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

[Charlietus]

That's true. I wish that just as we got RT, that we got hardware silicon dedicated for real time advanced volumetrics for effects like smoke, water and fire. These constantly stick out always. How much I hate it when smoke effects turn around towards our direction or look like transparent billboards on otherwise highly believable environments

Dedicated hardware for accelerated volumetrics would be so cool. I don't know how that would work, or if that would even be possible. But most effects are done the same way they were done 15 years ago, billboards. And once you know how it works, you can't unseen them.

Imagine hitting a enemy with a sword and the blood is an actual liquid that splatters realistically, or you shoot a bottle and the water comes out and covers the environment.

 

[Jupiter]

Audiovisually it's good and perhaps the best there is to see on consoles but there is too much passivity in the game. Nothing that a game should have as a goal.

 

[Remij]

Guys, if I'm going overboard with pictures, just let me know lol. There's certain parts of this game which left me stunned from a technological standpoint. I enjoyed my time with the game an accept it for what it is, if not what I wanted it to be as a sequel to the first game.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Guys, if I'm going overboard with pictures, just let me know lol.

Nah, post away! I tried the photo mode for the first time today and it's actually quite in depth. Not just the usual lens effects but you can often move or hide the characters, add lights and more. Of course I didn't realize until after that my screenshots basically didn't work because I took them with HDR mode on... alas

 

[Inuhanyou]

It's a nice looking game. I just wish they put more focus on other things. DmC for me was their best game by far because it felt like it was really trying to nail the gameplay side of things. And didn't actually think the visuals looked bad either for ue3.

 

[trinibwoy]

With this amazing level of fidelity, 2D sprites for blood, dust and other particles stick out badly. That's something I hope developers concentrate on in the future.

Do you have an example? The fire seemed volumetric in the videos I’ve seen. Is that also using billboards? I had assumed Niagara was a proper particle system.

 

[Charlietus]

Do you have an example? The fire seemed volumetric in the videos I’ve seen. Is that also using billboards? I had assumed Niagara was a proper particle system.

I haven't played the game yet, I have only seen some screenshots and clips, so I can't really make examples. I was talking more in the general sense, that with all those enhancements to lighting, models, animations, effects have mostly remained the same for a long time. Aside from particle systems used for fire sparkles and magicky stuff, 2d sprites get used everywhere for everything else.

I just thought of an example in hellblade 2 that I have seen: the waves crushing on the shore at the beginning (?). All 2D sprites.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I haven't played the game yet, I have only seen some screenshots and clips, so I can't really make examples. I was talking more in the general sense, that with all those enhancements to lighting, models, animations, effects have mostly remained the same for a long time. Aside from particle systems used for fire sparkles and magicky stuff, 2d sprites get used everywhere for everything else.

I just thought of an example in hellblade 2 that I have seen: the waves crushing on the shore at the beginning (?). All 2D sprites.

When you think about what horizon forbidden West is doing and what hellblade is doing the difference between a small team and a big team is pretty clear

 

[Charlietus]

When you think about what horizon forbidden West is doing and what hellblade is doing the difference between a small team and a big team is pretty clear

Honestly I don't like the forbidden west waves either, the splashes and the foam effects are also in 2D, they look flawed to my eyes in different ways.

 

[Remij]

Nah, post away! I tried the photo mode for the first time today and it's actually quite in depth. Not just the usual lens effects but you can often move or hide the characters, add lights and more. Of course I didn't realize until after that my screenshots basically didn't work because I took them with HDR mode on... alas

Yeah, I'm actually surprised how good it is. Having the ability to move the camera during cutscenes already makes it better than most. A lot of games wouldn't allow that level of freedom because they very'd quickly break down when not viewed from the exact angle they wanted you to see it from. The fact that you can also do things like rotate the character/enemies and add lights makes it even more impressive as you said. I also appreciate how they've implemented their focal point options, along with the "focus assistance" which very clearly shows you exactly where the different focal planes are. Sure, many games allow you to adjust near and far distances, but here's it's easy to understand and straightforward. Also love how it allows you to "play" the real-time effects in a scene, which can help sometimes when you have that perfect framing, but there's some particle or effect that isn't quite right. Good stuff! I can just imagine what some of the professional game photographers will come up with from this game. Since it's Unreal Engine you can bet they'll also have their own tools to take things to the next level.

Do you have an example? The fire seemed volumetric in the videos I’ve seen. Is that also using billboards? I had assumed Niagara was a proper particle system.

It's using billboards in some cases, not all. In the giant fight, which was featured in the gameplay trailer, when he gets lit on fire, it's entirely 2D. If you use photomode and move the camera it becomes extremely clear lol. You can see the silhouette of his head in the texture

I was quite disappointed in this effect to be honest. It looks ok enough in motion during the scene, but considering how much better it was in the initial trailer, it's a big downgrade. I understand why they did it, but it's a shame that the original effect wasn't included in a higher setting option.

 

[cheapchips]

I was quite disappointed in this effect to be honest. It looks ok enough in motion during the scene, but considering how much better it was in the initial trailer, it's a big downgrade. I understand why they did it, but it's a shame that the original effect wasn't included in a higher setting option.

I just reached that bit and felt like it could look better, even as a 2d effect. It's a little bit odd really. I wonder if it wasn't that the original version was scaling to the S.

Seems a little picky of course. The whole sequence is still spectacular.

 

[see colon]

Can you name any other similar game, Uncharted or Tomb Raider or anything, that's had such a graphical upgrade post launch? I can't think of any - it's very hard to justify as a business expense. Closest I can think of end up more GaaS such as No Man's Sky, where constant updates yield constant sales.

