Stellar Blade, which is exclusive to the PS5, is often praised by fans for its good combat. Now the developers reveal in an interview why the fights turned out so well.
What’s so good about the fights? Players on Reddit particularly praise the depth of the combat system compared to other Soulslike games.
The bosses in Stellar Blade would have good animations that you could actually react to instead of always counting what ability would happen next.
The players find the fights just right in terms of difficulty, neither too easy nor too difficult. This may be mainly due to one thing that the developers implemented when programming the game.
You can see the trailer for Stellar Blade here:
Stellar Blade, the action-adventure on the PS5 starts demo
More videos
Autoplay
The developers held a speedrun competition
What did the developers do? In order for all developers to understand how the battles and the battle system behind them should work, the developers did what most players often demand: They played their own game.
But it didn’t stop there. Early in Stellar Blade, players encounter the boss Abaddon. The scary monster was the target of an internal speedrun competition for the developers.
The devs took turns playing the battle against the boss in competition with each other. The goal was to defeat the boss first.
What is the competition supposed to achieve? Because all the developers tried to kill the boss first, they got a feel for the game afterwards. Instead of a normal test environment, the developers were able to compete and see how normal players would feel when fighting the boss.
Through the competition, everyone developed an idea of how the combat in Stellar Blade should work and what the combat system should be. In an interview on YouTube, developer Hyung Min Lee says: “[…] From that moment on, we all understood how to design Stellar Blade’s combat system.”
Stellar Blade’s combat is one of the features that fans consistently point out. Not only is Stellar Blade well received by the fans, the inventor of NieR: Automata also thinks Stellar Blade is better than his own RPG and that makes him jealous.