Stellar Blade’s Story Was Bad, And The Devs Know It

As I’ve expanded my appreciation for video game genres that I don’t typically play or enjoy – survival strategy games like , for instance – I’ve learned to properly recognise the satisfaction of playing a game with finely tuned mechanics. When a core gameplay loop just works, or the moment-to-moment action is perfectly🍃 smooth, it feels amazing.

I’ve also seen the high bar for storytelling that games of every genre are capable of reaching, and so it’s all the more disappointing when a game launches with a boring story yet great gameplay. It’s like I can see an alternate universe version of this mediocre game that’s not just good, but great, and♌ it’s disappointing 🀅to see that potential not being reached.

Eve from Stellar Blade next to Gwendolyn from Tides of Annihilation.

Tides O🅘f Annihilation Already Reminds Me Of The Worst Parts Of Stellar Blade

Once🍷 again, just having good combat isn't ꦺenough to make a game good.

Posts 4

Stellar Blade’s Storytelling Dragged It Down

That’s how I felt about . I didn’t love the gameplay at the time – I still don’t really care for Soulslike experiences, so the intricacy of its melee mechanics went a little over my head. I also absolutely hated the Uncharted-style platforming, which felt clunky and out of place at the꧅ best of times. But I still saw the kind of value it held for players who enjoy this sort of thing.

But beyond all of this, it was the story that put me off completely, leading me to abandon Eve’s adventure a mere few hours in. The plot itself felt like a tale we’ve heard told time and time again. A squad is sent to Earth to liberate it from a colonising force, they need to recover specific resources in order to do so, there’s an evil AI, yada yada. It’s rote sci-fi storytelling, but that in itself isn’t a bad thing. The hero’s journey ha🥃🐠s been reinterpreted over and over for centuries, but it’s how that retelling is executed that makes a difference.

Unfor💫tunately, Stellar Blade lacks narrative substance. There is very little weight behind its story and characters, and the hours that I played left me entirely uninspired. It’s always struck me as strange that a game that is so obviously stacked with lore and worldbuilding is so lacking in storytelling chops elsewhere, and it turns out the developers are well-aware of this flaw.

𝔍 Stellar Blade Crossing Over With Nier Automata👍 Has Broken My Brain

I ho🔯pe the upcoming collaboration is more than just predictable cosmetics.

Posts 1

Stellar Blade 2 Will Have A Better Narrative

In a recent interview, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:director Kim Hyung-tae said, “I think it is true that the story is weak. The game’s core play system was completely relatively early, but the thing that held us back the most was the cutscenes… In an action game that carries the narrative, cutscenes 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 cutscenes, but at first, we tried to make a lot of settings and cutscenes.”

Accordin🍒g to Kim, the weakness of Stellar Blade’s narrative was largely an issue of c൲ost. Cutscenes that would have served to flesh out the narrative and the wider world of Stellar Blade had to be cut just to ship the game.

There is an easy, snide joke here I could make about the coဣst of rendering immaculate bum cheeks in such great detail, and where that money could have gone instead, but I also empathise with Kim. He says that there just aren’t that many resources for narrative-centered games in Korea. I assume because so much of the country’s games ecosystem revolves around competitive esports and we are only now beginning to see how local developers are capable of producing strong triple-A single player experiences like 𓆉this.

A stronger narrative in the first game would easily have made up for the action in the game that I don’t typically gel with. , has a heavy reliance on parry mechanics that I’m usually averse to, but I still got hooked on it alongside everyone else – partly because of its tight turn-based gameplay, but also largely because of its excellent voice acting and compelling characters. If Stellar Blade 2 manages to pull off a story worth hanging around for, I could g🐓et hooked on it 🐷too.

It’s too late to add better stor💟ytelling to Stellar Blade now, ﷺbut Shift Up intends to put the oodles of money it earned into a sequel that does narrative better. It’s hard to say if the game would have been better with more cutscenes, since mediocre writing is mediocre writing, but maybe Stellar Blade 2 will have a bit more narrative heft behind it.