Breakdown
- Stellar Blade players noticed a delay in their inputs and the animations when parrying, dodging, and attacking.
- The director confirmed in an interview that they intentionally put in a 0.5s delay due to stylistic choices.
- Shift Up is monitoring player feedback and will adjust this delay if it hampers the gameplay experience for players.
In an interview with 4Gamer, the game's director clarified that Stellar Blade's input delay is an intentional design choice.
While many have praised Stellar Blade for its accessible implementation of FromSoftware's Dark Souls and Sekiro-like combat formula, others have noticed a strange delay during their gameplay.
Players notice this half-second delay when they press buttons, and there is a noticeable lag between the button press and the animation. This was especially noticeable to veterans of fighting games and games like Sekiro and Nier: Automata, which require precise frame-perfect actions.
In the interview, Kim Hyung-tae confirms the existence of this delay, "In Stellar Blade, there is about a 0.5 second lag between the moment you press the button and the moment the skill is visible on-screen."
However, he says that there is no input lag, as the skill is used immediately upon the button press. The only delay present is for the animation to play out.
He clarified the purpose of this adjustment to the game's responsiveness, “We made it so that the character’s movement does not get triggered immediately upon button press, as we felt this would not fit the game’s style of animation."
“It’s a time lag that can’t be reduced any further," he says in a translation from VGC. However, he also stated in the interview that they would monitor player feedback and make adjustments accordingly.
If the feedback shows that the delayed animations make the game feel worse to play or harder to learn, the studio will make appropriate changes in the future.
We've already seen them do this with the day one patch for Stellar Blade, where the patch notes on the official X account state that they adjusted “the input time for basic attacks, as well as the timing of blocking and parrying to be more responsive”.
Stellar Blade was released on April 26 and is currently only available on the PlayStation 5.
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