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

[Dampf]

Game runs great on my RTX 2060 laptop. It runs on a set of medium, low and high settings and it is very scalable. There was a point in the intro where the VRAM usage exceeded my 5.1 GB frame buffer (why not 5.8 though) and destroyed performance, but after reducing settings and resolution a little it ran smoothly. I'm on chapter 2 now, I hope it stays as performant and VRAM efficient. I feel there is even potential for a 60 FPS experience (although unsteady) there, but I'd rather have higher resolution and settings and cap at 30.

However, upscaling is a little broken in combination with volumetrics and shadows set to lower than high, especially with DLSS for some reason. The clouds appear low res and flickery. Other than that, it looks incredible though.

Also, great way to handle shader comp. It runs very smoothly. Alex will like it. I believe this is the first really good showing of what UE5 can do and how it performs.

 

[Davros]

So apparently this game supports Binaural sound on headphones anyone tried it ?

 

[techuse]

Looks like a gameplay feature, to give the player time to (re)act. Otherwise, if operated at real speed, players would need combat training to match the virtual combatants they face. These pauses should be dialled down in GamePlus/Hard modes.

Game looks on occasions excellent with all that detail. Diffuse light makes it more realistic. Games are still struggling with direct sunlight portrayal. However, with all the scenery and people looking great, the effects are starting to look really retro. eg. The fire breathers...that's fire isn't at all convincing or in keeping with the rest of the game. The sea has great motion and looks good from a distance, but breaks completely up close when in it. It's a difficult situation for games to be in as these aren't necessarily easy fixes. Next-gen fire should be doable, but water...well, we can return Water to our benchmark for quality graphics! Always used to be a standard for visual quality, up until shaders became commonplace and decent water shaders generic. Now we can look at water behaviour.

Also, inner monologue is definitely annoying just from the video!

Do we need better material representation for this or a more complex, surface lighting equation? PT and RT don’t tend to improve this aspect at all.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Going with this example:


Lighting is the issue. There's way too much contrast on the shadowed side. The sun should be bouncing loads of ambient light...



Diffuse lighting manages to balance and spread the lighting, but that's been pretty effective in games even with just light probes. is there a photo mode? Playing around with brightness and contrast may help.

Edit: Also, from the opening clip:



This has the same problem of early CG caused by a linear colour space. The contrast between bright highlights and shadows isn't linear, but a 2.2 gamma. We used to get smooth transitions from light to dark whereas in reality our eyes see a strong boundary. The highlights here aren't causing a strong contrast with the shadow.



It's probably both a lighting and material issue. A full path tracer with materials can capture lighting correctly and get the right contrast and ambient lighting effects. As devs experiment with traced GI, they'll hopefully be able to work on models that can deal with the considerable energy differences of direct light.

 

[Nesh]

Looks like a gameplay feature, to give the player time to (re)act. Otherwise, if operated at real speed, players would need combat training to match the virtual combatants they face. These pauses should be dialled down in GamePlus/Hard modes.

Not sure if we are talking about the same thing. But if I got it correctly what he is referring to, is that the animations at every hit or block, the animation stalls for some fractions of a second. So if the combat is hectic, you just get continuously animation stalls and just doesn't look or feel right.

It breaks the flow of the controls. It can ve jarring and mimicks the same kind of experience you would get from random frame drops.

Most DMC games don't have this, hence why it feels so good. And that can serve as a good example. DMC1 had amazing flow and animations were adjusted both for enemy and character to help the player read and react. DMC2 on the other hand introduced these animation "hiccups" at every block or hit. The difference was a night and day. Thang God they abandoned it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not sure if we are talking about the same thing.

Ah, you mean on each impact. I'm guessing those are delays for player input. Shorter pauses are probably when the player has followed with the next input quickly. There's certainly no technical reason - these are invariably timing combat mechanics. I also wonder if they are as apparent when actually playing (for most people) as opposed to watching?

 

[Globalisateur]

Gave it a try, defenitly The Order/Ryse of this generation (both graphicaly and gameplay wise). Looks very cgish, main character looks awsome, lighting, rocks/stones all of it looks very good. Drawbacks I seen in graphics term: much fog reducing draw distance, water waves/splashes can looks very basic, other character are not as detailed as Senua, interaction very limited. Picture is quite soft and also noisy but that not a big problem for me tough chromatic abberation is, defenitly should be option do disable it. Gameplay is very poor tough game is short so maybe will try to finish it just for graphic. Would never pay for it full price but for gamepass addition is perfect. I hope Ninja Theory will survive and next time they will try to keep this level of graphics but also focus on gameplay and create more standard single player narratrive game closer to maybe Naughty Dogs/Kojima/Coalition titles.

I probably don't like how the game looks mainly because of the CA spoiling everything. But still the draw distance is disappointing, and the vegetation and rocks details are actually quite disappointing too. I mean they look very good but is that enough here? Yes I have looked at others more impressive pics. I'd say Death Stranding looks more impressive technically than this in pretty much all aspects (draw distance, even lighting, rocks/vegetation details, water realism, sharpness, open-world settings and game systems, art design) minus probably the characters models.

Guys when was the last time you watched a movie with so much CA in the CGI parts? What's happening here? Chromatic Aberration fetishism?

 

[Dampf]

Man the water rendering is just incredible. It's all so dynamic and good looking. I wonder if they used FluidFlux.

 

[snc]

I probably don't like how the game looks mainly because of the CA spoiling everything. But still the draw distance is disappointing, and the vegetation and rocks details are actually quite disappointing too. I mean they look very good but is that enough here? Yes I have looked at others more impressive pics. I'd say Death Stranding looks more impressive technically than this in pretty much all aspects (draw distance, even lighting, rocks/vegetation details, water realism, sharpness, open-world settings and game systems, art design) minus probably the characters models.

