Ninja Theory head Dom Matthews has a strange way of describing how he feels about making Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.
As Dom says in an interview with GamesRadar, he refers to the game as an independent AAA. I’m sure, when you read this, you thought to yourself, like a AA? But Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 doesn’t look anything like Atlas Fallen, as certified as a AA as any title you can think of.
Dom defines independent AAA as “AAA production values with independent creative risk-taking.” While that sounds like a pretty good way to make a game, it’s kind of hard to really accept that such games should be called both independent games and AAA games.
Really, independent games have often been taken to refer to the scale of a video game project, as much as how it acquires its funding. For a long time, we hadn’t thought of Borderlands as an independent video game. While Gearbox certainly always brought the series with AAA production values, the truth is Gearbox hadn’t been owned by Take-Two Interactive until recently.
Similarly, it’s really illogical to refer to any of the small scale titles published by Devolver Digital as independent, if you think about it. It’s certainly true that Devolver’s financial backing still isn’t enough to match the budgets that a big company like Nintendo or Sony could bring to a smaller project like Tearaway (remember that Vita title? Now you do) or Jupiter’s Picross series of puzzle games, which have sustained them for decades.
So perhaps the language with which we refer to these games is imperfect. But what we can at least take from this claim is Dom seeing his studio, Ninja Theory, as still making games like an independent game company.
It does seem, based on what Ninja Theory says in public, that Microsoft hasn’t tried to meddle or influence development of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 in any way. Instead, Ninja Theory’s decisions to ramp up from 20 to 80, to remove permadeath in the sequel, or to utilize 3D audio (which you would have to invest in and set up to really enjoy), all really came from within the company itself.
Dom made another analogy, which is certainly easier to agree with:
“If I were to draw an analogy with film production, to me, Hellblade 2 isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster – it’s a quality independent film.”
For sure, you may have already thought of a few movies that look like Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 (let me bring up 2005’s The Descent) or seem to thread the needle between independent and AAA (the original Terminator looked like a grimy grindhouse film, but had state of the art VFX.) It’s easy to refer to the Hellblade games as cinematic, but not in the same way Sony’s popular open world franchises are cinematic.
It’s nice to imagine if Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 could become successful enough to define what games that seem like movies will be like for the next decade of video games.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will be releasing on May 21, 2024, on Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam.
