Hellblade's Runtime Would Be Just Right... If The Game Didn't Take So Long To Make

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga feels like a ‘money where your mouth is’ sort of game for me. I have said for a long time that the current way games are developed is unsustainable, and quoted the famous slo൲gan, ‘I want shorter games with wo🥂rse graphics made by people paid more to work less and I’m not kidding’. But seeing Hellblade 2 clock in at under ten hours has me conflicted.

Firstly, Hellblade doesn’t quite fit this gaming motto - it does not have worse graphics. Despite being a fairly small studio of around 100 employees (admittedly under the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft umbrella), Hellblade has cꩲutting edge visuals. It has also been in development for at least five years, which may have included people working less for more money, but it still doesn’t solve gaming’s sustainꦦability problem.

Senua looks shocked amongst a burning forest in Hellblade.

Hellblade 2, like many video games around today, is a game that took half a decade and likely a huge amount of money to make, and comes out the other end looking pristine. The only difference is many of its peers do all that and end up with a 20 hour experience, and Hellblade is offering less than half that. I don’t believe in a minutes to dollar value conversion in gaming, and several of my favourite games from last year were shorter than Hellblade; 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Slay the Princess, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:A Space for the Unbound, Cocoon, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Goodbye Volcano High all made my GOTY list with shorter runtimes.

But Hellblade looks the way it does because it wants to fit in with the triple-A crowd. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:burden to carry Xbox through 2024 is lessened by the release dates for Avowed and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Indiana Jones, but no Xbox exclusive is without pressure. Fans may call it the Xbox tax, but the cold, hard truth is that PlayStation was very successful in the PS4🌺 era thanks to a slew of exclusives, and Xbox decided ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’. It has bought up twin behemoths in Bethesda and Activision to make this a reality, but so far its efforts have floundered.

Ironically, the one Xbox exclusive that has lodged itself into gaming culture is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush, which eschewed triple-A visual trappings for a funkier, far more original art style. Hellblade’s art style is already set by the first game, which I liked well enough, so I’m not sure where it could go. I guess I most꧂ly don’t like that an eight hour game takes five years to make. As impressive as Hellblade may be, either visually or in terms of gameplay, the industry cannot sustain itself on two short games a decade.

There have also been complaints that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the game is digital only, but unfortunately this feels like an inevitable part of gaming’sꦛ future. The endless pursuit of technological perfect💟ion at the cost of all else does not need to be.

Last year, another Xbox showcase ༺claimed Hellblade would “push boundaries”, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my thought at the time was &lsq🌼uo;why?’. Some would argue this is the primary purpose o▨f art, but there was not a sense that these were necessarily creative boundaries, but technological and budgetary restrictions that needed to be broken to keep up with the Joneses over at Sony. Facial animation does not a game make. My issue is less that the game took five years, and more that those five years have been spent making Senua look her Senuaest, rather than anything interesting.

So, do I actually want shorter games? Or is that just a thing I say because I don’t like where the industry is heading? I suppose the assumption is that these shorter games also have shorter, more comfortable development cycles, rather than five years of breaking boundaries. It’s nothing against Hellblade personally - take out 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sunset Overdrive and it’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my favour💛ite Xbox exclusive of the past 15 years. It’s just ℱmaybe I should have said, ‘I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less and I’m not kidding, and they shouldn’t take five years to make’.

Part of it is probably selfish; I enjoy video games and waiting five years for eight hours doesn’t seem exciting. But there is a more, if not altruistic, then at least pragmatic approach here. Video games aren’t going to move away from the allure of crafting the biggest, blockiest bustingest games around, but will likely need to embrace the ‘1.5 game’ (think 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Miles Morales-style spin-offs) to keep to a regular enough release rhythm to be sustainab🔜le. Hellblade clocking in at eight hours makes it feel like a 1.5 game, despite being a core sequel - and games of this size cannot consistently take five years to make.

Ultimately Hellblade will be judged, good or bad, when it arriv💫es. And I’d probably have the same sustainability fears if we found out it was 100 hours long. Luckily, there are numbers between eight and 100, and clearly this is where my own personal video game magic nu🐭mber lies.

Hellblade was a key part of Xbox’s great showcase last night, and Xbox feels like it’s moving in the right direction. B🌳ut five years for 🌼eight hours is not an equation games can do for very long if they want to answer to be profit.