The Ninja Theory team showcased the progress made on the combat in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The game itself tells about the journey of Senua through a dark world of psychotic visions from her mind.
The development team picked a combat heavy section of the game to focus on when refining the general process of how that would work for the game. They stated that Senua’s physique was more vulnerable than that of the vikings that she was facing, so it was key to them that they didn’t overpower her as a character. To put it another way, Senua’s success comes from speed and ability rather than brute force strength.
The team has hundreds factors of laid out in the Unreal Engine 4 editor that help give the combat sections more nuance and variance. The foundation for that started with motion capture sessions, but even though they got a lot of information out of that it was only just the beginning of their work. Ninja Theory adds facial expressions afterward to help give Senua authentic reactions to combat.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is set to release sometime in 2016 for PS4 and PC.
