Inside Xbox One X Enhanced: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Xbox Wire.

Many of gaming’s most compelling stories come from those who’ve helped to create our favorite Xbox One games. In our Inside Xbox One X Enhanced series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of the work involved in enhancing these epic games for Xbox One X, how they’ve helped chart the course of the world’s most powerful console, and what that means for the future of gaming. Today, we’ll be chatting with Ninja Theory’s Dominic Matthews, Commercial Director on the epic adventure game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

What specifically is your development team doing to enhance Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice for Xbox One X?

We’ve put a lot of work and care into making the Hellblade really sing on the console. We’ve given players the choice of three enhanced modes to choose from: Enhanced Visuals mode, High Framerate mode and High-Resolution mode.

How do these enhancements impact the gaming experience, and why did your development team choose to focus on these enhancement areas?

We wanted to give players the option to enhance Hellblade in the way that they want. Different players care about different things. Enriched Visuals mode offers increased visual richness throughout the experience, such as additional fog, foliage density, shadow quality, and higher resolution textures. High Framerate mode runs the game at a silky smooth 60fps. This is for players who choose smoothness of the action over higher resolution. High Resolution mode runs the game with dynamic resolutions that scale throughout the game up to 4K. This is for players who are happy with 30fps and want to see just what their Xbox One X can do when partnered with a 4K TV.

How do you expect fans of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice will respond to playing it on Xbox One X with these enhancements?

Xbox One X players are looking for an experience that gives them an opportunity to showcase what the console can do. Hellblade’s Xbox One X enhancements, combined with HDR support, will give them just that.

What enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for Hellblade: Senua’s on Xbox One X?

We always like to see where we can push resolution and framerate, but for Xbox One X being able to add additional richness in the Enriched Visuals mode was particularly exciting. Hellblade is a very cinematic experience and the additional touches of quality help to immerse you in the game even deeper.

What does 4K and HDR mean for your game, games in the future and development at your studio?

We see 4K and HDR as being important steps in improving the cinematic experience that games can offer. In the case of Hellblade, we took the Xbox One X release as an opportunity to great our first 4K HDR trailer, which can be seen at the top of this post.

Thanks to Dominic for taking the time to chat with us about Xbox One X Enhanced. We’ll bring you more interviews with more developers in the future, so stay tuned to Xbox Wire!