How Ninja Theory is making Hellblade's cutscenes on a budget
Hellblade has nowhere near the budget of Ninja Theory's past games. So how is the indie making the cutscenes look just as good?
Heavenly Sword kicks off Ninja Theory's reputation for gorgeous, cinematic cutscenes, and was the first game to use full performance capture.
Other Ninja Theory games like Enslaved and DmC also employed this technology, but Hellblade, which the developer has described as an "independent AAA" because it aims to hit the triple-A quality bar on an indie game budget, just doesn't have the financial backing for Hollywood-level capture.
In the video below, Ninja Theory explains the homebrew solutions it is using instead. Towards the very end of the video you can a snippet of work-in-progress test footage of these under-development techniques.
Hellblade is coming to PS4 later this year. The full full test footage may be released soon.