Epic Games has released multiple tech demos to promote the capabilities of the Unreal Engine 5 at GDC. Some were made specifically for the occasion, but others were taken from games currently in development. One of these titles is Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, which has been chosen to showcase how good facial animations can look in the new engine.
The first Hellblade title already used advanced technology to capture facial expressions, but Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 takes that to the next level using Unreal Engine's Metahuman tool. With this cloud-hosted application, developers can build photorealistic digital humans as easily as using a character creator. Despite the simplicity of the method, the degree of realism and personalization is unparalleled compared to similar tools.
The short demonstration above gives us a glimpse of what we'll likely see in-game. The video conveys some impressive visuals and high-tier facial animations.
Despite the impressive showcase, we still don't know when we'll be able to try Ninja Theory's upcoming game. The game was announced in 2019, and since then, we've got a behind-the-scenes video and a few more short updates on the game's development, but nothing too specific. Hopefully, we'll hear more about it in one of Xbox's future showcase events.
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KitGuru says: Unreal Engine 5 is already powering the upcoming wave of next-gen titles. We expect developers will continue to find ways to push visual boundaries over the next few years.