I’ve been hearing a lot of hype around Stellar Blade - that is when fans haven’t been lamenting the sequel’s awful AI music video the creators decided was a good idea.
I’d heard it was Bayonetta meets Dark Souls, with flashy, acrobatic movement, and carefully considered combat with tight timings. And considering it’s coming to Switch 2 and utilising new technology for the platform in the form of FSR frame generation, I thought we were going to be in for a grand old time.
So when the demo dropped, I immediately took in that information and downloaded it...a day later. And my time with it was…disappointing.
The game tells you early on to hit the block button just before an attack lands in order to parry. So far so Soulslike, but I wasn’t able to get one down at all. It turns out that you don’t hit the block button just before an attack hits, because of input lag.
I wondered if this was exclusive to the Switch 2 version, but nope, the director Kim Hyung-tae confirmed that this input lag was apparently deliberate, and all because it wouldn’t fit the animation otherwise. Sakurai would have a field day.
But the thing is, it’s not just the parrying that is tied to this, nor just the character actions, but everything, including camera movements. The whole game feels extremely heavy and unresponsive for the style of gameplay it’s trying to achieve.
Some of this might be exclusive to the Switch 2 port, because of that FSR frame generation I mentioned previously. The game is (under the bonnet) still technically running at 30fps, so the response time is at best 33ms, rather than the 16ms you’d get at 60fps. You know when you’re playing on a TV at a friend’s house and they haven’t properly engaged game mode? That’s what playing Stellar Blade feels like, even on a lightning-fast monitor.
It’s bloody disappointing, because I was quite curious to see how frame generation would work on the Switch 2, but this added latency (assuming it is the fault of the generated frames) just isn’t worth it. Capcom's Dragon’s Dogma 2 is going to use it as well, though, so I’ll reserve judgement for the time being.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.nintendolife.com/features/opinion-i-think-im-missing-something-about-stellar-blade-on-switch-2
