Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will be set in ninth-century Iceland, Antoniades said, and to properly capture that setting, Ninja Theory has sent its “art and audio teams out there doing photography, photogrammetry, and combining it with satellite data to recreate large swathes of the landscape.” Tameem Antoniades, “chief creative ninja” at Ninja Theory, said in a development update Thursday that the Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 team is currently “building a good chunky slice of the game before we then move into full production to build out the rest.”Īntoniades said that Ninja Theory “didn’t want to do a straight sequel - we wanted to do something extra special, and so we’re making our lives as difficult as possible in that pursuit.” Based on the belief that the Norsemen were known for sacrificing the leaders of the tribes they had conquered to their gods, the game's director and lead writer Tameem Antoniades decided to use this as the basis for Senua's quest and trauma, and to have her find everyone in her village killed by the Norsemen and her lover sacrificed to Norse gods via the blood eagle, a ritualized method of execution whose authenticity is actually debated among historians.Ninja Theory’s sequel to Hellblade : Senua’s Sacrifice didn’t make an appearance at Microsoft’s Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase at E3 2021 for what sounds like a very good reason: The game, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, appears to still be quite early in development, based on a new update from the developer. Towards the end of the 8th century, the first Vikings arrived in the lands of the Picts, more specifically the islands of Orkney, and replaced them as the main population of the land. Doing research to find the right angle for the character, the team realized that despite the Roman Empire being able to conquer nearly all of Europe, they were unable to conquer a group of Celts, known as the Picts, in the northern reaches of Great Britain.

Based on what is believed of the way Celtic warriors looked, Senua was given war paints, and braided hair clumped with lime. The main inspiration of Senua's character was the Iceni queen Boudica, while her name came from Senuna, a Celtic goddess long lost to historians but re-discovered in 2002, whose name was at first read incorrectly as Senua.

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