In today’s gaming landscape, it’s hard to imagine any genre without multiplayer elements, and pure single-player experiences are becoming increasingly extinct. With Stellar Blade, the Korean studio Shift Up wants to make all soloists happy. In an interview, the game director explained why he chose this path.
Stellar Blade is a classic hack-and-slay where you knock tons of monsters off the screen in extremely fast fights. The action is definitely reminiscent of genre greats like Bayonetta or Nier: Automata and accordingly there are no multiplayer elements. A bold step in 2024. There won’t even be microtransactions yet.
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But why does the development studio Shift Up rely on a purely solo experience? In a conversation with the Korean site Ruliweb, game director Hyung-Tae Kim went into the reasons in more detail. An important factor for him is diversity in the games industry.
He states: “Console titles and single-player games with an ending are very important in their own way.” For him, these have to coexist with other titles. He also sees a market for games that are not continuously fed with content over months and years, because there are enough live service games and not everyone has the time for them.
Kim’s statement that different platforms are important seems somewhat contradictory. Finally, Stellar Blade will appear exclusively on the PlayStation 5. But the next Shift Up title will appear as a classic multiplatform game.
You can see for yourself the studio’s debut from April 26, 2024, which is the day Stellar Blade will be released. There is also currently a demo in the PlayStation Store.
A demo for the hack-and-slay Stellar Blade will be released on March 29, 2024. In this video, the development studio SHIFT UP introduces you to the contents of the test version.
