Ninja Theory, creators of a third-person action adventure game Senua’s Story: Hellblade 2are back with another Developer Diary filled with exciting details about how they have traveled the seas and skies to provide fans with photorealistic gameplay and better world building.
Ninja Theory realized quite early that this was an Xbox exclusive Infernal Blade 2 will take place in Iceland. After all, the story centers around Icelandic native Senua and her quest to retrieve her lover’s soul from the clutches of the goddess Hela. All was well when the team began their journey developing ideas for this sequel, but eventually there were issues with distance.
“When we decided that the locations would be based on real places in Iceland, we decided we needed some pretty good references for that,” said Ninja Theory environment art director Dan Attwell. Developer diary (opens in a new tab). “But you can get this far just by going online and googling images.”
After obtaining elevation data for all of Iceland and using a service called Drone Deploy that enabled the team to map 3D models of more specific locations, the team knew they needed to take one more step to ensure Infernal Blade 2 it would be as realistic as it should be. It’s time to travel to Iceland.
Trip
“We realized we needed to extend our range,” said Attwell. “So we added 21 locations [to the trip], which meant driving 2,500 km in 11 days.” This is certainly quite a feat.
The Ninja Theory team had the opportunity to visit ancient man-made structures and see what life would be like for a person living in 10th century Iceland. “We don’t want to create what we think it looks like,” said Attwell. “We want to be as faithful as possible to what reality would look like.”
After all, all the planning and traveling was worth it. Thanks to this trip to the northernmost points of Iceland, the creators could understand what Senua would really look like. This, in turn, will hopefully allow Infernal Blade 2 be photorealistic in the Xbox Series X|S graphics and localization, and in the stories it’s meant to tell.