This is looking better than Death Stranding.
Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 [XBSX|S, PC, XGP]
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This is looking better than Death Stranding.
cheapchips
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The draw distance is huge in places. About half way through the game I had the same sensation I had with Jusant. The area where I'd been poking around snooping at all the fine detail 5 minutes before was waaay over there, and level of detail was stupidly high all the way through the path I'd traversed. It's a hell of a UE5 party trick.
Dude you left at a good time. It gets so much worse. I’m in this section now that’s just hours of crawling through caves with only the voices.
I guess I am mainly bothered by both the limited FOV, blurriness and lack of details. Here is a XSX screenshot, the best I have found:
On PS5 Death stranding is pushing 6-8x ish more pixels while displaying incredibly big vistas, sometimes as big as that. Sure there may be more popin but Death stranding is a big interactive open-world game where you can go pretty much anywhere. The scope is so much bigger than HB2 very restricted setpieces. Overall I am still more impressed by what DS is pushing on PS5. I wasn't already much impressed by The Order on PS4, for me all that filmic stuff and carefully limited perspectives is just developers trying to cheat our brain. In Death Stranding there is no cheating whatsoever as it looks so organically and realistically real with high frequency details all over the place and beautiful realistic lighting (most of the time).
Maybe on high end PC 4 times more powerfull and all details pushed to the max without the filmic stuff I'd have a different point of view. But right now for me Decima engine used by Kojima team is still the most impressive piece of graphics technology on consoles. And I think Death Stranding 2 will go even further than that with RT finally been used by that engine.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It's always a little sad when the usual MS haters are dragging down another 1st party title. It's pretty tiring. The idea that DS looks better than HB2 is completely ridiculous. Let's get real folks.
If you think that's tiring try playing this game with a headset. Extremely high quality unrelenting schizo demonic ASMR will make you really feel like a crazy person.
Being sharper or clearer can be detrimental to the image quality. I haven't played hellblade 2 yet, but as an example, tlou 2 has a gorgeous film grain effect that enhances the image so much. It's pretty sad when people on console and PC just search for the clearest image possible (even installing mods to do it) when a lot of those effects are there for a reason (and some are better implemented than others, of course).
Yep, agreed. For me, I always take into consideration the artists intent. I wouldn't call Hellblade 2 blurry so much as "out of focus". It's meant to be constantly shifting between focal planes.. that's part of the intent of the developers. I'd call games blurry if they're clearly meant to look sharp but lack detail and sufficient resolution to provide it.. but as John stated in the video with Hellblade 2, after a point it doesn't matter how much resolution you throw at it, it's still going to be "blurry" in spots because it's meant to be.
I get it's not everyone's thing, and it's their own opinions, but it's helpful in conversations to at least acknowledge the intent of the developers. Also, it's great that there are mods out there for people to disable visual effects and things they don't like. Some people have a hard time parsing details when things are blurry, some people have issues with brightness and all sorts of accessibility issues which are valid. It's nice to have options.
I'm all for a softer image especially in single player story driven games. As long as there's no aliasing (there isn't in this game with DLAA) I would almost prefer the softer image. However I would like to tone down or disable the chomatic aberration and turn off the letterboxing. My PC has enough GPU power to render the extra pixels.
And as always DLSS frame generation is super effective. Do note the in game FPS counter doesn't seem to account for framegen, it only shows the base framerate. The NVIDIA overlay displays the "correct" FPS accounting for framegen, so it reads about double what it shows in game for me.
I would encourage anyone with a decent PC and Gamepass to check this game out. Seeing it running in realtime hits different than the youtube videos. Gives me original Crysis vibes in terms of how far ahead it is. Will probably be some years before this level of graphical excellence and polish becomes mainstream.
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The post processing on this game is well over the top (pc max settings) and just interfering with the underlying quality.
After having disabled all those things I mentioned, IQ is in the top 3 with Phantom Liberty and Alan Wake 2 ahead of it.
Artistic intent went a bit overboard here….
this game managed to give me the goosebumps -unusual for me these days-, the graphics are something else at times, and the animations... The gameplay is kinda basic, but this in an on rails story driven game, so no particularly fun.
Something else that I loved is that the game supports the new settings of Intel XeSS. I got 34fps running the game at 4K with XeSS Balanced, with the default settings, which are the highest settings.
To get stable 60fps I had to drop the resolution to 1080p and Ultra Performance XeSS, but I played the game at 4K XeSS Balanced and Vsync On -> Every 2 frames.
So to sum it up, technically it's an amazing game. Fun wise, it's not very fun but I hope Microsoft keep teams like this, very talented people, creating games and narrative experiences.
Something else that I loved is that the game supports the new settings of Intel XeSS. I got 34fps running the game at 4K with XeSS Balanced, with the default settings, which are the highest settings.
To get stable 60fps I had to drop the resolution to 1080p and Ultra Performance XeSS, but I played the game at 4K XeSS Balanced and Vsync On -> Every 2 frames.
So to sum it up, technically it's an amazing game. Fun wise, it's not very fun but I hope Microsoft keep teams like this, very talented people, creating games and narrative experiences.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Look I like Death Stranding just fine and think it can look quite beautiful but man, come on. It does not compare to this. There isn't even any shadowing on the vegetation in DS!
As for Death Stranding 2, we'll see, it certainly looks impressive. But no, DS1 does not compare to this.
As for Death Stranding 2, we'll see, it certainly looks impressive. But no, DS1 does not compare to this.
Death Stranding 1 is a world and a half away from this.. it's no contest at all. Visually anyway. Death Stranding is a better game lol
But Death Stranding 2 will definitely be much closer to this. Even the environmental detail increase shown in the trailer is a big step up from the first one. Should be a treat.
snc
Veteran
The more Im playing HB2 the more I admire graphics (unfortunetly not gameplay ) . Its definitely for me number 1 in terms of visuals and will be hard to surpass it on xsx/ps5 taking into account linearity, how limited interaction and gameplay is, ~2.5m pixels thx to black borders and 30fps. Dont think these consoles have much more power.
) . Its definitely for me number 1 in terms of visuals and will be hard to surpass it on xsx/ps5 taking into account linearity, how limited interaction and gameplay is, ~2.5m pixels thx to black borders and 30fps. Dont think these consoles have much more power.
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I think you'll be surprised at what some developers can do. This game was made by a relatively small team. There are teams out there 5x bigger and have huge budgets to throw around. Not to mention, this game ultimately ended up releasing on UE5.3.2.0.. there's been big improvements since then which should help console performance drastically. I bet you there are a lot of things done in HB2, which the team probably had to do with some hacky workarounds, which would be much more performant and easier to implement now in this latest version of the engine.The more Im playing HB2 the more I admire graphics (unfortunetly not gameplay
I think it's really just getting started.
Nonsense. We love MS and can't wait to play it on our PS5
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.
Is the motion blur not good? Seems like it would be really useful in combat.
cheapchips
Veteran
RobertsR1 is among those that don't like the overall image the developers have pursued, which is fair enough. It's differing cinematic tastes rather than anything technical. Hellblade 2 isn't supposed to look anymore realistic than The Northman or Fury Road.
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