Ninja Theory has announced Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice VR Edition earlier today. It will be arriving on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on July 31, 2018. Players will be glad to learn that the VR Edition of the game will be free for existing owners of the game on Steam, which means that only the PC version of the game will receive the fully-immersive VR experience. That would make an already surreal experience even more otherworldly as players dive into the world crafted by the folks at Ninja Theory.
In the announcement video posted earlier today, commercial director Dominic Matthews said that a Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card is recommended to run Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice VR Edition. He also revealed that a VR version of the game has been in development since 2015. At first, the developers encountered a problem where the camera’s motion would cause players to feel nausea.
However, creative lead Tameem Antoniades explained that they tried another challenge was how to develop third person free roaming in VR. They finally decided to use the protagonist Senua as a frame of reference for movement, with head steering to control her changing directions or turning. The world will also rotate gently when turning in order to portray 360-degree movement.
Additionally, it took the VR development team a whopping two years to achieve a stable 90 frames per second in the game. That hard work also benefitted the normal version of the game, which ran better on lower spec PCs and consoles thanks to the optimization achieved by the VR development team.
It’s great for Ninja Theory to offer the VR Edition to anyone who owns or buys the game on Steam. However, the fact that it’s not releasing on the PlayStation VR may have something to do with either the PS4’s lower specs or the company’s acquisition by Microsoft Studios. In the meantime, check out the Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice VR Edition announcement video below.
