Stellar Blade has gotten its first major patch which adds some significant new challenging content and ends what was one of its most bizarre controversies at launch. Here’s what’s been added:
Boss Rush Mode: This is a new challenge where players are tasked with fighting all the game’s bosses in different settings as a new pursuit. This challenge rewards, what else, a brand new outfit in the game, the Neurolink set seen below:
Quality of Life: They’ve added a few things like auto-lock-on when exiting ranged mode, an option to show the compass in the HUD, and they’ve increased the time limit for puzzles. There are also some balance and control improvements, but I’m not sure we know all the specifics yet.
Kunoichi Outfits: These are two new outfits that the game says can be obtained at Adam’s Safehouse, but I just got a prompt they were auto-added to my inventory when I logged in. You do not have to buy the patterns or pay to craft them. They’re very good! (one is the lead image up there, the other is a grey variant).
“Uncensored” Outfits: Here we go. After months of complaints that Stellar Blade had been “censored,” presumably at Sony’s behalf, in regard to two of Eve’s outfits in particular, well, they’ve ended that dispute.
SHIFT UP maintained that the on-disc outfits were not the “intended” final outcome for those outfits, so the tiny amounts of extra fabric added were added out of censorship concerns, it was just a design choice (there are plenty of even more revealing outfits in the game).
That did not satisfying a particular crowd who maintained this was purposeful censorship, something they believe was demanded by Sony for release, despite there being no evidence that this was the case. This resulted in a #FreeStellarBlade social media campaign mostly focused on the outfits.
Now, Stellar Blade has released two outfits that are not patching or changing the old outfits which still look the same, but they are variants with the “censored” bits removed. Aka, they are very revealing in the pelvis and chest regions, as apparently nature intended. Essentially everyone who was upset about this is considering it a win, though some are still saying “uncensor the original outfits!” like that even matters anymore with the release of these. You pick these up from Roxanne, the black market dealer. They cost 10 Vitcoin each and must be crafted. Still, easy to acquire.
I said when this was all unfolding that I figured SHIFT UP would eventually do something like this, either changing the original outfits or doing what they’re doing here. They are a company that is absolutely forthright about their intention to make sexy characters, and demands that outfits weren’t sexy enough in a game full of extremely sexy outfits was probably always going to lead them to go “okay sure whatever, here are sexier versions,” so here we are.
The bad part of this is that the “culture war” folks here have been rewarded for their frankly ridiculous campaign lambasting this game, the developers, Sony, everyone for the original outfit changes as some sort of conspiracy which did not exist. The outfits themselves are fine (again, there are a dozen outfits at least this revealing in the game), but this being a “reward” for this group and their behavior is not a great look.
Anyway, the big thing is the boss rush mode, and that sounds like a fun thing to go and try now that I’ve maxed out Eve in every other way.
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