Hellblade 2 will use an unusual anamorphic effect

Creating a gaming experience that makes you feel like you’re in a movie theater isn’t easy at all. The developers at Ninja Theory are trying to do just that, and it looks like their efforts are paying off. On Twitter, they decided to share how they use the so-called special visual effects. anamorphic effect. This may be commonplace in modern films, but it’s still lacking in games.

Let me show you a picture cinematic anamorphic effect is a combination of several elements that make the resulting scene spectacular. Such a frame is shot on anamorphic lenses, where everything fits into a compressed image. It then expands to a typical movie size. This leads to several things: the lights create the typical lines, they are not round. Objects that are out of focus in the scene are more blurred and the space is curved. The lights in the background, which would have been round with conventional technology, suddenly became oval. This is all thanks to the anamorphic lens, but how do you achieve this in the game?

This is what the developers not only boasted about, but also explained the effect. Because of this, they can Senua Hellblade 2 saga turn into something that is much more like a cinematic environment and gives the image depth. In Unreal Engine 5, they use a combination of blending distortion, chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, and bokeh to reproduce the look of an anamorphic film.

Whether they succeeded is up to you. For us, the developers are definitely on the right track, and while they haven’t shown much, the final effect looks pretty good. We still don’t know a release date, the game is in development for Xbox Series X/S and PC, it will be part of Game Pass.