Hellblade Sensua's Sacrifice - River of Blood Optimization?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

So I played this game maybe a year ago, and every now and then I think back to that claustrophobic scene with all the arms and heads, link here:

So my question is, how did they achieve this and still make it run on console with good performance?

I can’t say I ever tried pushing Unreal when it comes to amount of skeletal meshes. But I find it hard to believe that they haven’t used some sort of black magic voodoo to achieve this result, with minimum 60 fps, with all the postproccessing effects turned on and so on.

So, have they just put together some Animation Blueprints and gone crazy? Have they created their own instanced skeletal meshes somehow (afaik that does not exist today)? Have they rewritten the entire engine? Are they even using skinned bones/skeletal meshes or are they driving the animations in some other way?

I find this very interesting and would love to hear other peoples opinions about this. Maybe even someone from Ninja Theory is lurking around these parts and can give me an answer?

Anyway, great game 5/7 would play again!
Cheers

2

They used the power of UE4 mixed in with some general gaming development tricks. Ultimately, UE4 is really well made and runs smooth on consoles and PC. I’ve played a couple of UE4 games with little to no frame drop like i get with other games with proprietary engines.
I’m still learning more about game development.

  • You can have about 100 Skeletal Meshes as long as their mesh is low-poly enough.

  • I had a game that had up to 200 pawns walking around with no issue.

  • Post process is great and I think it’s cheap to use. You can get a lot of mileage out of it.

  • The game isn’t open world

  • This means your draw distance is low and you have to render a lot less meaning you can pack more into what the player sees.