The developer of Hellblade 2 has defined why it prefers making shorter video games, insisting digital distribution has opened the door “to games of all shapes and sizes.”
Microsoft-owned developer Ninja Theory will quickly release Hellblade 2, which prices $50, is digital-only, and about eight hours long. It follows 2020’s multiplayer online game Bleeding Edge, and 2017’s Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, itself a cheaper, shorter game that launched with out a bodily release.
In a current interview with IGN (try IGN's Hellblade 2 preview for more), Ninja Theory studio head Dom Matthews stated Hellblade 2 is “the right shape and size of experience” to inform the story the builders meant to make.
“I think what we always set out to do is to tell a story and for the game length to be appropriate for the story that we want to tell,” Matthews stated. “So it's not really a case of setting out to make shorter experiences. I think it is… There is a story that we want to tell here with a beginning, middle and end and what is the right shape and size of experience to tell that story? So that's kind of where we start.”
Matthews stated Ninja Theory has discovered an viewers for shorter video games the place “every step of that journey is meaningful.”
“What I would say as well though is that I think that since digital distribution has become a thing, it has opened the industry up to games of all shapes and sizes, which I think is really great,” Matthews commented. “So I'm really pleased to see that there's a lot of people that actually enjoy a shorter experience, something that they can sit down on a whatever Friday night, stick their headphones on, turn the lights off and kind of sink into an experience and players who don't necessarily want something that is 50 hours long, a 100 hours long, so it's as long as it needs to be. And I'm one of those people, I like shorter games.
“I think there's a lot of pressure on people's time these days and I think our fans, from what we hear from them, they enjoy a shorter game where our intention is that every step of that journey is meaningful… There's an audience of people that want games that are focused.”
Nowadays, with more video video games launching straight into subscription companies and with out bodily variations, it has develop into more and more tough to measure success, a minimum of from the surface wanting in. As a first-party Xbox game, Hellblade 2 launches day-one on Game Pass on May 21, 2024. While it can even be in the stores standalone throughout PC through Steam and Xbox, Hellblade 2 appears unlikely to show its worth by means of gross sales alone.
For Ninja Theory, although, there are lots of measures of Hellblade 2’s success. “I think for us as a studio, well my focus as well as studio head is how can we empower the team here, the artists here to go and create an experience, and how do we get it out to the widest possible audience?” Matthews defined.
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Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can attain Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].