Ninja Theory’s upcoming action game, Hellblade, will feature a third-person, over-the-shoulder camera like Resident Evil 4 and a number of other third-person shooters, the studio has revealed in a new developer studio.
The reason for this, Ninja Theory say, is that Hellblade’s camera needs to be smart enough to manage itself as well as allow players to control it, and both those aspects of the camera system need to be designed efficiently, as the game is being developed by a small team and on a smaller budget.
In Heavenly Sword, the camera was on-rails and painstakingly mapped by hand into the various levels by designers. In DmC Devil May Cry, the camera was more free-roaming and intelligent enough to manage itself for the most part, but also allowed players to control it whenever they liked. In the case of Hellblade, the camera will be closer to your character, Senua, and has resulted in the game adopting movement controls that are similar to that of a shooter—left stick for moving forward/backward and strafting; right stick for turning left and right.
Additionally, there’s going to be a lock-on button that, when held, will zoom in and allow you to strafe around the enemy. Ninja Theory haven’t shown too much of the camera and controls in their dev diary, but you do get some idea of what they’re going for in the video embedded above.
Finally, Hellblade’s combat system is also being designed in a way that the combat designers will eventually be able to build and tweak the combat system without any actual coding involved. This is being done by implementing a system that links together animations, reactions, gamepad inputs, sound, and everything else that goes into creating combat, and allowing you to link different items to one another and move them around. Again, while we haven’t seen this in action yet, the video does give one some idea of how this will work.
Hellblade is currently in development, and on the console side, will debut first on PlayStation 4. It will then proceed to other platforms.
