00:00Senua's Saga Hellblade 2
00:10launched on Xbox and PC last year,
00:13and we've loved hearing about your experiences with the game,
00:16seeing your virtual photography,
00:18and learning what Senua's story means to you.
00:21It begins as it ends.
00:23Work here at the studio has continued
00:25as we've been pushing the limits of the game's visual performance,
00:28finding new ways for you to experience Senua's journey,
00:31and optimizing Hellblade 2 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro
00:35for a cross-platform release and update this August.
00:44Performance mode is a highly requested feature from our community,
00:47and that's a setting that the players can choose
00:49within the options to run the game on a 60fps mode.
00:52You can swap between the performance and quality mode seamlessly.
00:56When you are playing on the PlayStation 5 Pro,
00:59you can choose between your preferred upscaler PSSR and TSR.
01:03Our approach to performance mode was to keep the original cinematic experience intact.
01:08And I'll cut you like a fish.
01:10So from the outset, we were pretty set on not removing any features at all
01:14for the performance mode version of the game,
01:16and rather we made a series of targeted optimizations
01:19as well as performance mode specific settings.
01:22For the original release of Senua's Saga Hellblade 2,
01:25we optimized to the 30Hz target and then actually optimized a bit further than that
01:29to give ourselves a bit of headroom for a smoother framerate
01:32as well as letting us scale more for PC hardware.
01:35And so that meant that we had a bit of spare CPU headroom basically
01:38where if we were to scale the graphics settings,
01:40you get some additional framerate kind of by default,
01:43but it wasn't quite enough to get us all the way to 60 frames per second.
01:46So because we had that headroom for the quality mode version of the game,
01:49that meant that we did actually have a couple of 2-4ms spikes
01:52that would never affect the framerate.
01:54However, in performance mode, these became a large part of our frame,
01:57and so we spent quite a lot of effort in targeting and removing all of those.
02:00This often involved spreading work across lots of frames,
02:03and particularly around spawning characters and items,
02:06level streaming and garbage collection.
02:08For our general CPU performances, you might imagine for a game like this,
02:11a lot of it was spent on our characters, their animation and their physics.
02:16We got back most of our performance by making targeted improvements to animation
02:20as well as making our Anim Blueprints performance mode aware
02:23so that we could branch certain functionality
02:26and make appropriate reductions when necessary.
02:28If you would just listen to me Senua.
02:31We also implemented an animation frame budget allocator,
02:34which meant that we could set fixed budgets,
02:37which is very important for 60Hz games,
02:39to ensure a consistent frame time,
02:41and then anything beyond that budget would just push to later frames.
02:45We also set this up with a priority system on characters
02:48so that this would not affect primary characters within a scene.
02:51Also, as our animation blueprints were performance mode aware,
02:54we were able to scale the physics on the characters for performance mode only.
02:58Reaching our goals on GPU is a combination of lower resolution,
03:01scalability settings, and performance mode-specific settings
03:04for lighting and shadows to reduce their cost.
03:07We also made improvements to post-processing and VFX.
03:11In addition to this, we made our Niagara system's performance mode aware,
03:14which meant that we could branch their functionality as well.
03:17There's a lot more to it and a lot of finer details
03:19to keeping the performance smooth and consistent at 60 frames per second,
03:22but that's the broad overview of what it took to get the game running at 60
03:26on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 5 Pro.
03:30For players who finish the game, they can access to our new difficulty,
03:38which is called the Dark Rod mode,
03:40and itself is a throwback to Hellblade 1.
03:42In this mode, the combat is more challenging,
03:47and with each death, the rod grows on Senua.
03:53Die too many times and your progress will be lost.
03:57There's also a new achievement if you beat the game in this mode.
04:05For Senua Saga Hellblade 2 Enhanced, we're making some improvements to our photo mode.
04:10We're adding camera motions.
04:11You can now set and automatically move camera in the game world when you are hiding the UI.
04:16You can control the speed, angle, and direction.
04:20Next to that, we're adding ambient sounds.
04:32And lastly, we're adding custom music.
04:34Tracks that were curated specifically for the photo mode.
04:45We also refine the existing settings to give you a better experience in photo mode.
04:49We can't wait to see what you will create with these tools at your disposal.
05:00Once you beat the game, you will unlock developer commentary mode.
