Technology with regard to facial and motion capture has significantly advanced over the past few years and game developers are taking full advantage of them in order to create more physically realistic characters for their games. Ninja Theory is on board with the idea with the redesigned protagonist for their very first Independent AAA game, Hellblade.
In its "Hellblade Development Diary 16: The Face of Senua" published in YouTube on Oct. 23, Ninja Theory focused on the development of the protagonist Senua's redesigned face with the help and special participation of its video editor, Melina Juergens, and the company 3Lateral located in Serbia, which specializes in extremely high resolution 3D scanning for character designs.
Juergens said that, due to the detail in which 3Lateral wanted to capture her face, the scanning took an entire day as she had to make over 100 different facial expressions. It seems like all her efforts paid off because the new Senua who borrows her face is a far cry from the original art that Ninja Theory released in August 2014.
Just take a look at the details the game developers are giving the players.
Hellblade is a melee gameplay that follows Senua, a female Celtic warrior haunted by trauma from a Viking invasion. The trauma makes her mentally unstable and she suffers through visual and aural psychosis and unable to tell her hallucinations from reality. The narrative focuses on Senua's descent into hell and her battle with demons, whether physical or psychological is up to the player to discover.
"On Hellblade, we will double down on what we do best to give you a deeper character in a twisted world with brutal, uncompromising, combat," Ninja Theory wrote on Hellblade's website.
Ninja Theory's decision to tackle mental illness through Hellblade gained the support of Wellcome Trust mental health charity. "Rather than being a didactic game teaching us about psychosis, Hellblade allows us to explore it through the creation of a compelling and complex character, and the world that she inhabits," Wellcome Trust Spokesperson Iain Dodgeon said.
Hellblade is Ninja Theory's first fully owned game and will be released digitally and on Playstation 4.