Guys when was the last time you watched a movie with so much CA in the CGI parts? What's happening here? Chromatic Aberration fetishism?

I still thinks HB2 is probably most cgi looking game available now but can understand some playes wont like the looks (especialy pc as there is so many postprocess here). Chromatic abberation looks bad for me and as I said should be option to disable it.

 

[Nesh]

Man the water rendering is just incredible. It's all so dynamic and good looking. I wonder if they used FluidFlux.

Don't know. It is kind of a mixed bag. I checked the video earlier that showed Senua in the water and the waves coming at her, and the way she interacts with it is unnatural. It doesnt feel like water. It totally looks like what it is. A polygon plane clipping through her. The waves coming at her look strange too. Everything received such amazing attention to detail that elements like this if not done properly stick out badly.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Guys when was the last time you watched a movie with so much CA in the CGI parts? What's happening here? Chromatic Aberration fetishism?

There's a lot of blur throughout. Artistic license given the mental state representation?

Don't know. It is kind of a mixed bag. I checked the video earlier that showed Senua in the water and the waves coming at her, and the way she interacts with it is unnatural. It doesnt feel like water. It totally looks like what it is. A polygon plane clipping through her. The waves coming at her look strange too. Everything received such amazing attention to detail that elements like this if not done properly stick out badly.

This thread could do with more examples to illustrates highs long with lows.

 

[Malo]

This is the scene in reference to the water

Solely talking about the water alone, I'd have to agree it's nothing special at all and not using any kind of physics, or any special plugins. It looks like animated low resolution polygons that simply rise up and down. They're adding "splashes" to simulate effects at certain parts of the scene for extra effect. The waves especially stand out. *At least in that scene.

As to most of the rest of the game? The overall quality and cinematic experience looks stunning, really want to play this on my OLED TV.

 

[cheapchips]

But then there's this water, which is kind of great. Spoiler for what happens when you complete a puzzle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/1cxb23m

 

[homerdog]

But then there's this water, which is kind of great. Spoiler for what happens when you complete a puzzle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/1cxb23m

Yea spoiler the voices start talking again. The way they talk in a low voice with the mic 1 inch from their mouths is agonizing to me. Imagine you're walking around listening to NPR in the '90s on your walkman with the volume turned all the way up but the hosts are dropping acid.

That water (and everything else) looks amazing. I thought the water looked great even at the beginning. There is tons of post processing going on so maybe if I got all up in it from super close range it would break down.

 

[Nesh]

But then there's this water, which is kind of great. Spoiler for what happens when you complete a puzzle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/1cxb23m

Yeah that looks amazing. It is very challenging to be targeting high fidelity and yet being able to polish every visual aspect to function consistently. The application of water here is completely different from the other one. It is a highly skilled and talented team, but obviously still operating like a small one. Fluids and their behavior under different conditions is not an easy task. In gaming we don't have the limitless potential of actual volume simulations we get in CG rendering. They have to mimic those volume behaviours using tricks as our hardware is not powerful enough to do it in real time.

So a dev may develop some water tech that fits and works perfectly in one situation, but in another it requires a whole different approach and potentially different tech altogether to work. It is time consuming and involves crazy labor to develop a universal tech that works and looks good everywhere. Unlike offline fluid/volume simulations. For a game that looks that good, taking shortcuts or experiencing some bottlenecks, unfortunately produce a lot of uncanny valley as it contrasts with what looks almost real and perfect.

 

[Malo]

But then there's this water, which is kind of great. Spoiler for what happens when you complete a puzzle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/1cxb23m

Yeah that's awesome, great to see those types of effects. Doing that in the scene I mentioned above would have not being viable.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

But still the draw distance is disappointing

You've mentioned this a couple times but not sure what you mean. Can you post screenshots of examples where there's some sort of cutoff or pop? I've still only played an hour or so but with the various media out there there's clearly scenes with extremely long draw distances and I've yet to see any significant pop, shadows disappearing, etc.

Death stranding looks good - especially for PS5 60fps - but the LOD dither fade on stuff is fairly noticeable, and in the distance basically all objects are culled and you get the flat landscape mesh look. Ex. rock mesh here, and compare the foreground to the background geometry:

I haven't seen anything like that in HB2 yet, and realistically I don't expect to with Nanite.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The geometric density in Hellblade 2 is just way higher than anything else I've seen. I do think it's obscured by the soft presentation. Mods to disable depth of field, chromatic abberation would probably be very revealing. Alan Wake 2 kind of suffered from the same thing. I like the filmic presentation. I like stylistic choices. I just think it's a little too strong, and doesn't line up with what you see in films.

 

[RobertR1]

Hellblade II Gets First Mods to Play in VR or Remove Black Bars, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain and More

Senua's Saga: Hellblade II PC gamers can now get a VR mod or a mod that removes black bars, chromatic aberratiom, film grain and more.

wccftech.com

This should help get rid of the cranked up Post Processing effects.

I disabled the following:

[SystemSettings]
r.FilmGrain=0
r.NT.Lens.Distortion.Intensity=0
r.NT.Lens.Distortion.Stretch=0
r.NT.Lens.ChromaticAberration.Intensity=0
r.NT.DOF.RotationalBokeh=0
r.NT.DOF.NTBokehTransform=0
r.MotionBlurQuality=0

Game looks miles better. Just needs a mod to disable the 'voices.' Shame there's no RT. The shadow and lighting could use it.

 

[Karamazov]

i have not seen the whole game, but in somes videos i saw the camera flies through the landscape and draw distance is pretty big.