Stellar Blade, which is exclusive to the PS5, is often praised by fans for its good combat. The developers now reveal in an interview why the combat has turned out so well.
What is so good about the combat? Players on Reddit particularly praise the depth of the combat system compared to other Soulslike games.
The bosses in Stellar Blade have good animations that players can really react to, instead of constantly counting what ability would happen next.
Players find the combat to be just the right difficulty level, neither too easy nor too hard. This may be largely due to one thing that the developers implemented while programming the game.
Here you can watch the trailer for Stellar Blade:
The developers held a speedrun competition
What did the developers do? To help all developers understand how the combat and the underlying combat system should work, they 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. This creepy monster was the target of an internal speedrun competition among the developers.
The devs took turns competing against each other in the boss fight. The goal was to defeat the boss first.
What is the purpose of the competition? Because all developers tried to defeat the boss first, they also gained a feel for the game. Instead of in a normal testing environment, the competition allowed the developers to see how regular players would feel when fighting the boss.
Through the competition, everyone developed a vision of how the combats in Stellar Blade should work and how 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 the combat system of Stellar Blade.”
The combat in Stellar Blade is one of the features that fans continuously highlight. However, Stellar Blade is not only well received by fans, the creator of NieR: Automata also finds Stellar Blade better than his own RPG, and that makes him envious.
