In a new interview with Spanish outlet Vandal (as spotted by Resetera user Idas), combat designer Juan Fernández talked about his job as a designer, and more particularly, his job as combat designer for both the original Hellblade and the upcoming sequel. There are some interesting tidbits in this interview with one of them being that, apparently, the combat experience that will be offered by Hellblade 2, will be taking a different approach compared to its predecessor, including the need for players to use different attacks and combos. As also pointed out by the designer, the quality of Hellblade 2 will be on another level, and the game will feature “new stuff” that will have an important impact on the game. “We’re raising the bar of doing more with less”, Fernández said (roughly translated). “We’re more people than the first Hellblade but the quality we’re giving versus the team behind it compared to similar games, I think it’s through the roof.” He continued, “What I like about Hellblade 2 is that it’s a very unique approach, I think it’s going to have an impact like Hellblade 1 but for other reasons, because obviously there’s a lot of things that were new in the first game that will have less impact in the second game, but there’s a whole bunch of other new things that will have that impact". The designer then went on talk about Hellblade 2’s combat experience. “What I was least satisfied with in Hellblade 1 was the lack of enemy variety, the long-range combat was stifled, and the balancing stuff, the way the difficulty systems were tuned, the enemies had too much life, they had too much durability and it got tiresome a lot of the time, we had a lot of variety of attacks and combos but the enemies didn’t really encourage you to use one or the other, people found two or three moves they liked and repeated them constantly, there were very generous parries and story timings that could be balanced more intelligently”. Some interesting stuff in here about Ninja Theory’s highly-anticipated sequel for sure – surely, we can’t wait to get our hands on it. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is currently in development for Xbox and PC. A release date has yet to be announced.
