The close-ups and expressiveness in HB 2 are extraordinary, and they have demonstrated a lot of nuanced animation in the pain and anguish and determination of fights (fights also have an intimate, narrowed camera that really finds these expressions.) I don't know if these are "dynamic" expressions or if they just have really good captures of pained looks to splice into fights and encounters, but it does a great job of having the character feel alive for pretty much every second of footage they show so far. (We'll see how well they keep it up, but so far so good.) DS2 by contrast has great cutscene exchanges, but it's bound to suffer from being open-world and not linearly confined, so when Norman Reedus jumps into the cockpit of a jeep and the camera gives you a front-on view of play, it looks like a game character robotically getting into a seated pose for vehicle control.
Lip flap animation in Death Stranding 2 is what really got me this time; it's flawless in portraying the actress's facial movement for each syllable. Ninja Theory has been on the forefront of facial capture technology but the only small bits of actual dialog we've seen in the
2023 troll encounter trailer and the
2024 developer showcase were slightly off still. (
NT has great technical demos of dialog, but I'm just going off of what's in the playable build.) I'm curious to see how each of these projects finish up, as both companies are on the bleeding edge of facial tech. (Kojima's "OD" project for Microsoft is experimenting with UE Metahumans, so the good competition will continue.
...Environments in Hellblade 2 have not yet captured me, except for the Troll Encounter trailer setting; the most recent Developer Spotlight video really had little of the scope or detail I had thought this game capable of outside of the confined fight sequences, almost as if you can see the rails of its level paths. No real vista shots or moments of majesty in that clip. However, the shots were not really geared for that, and they really didn't show a lot of traversal gameplay, so it's a limited viewpoint. The two Death Stranding 2 clips have indulged in huge vista shots (and show clear improvements or modifications over the already impressive Horizon FW environments using Decima) and so in a 'battle' of two games to be played almost entirely in outdoor environments, I have a better sense that Death Stranding 2 will wow me with its landscapes. (It's odd, Ninja Theory has put a lot of its promotion into talking about its excursions to Iceland, seeking to bottle that majesty for the game, but so far they've not shown much of those results in their game showcases.)
“cross-gen with low density and detail”
