Stellar Blade’s story is ‘weak’ admits director but there’s a reason why

The director behind Stellar Blade has opened up about its shortcomings, as the action game tops three million sales worldwide.

Despite the controversy around the design of its lead protagonist, Stellar Blade was one of the best surprises of last year.

However, like other great action games in the same mould, à la Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, the story isn’t exactly its strong suit – even though there are dramatic cut scenes scattered throughout, attempting to make some sort of sense of it all.

Stellar Blade’s director and Shift Up CEO, Kim Hyung-tae, has discussed the game’s narrative during a new interview, where he openly admits that the story is ‘weak’.

Speaking in an interview with This Is Game, Hyung-tae was asked about the negative feedback levelled at Stellar Blade’s narrative.

‘I think it is true that the story is weak,’ Hyung-tae replied (via machine translation). ‘The game’s core play system was completed relatively early, but the thing that held us back the most was the cut scenes. In an action game that carries the narrative, cut scenes play a very important role in storytelling. It is difficult to convey the entire story with action alone.

‘That is why we have to carry the narrative through cut scenes, but at first, we tried to make a lot of settings and cut scenes.’

The director explained that planned cut scenes which provided more context on Stellar Blade’s world were pulled during development, due to high production costs.

‘In the early stages of development, we planned to include detailed settings such as the reason the main character changes clothes in the story,’ he added.

‘However, as production progressed, the cost of producing cutscenes became too much, and eventually, for the sake of efficiency, we had no choice but to reduce cut scenes that supplemented the world view or character narratives outside of the main plot.

‘That’s how we were barely able to complete the game. It’s also because the development manpower pool or system for narrative-centred games has not yet been fully established in Korea.’

The director hopes to present a ‘sufficiently rich narrative’ in the sequel, which is targeting a 2027 launch. Stellar Blade was originally going to receive story DLC, but as confirmed by Hyung-tae, these plans were rolled into the next game.

‘As we were preparing the DLC, the volume grew more than expected, so we changed direction and proceeded with the next work,’ he said. ‘However, there have been many changes since then.’

It’s not really the quantity of cut scenes that’s an issue though, but the quality, and ironically having to limit the number may have helped the game. So the idea of having more in the sequel is not necessarily something to be welcomed.

Stellar Blade launched on PC last week and has already proven to be a big hit on the platform, sitting in the top five of Steam’s most played games over the past 24 hours (via SteamDB).

Over the weekend, the game racked up a 24 hour concurrent peak player count of 192,078, which is far higher than Sony’s other published PC ports like God Of War Ragnarök (35,615) and Spider-Man (66,436) – although it’s popularity is likely driven by its popularity in Asia.

Recently, developer Shift Up announced Stellar Blade has surpassed three million units sold across PlayStation 5 and PC, with one million copies sold within three days on Steam alone.

The PC version opens the floodgates to fan mods, something which Hyung-tae encourages, although he’d prefer to see fan creations which change the gameplay in some way.

‘Since we don’t provide official modding tools, it’s hard to change the entire game, but we’re looking forward to seeing mods that slightly change the way you enjoy the game,’ he said.

‘Of course, mods like new costumes or monster visuals are cool, but I think it would be really welcome if there were mods that expand the user’s play experience itself.’

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