05:03As you play the game, you will hear from our team and learn how we crafted Senua's story.
05:08Hard to read, and they're fast, right?
05:10They don't have super long wind-ups.
05:12This is the only location that's not based on the real location,
05:15so we kind of had free reign in terms of what we did with the spaces and how we themed them.
05:21There is around four hours of commentary from our team, cast and collaborators.
05:25As an environmentalist, you have a responsibility to sort of guide the player as well as lose them.
05:29So, yeah, it's kind of a tricky little balancing act, but I think we got something pretty cool out of it.
05:35For players on PC, we've worked to give you a little something extra if you have higher-end hardware.
05:45While we could have just taken all of the settings up to their maximum,
05:48we decided instead to only extend specific settings where we thought they gave a visual improvement
05:53at a reasonable performance cost.
05:56This includes improvements across shadows, TSR, post-processing, volumetrics and view distance.
06:05And for those with hardware that supports it, we've also added DLSS 4 and Multi-Frame Gen for even higher frame rates.
06:16While we were making performance improvements, we also wanted to revisit Steam Deck verification.
06:20For the original launch, while Deck performance wasn't awful, it wasn't an out-of-the-box experience.
06:25You had to tweak the graphics settings yourself and there were still some places that were CPU bottlenecks.
06:30To improve this, we've made the game Deck Aware, which means that the first time that you boot it,
06:35it will know what platform it's on and set all of the settings for you.
06:38We also took our performance mode CPU improvements and applied those to the Steam Deck version of the build.
06:43For some time we were happy.
06:45Like us.
06:51Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice shipped on PlayStation in 2017.
06:56So we're really excited to bring Senua back to PlayStation so players can continue her journey in Senua's Saga Hellblade 2.
07:02When porting a game between similar form factor and performance hardware,
07:06it's more about porting the technology than the game specifically.
07:09And so we were very fortunate here that Epic had a very good platform integration for PlayStation already for Unreal Engine 5.
07:16Once the build was running, we were able to then have our tools team hook up all of our CIN infrastructure
07:21so that we would get nightly builds as well as being able to onboard the content team.
07:25They're testing people. They are laughing at you.
07:27We also have a system internally called Self Play, which is able to play the game from start to end,
07:32as well as attaching profiling tools to this while it does it.
07:36This meant that very early on we were able to get the game verified as playing start to end
07:40and get a good overview of where our current performance was at.
07:43This was a great position for us to start on the platform.
07:46In terms of hardware capability, performance for quality mode was pretty straightforward.
07:50The game already scaled between Series S and Series X as well as beyond in both directions for PC hardware.
07:55So for PlayStation this meant finding out where on that spectrum the hardware sits
07:59and tweaking our scalability and resolution settings accordingly.
08:04All of the features of Hellblade 2 are present and accounted for on PlayStation hardware
08:08and we've also added support for adaptive triggers, haptics and Dolby Atmos.
08:13The version of the engine that we shipped on was not PlayStation 5 Pro aware.
08:17This meant we had to port features from later versions of the engine,
08:20but it did allow us to enable features like PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution and Variable Rate Shading.
08:25Ultimately the porting of Hellblade 2 to PlayStation 5 went very smoothly.
08:29This meant that we could spend more of our time working on the new content as well as performance mode.
08:33What were they looking for?
08:35Our partners at Qloaked helped bring an enhanced version of Hellblade 1 to PC and Xbox in 2021,
08:40so we were excited to work with them again to optimize Hellblade 1 for PlayStation 5.
08:45This includes features such as 4K resolution, up to 120 frames per second and ray tracing.
08:50Don't kill me. I'm not one of them.
08:53Senua Saga Hellblade 2 Enhanced arrives August 12th on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox PC, Steam and Game Pass.
09:04Pre-order on PlayStation to receive the Senua Saga Hellblade 2 original soundtrack at launch.
09:10As well as the standard edition of the game, we're also offering a deluxe edition,
09:14which includes the original Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice optimized for PS5 for the first time,
09:19and the soundtrack as an added bonus.
09:22Say it. You are ready. Tell them.
09:24For players on Xbox, PC and Game Pass,
09:28Hellblade 2 Enhanced will be available at the same time as a free update,
09:32so wherever you play there will be something new for you to explore this August.
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