Ninja Theory’s ‘AAA Indie’ Hellblade Gets a New Trailer
Taking root in real world history, the PS4 and PC third-person adventure follows a Celtic warrior battling her own psychosis, having been left mentally scarred by a viking invasion.
From the trailer, it’s easy to mistake this as a big budget actioner developed by a hundred person team. In actuality, Ninja Theory has only 15 developers working on the game. The ideology behind production is one NT calls “Independent AAA” – in other words, a title made with all the freedoms an indie dev would enjoy except benefiting from AAA production values.
NT’s Chief Creative Director, Tameem Antoniades, explains, “Digital self-publishing means that we can offer a smaller, but high quality game at around half the price of retail games.” It’s essentially the Robert Rodriguez approach to filmmaking applied to the gaming arena. Rodriguez, if you’re unfamiliar, was once described as capable of making a $40 million movie look like a $100 million.