Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga will have ultrawide display on by default.
Earlier this week, Ninja Theory shared a photo of the game running on an ultrawide monitor. While the game looks stunning in this resolution, it turns out there was a second message in that photo, hiding in plain sight.
As reported on Windows Central, Ninja Theory confirmed that Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga is launching with a default 2.39:1 resolution. This would be the resolution known as Panavision, a resolution that really displays best on an ultrawide set up.
As Ninja Theory explains it, if you don’t have a way to display the game on ultrawide, you will have to settle with letterboxing, as black bars will come up on the top and bottom of your screen.
It’s a surprising tech pushing choice from Ninja Theory, and while it may reflect on how much they have pushed their game forward, it may not be a choice that fans will be happy with. While recognizing that Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga is not quite a mainstream title like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 or Call of Duty, this is the kind of choice that can alienate instead of draw fans towards the title.
But let’s entertain this idea for a minute. What options do gamers have if they don’t have the budget, or possibly, the space, to get an ultrawide monitor, frequently but not exclusively found in the form of those new curved monitors?
For starters, if you already have three displays, it is possible to set that up to display in ultrawide, assuming you are playing this game on Windows. You won’t need to get any specific kind of monitor, but you will need a GPU powerful enough to output this properly. You can learn how to set this up on Windows here.
The other option we can recommend that we know of is to get AR glasses. This one won’t be on the cheap side, but it is a solution for people who play in crowded rooms. So far, we have seen XREAL’s glasses being tested by influencers to play video games on. But between now and the game comes out, a new mixed reality or AR tech might come up that’s cheap and easy to use, that would offer an ideal experience for this, so this is as far as we’ll go on this option.
Ultimately, it is going to feel weird if you play this game on a setup that won’t support Panavision. Most gamers will have to get used to those bars, but we’re sure if you have everything needed to properly display this game, it will be an amazing experience.
We should also add that Ninja Theory also revealed that Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga will run on 30 FPS on Xbox Series X|S. This may seem contradictory to some fans, but it may be the case that that’s the most performance Ninja Theory can get on console.
Gamers who think they can afford to get snobbish about framerate and resolution will balk when they find out how much it would actually cost to get this game running on the best performance possible.
Piecing everything together, it looks like most gamers won’t get to play Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga with the most optimized performance possible, at all. But based on what we’ve seen so far, it’ll still be a very impressive game for everyone who’s lucky enough to play it.
Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga is releasing on May 21, 2024, on Xbox Series X|S, PC on Steam, and Game Pass on console, PC, and streaming.
