Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II Visual Team Discuss Recreating Iceland For Realism

There’s an anticipation behind Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II that can’t be ignored. The first game wasn’t just a unique visual title that did things much differently from other action titles of its like, but it tested gamers mentally through the struggles that Senua had to go through. The sequel aims to do a similar thing but with a much different test. This time around, Senua isn’t going into the depths of the underworld to save her lover but trying to save others in the real world, all the while continuing to struggle with her mental perception of reality. That meant trying to make the world around her seem as familiar to players as possible, both in sight and in sound.

To that end, the team at Ninja Theory talked with the Xbox heads for its website to discuss what it took to make that kind of realism within a video game. In this case, they decided to recreate Iceland as best they could to not only make it feel like the one from today but also the one that would’ve been around in Medieval times. Iceland wasn’t the “obvious choice,” either; they had to whittle it down from multiple options that they felt could be what they needed for the title:

“The geography in Iceland is better than what we could have imagined,” noted Dom Matthews, Ninja Theory Studio Head in the interview. “It’s grounded in nature, but it almost feels alien. But because it’s real, as humans it feels right to us – like a real place, even if you’ve never been there.”

One of the key ways that the team went about doing this was simply looking for things within Iceland that they could put into the game via a process called photogrammetry. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, it means going to a real-world object, scanning it with special equipment, and then taking that scan and placing the object in the digital space. There was only one object that they did that within the original title, but Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II has almost 400 items scanned in!

Oh, but don’t worry, the game will still get psychedelic for you via Senua, but Matthews noted that this is more realistic than you might think:

“You’re in Senua’s shoes, trying to understand the world through her eyes, but the really powerful thing is that this isn’t beyond the realms of possibility for people that have experienced psychosis.”

You can experience Senua’s next adventure when the game releases on Xbox Series X/S tomorrow!