As Stellar Blade tops 3 million sales worldwide, director Hyung-tae Kim has revealed the sequel, which has already been confirmed, will have a “serious” story.
In an interview with This Is Game, via Genki, Kim admitted that the team had developed a deeper story for Eve and co., but the cost of cutscenes became too high, resulting in them having to skip a lot of the cinematics — and therefore the story itself — to get the game over the finish line. That’s why we’re left with so many questions about Eve’s world, including an official explanation as to why she requires a costume change so often.
While it seems Shift Up considered retrospectively adding in cutscenes to better explain the story, Kim was concerned that may “clash” with what players know and understand of the game thus far. Consequently, it looks like we can expect a “sufficiently rich narrative” when it comes to the sequel.
We probably shouldn’t expect a follow-up anytime soon, however; right now, the whole team is reportedly dedicated to the PC port. Kim did say Shift Up would “do our best” to get it out by 2027, though.
The PC version of Stellar Blade only launched on June 11, but it’s already Sony’s biggest single-player Steam launch ever. Right now, the concurrent player peak is over 192,000. By comparison, Ghost of Tsushima topped out at 77,154 players, God of War peaked at 73,529, and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered sports a peak of 66,436 players. In fact, the only Sony-published game to have a higher concurrent record than Stellar Blade is Helldivers 2, which is, of course, a multiplayer game.
IGN’s Stellar Blade review returned a 7/10. We said: “Stellar Blade is great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre.”
PC-specific features include AI upscaling via Nvidia DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 3, an unlocked framerate, Japanese and Chinese voiceover, ultrawide display support, higher resolution environment textures, and DualSense support for haptic feedback and trigger effects.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
