anything - the entire image is egregiously smeared with CA.

So many great visuals underneath, but it's like you're looking at the game very slightly cross-eyed or something, always just a bit out of focus.

Read some people already figuring out how to mod post-processing, though I'm not sure if CA has been isolated specifically.

 

[orangpelupa]

i found a workaround:
the lower the render resolution is, the less annoying the CA become.

probably due to how blurrier everything is, so the CA blends better. so its more like a real life camera CA.

 

[Charlietus]

People saying: "I play games for the gameplay, not to watch a movie" as if they are the enlightened probably think that games can only be just gameplay and nothing else. It's pretty sad to narrow an entire art form to just a couple of things when it's such a malleable medium.

 

[RobertR1]

A few more observations:
- There's no interaction with the foliage as you walk through the grass, etc
- No interaction with the puddles/water
- The guy walking ahead of you about 1hr in has a repeated sequence of the same dirt/debris coming off him after x amount of steps regardless of the terrain
- Lot of shimmering in fine edges under motion and even when still when the wind blows
- DoF abuse aplenty. Almost as offensive at the CA issues at times

Still yet to see "good visuals"

 

[steveOrino]

It's Unreal so find the Engine.ini and

[SystemSettings]
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0

 

[Seanspeed]

A few more observations:
- There's no interaction with the foliage as you walk through the grass, etc
- No interaction with the puddles/water
- The guy walking ahead of you about 1hr in has a repeated sequence of the same dirt/debris coming off him after x amount of steps regardless of the terrain
- Lot of shimmering in fine edges under motion and even when still when the wind blows
- DoF abuse aplenty. Almost as offensive at the CA issues at times

Still yet to see "good visuals"

You'll never find good visuals if you're only focused on finding sore or imperfect spots.

I mean, you dont even need to play the game to see the areas where it's strong.

 

[RobertR1]

2.5 hours in and I’ve def had my fill of the game. For me, it’s barely a game. You’re just walking through the story with voices in your head becoming exhausting to listen to. I’d prob play longer if there was an option to turn them off. In the 2.5hrs they added nothing. I get it. She has some psychosis but I don’t want it.

I’m sure there an audience out there for it but it’s not for me. At best I can give it 4/10. A better version of something like this would be A Plague Tale.