Cyberpunk got upgraded with lots of little upgrades, then the path traced update, frame gen, etcetera. I'm sure there are some bad good examples, like Redfall, that launched in such a state that some surfaces barely had textures and it was locked to 30fps on console, and it got a visual upgrade just from making the textures appear and upping the framerate to 60.

 

[RobertR1]

Cyberpunk got upgraded with lots of little upgrades, then the path traced update, frame gen, etcetera. I'm sure there are some bad good examples, like Redfall, that launched in such a state that some surfaces barely had textures and it was locked to 30fps on console, and it got a visual upgrade just from making the textures appear and upping the framerate to 60.

I def won’t hold any game to the level of support CDPR has given CP since release. Well beyond the normal fixing and optimizations. And it’s still benchmark on PC.

 

[Dampf]

Man, the cloud rendering on low with upscaling is so, so bad.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 exposes an uncomfortable truth about upscalers—it's all about what sort of compromises you're prepared to make to image quality

If you're anything like me, you'll be bouncing between graphics settings more often than you might like.

www.pcgamer.com

PCGamer mentioned it here briefly, but its much worse at medium and low volumetrics settings. I don't feel like that's how it should look. It becomes very pixelated. Even Series S looks much better. It's weird when you have the whole game looking like a CGI movie and then you encounter this:



(DLSS Performance at 1440p and volumetrics set to low).

It's also not happening all the time but only when specific patterns form. Really weird.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's also not happening all the time but only when specific patterns form. Really weird.

It's been shown AI training can be broken by specific data points. eg. image creation can be completely destroyed with some specific pixel values that are imperceptible to humans.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 exposes an uncomfortable truth about upscalers—it's all about what sort of compromises you're prepared to make to image quality

If you're anything like me, you'll be bouncing between graphics settings more often than you might like.

www.pcgamer.com

Clouds aside, this article actually touches on an issue I don't think folks appreciate enough when they are bullying companies about supporting every upscaler:

A pretty handy feature, I think you'll agree, although it inadvertently exposes an uncomfortable truth—each upscaler is good at different things, and that makes choosing the right one a very subjective process.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert in upscalers, but I've looked at the various upscaling outputs in detail in some of these noisier cases quite a bit as you would imagine as part of my job. While they all have been getting somewhat better over time, they all have various cases where they break down, sometimes in pretty bad ways. ex. TSR tends to have some issues with high contrast shadows/specular (as shown in one case in the DF hellblade video). DLSS has various issues with excessive ghosting and generally doesn't handle transparencies super well. FSR2 tends to leave a fair bit of noise in the image even with relatively little motion. Etc. Don't take these as gospel because this stuff changes all the time; the point is just that all of them have places they work well and places they fall apart a bit - none of them is magical.

Given the rather significant effect on the output pixels of these techniques, it seems a little crazy to keep treating this like it's a user settings problem. Putting a black box in the API (or SDKs like "streamline") often makes this even worse because now it's not only a black box of a few techniques that you have to try and QA, but a black box of "arbitrary future implementations on arbitrary future hardware" that could completely screw up the image and the game developer has no control or no way to QA that.

Games really need a way to be able to test and see the real pixels that are output and once QA signs off, those are the pixels that should show up for the user, until the end of time ideally. The test matrix with the current user demands to support every single upsampling technique is already getting to be a problem since there are so many cases that they need to be tested in. Issues like the clouds here will only get worse as it's just unreasonable to expect with so many moving parts controlled by third parties that there aren't going to be problems. Is this a game problem? Is this an API problem? Is it a DLSS problem? It's none and all of them at the same time, with no clear owner to maintain compatibility and "fixes".

Of course I realize the commercial reality of this direction, but I will not hesitate to continue to point out places where this giant black box that is the ultimate arbiter of the pixels you see at the end of the pipeline is a problematic model going forward.

 

[orangpelupa]

Dlss kinda addressed that by allowing games to use specific dlss dll version, I think.

People also can manually force the game to use different dlss version.

 

[Remij]

Thought I'd try my hand at recreating a still of Senua from the reveal trailer that many people thought there's no way they'd get close to. I'm clearly no expert at how cameras and lighting works, and I tried my best to recreate the lighting to be somewhat similar. This image is not edited.. it was made using the photo-mode only. Sadly they don't use the same animation in the full game, but I think it's very clear to see how a professional artist could make it look essentially just like that. The clothing and hair is also a bit different.. but outside of that, I'm just insanely impressed with how close they came in the shipping product to their original vision.

 

[see colon]

I def won’t hold any game to the level of support CDPR has given CP since release. Well beyond the normal fixing and optimizations. And it’s still benchmark on PC.

Thinking back, The Witcher got a patch that enhanced the graphics (hence the copies sold now are the "Enhanced Edition"), as did The Witcher 2 (PC patch that came outa round when the 360 version was released), and The Witcher 3 got an update that overhaled the lighting about a year after launch, and then the next gen update more recently.

Man, the cloud rendering on low with upscaling is so, so bad.

Do you have VRS on? I noticed lots of pixelization and brakeup in the water surfaces when playing on my laptop (low settings) with VRS on. Turing it off seamed to make no performance difference. Maybe it affects the clouds as well.

 

[Dampf]

Thinking back, The Witcher got a patch that enhanced the graphics (hence the copies sold now are the "Enhanced Edition"), as did The Witcher 2 (PC patch that came outa round when the 360 version was released), and The Witcher 3 got an update that overhaled the lighting about a year after launch, and then the next gen update more recently.

Do you have VRS on? I noticed lots of pixelization and brakeup in the water surfaces when playing on my laptop (low settings) with VRS on. Turing it off seamed to make no performance difference. Maybe it affects the clouds as well.

Yep, that was one of the first potential culprits I tried to eliminate. Even with it off the artifacting still happens.