Stellar Blade's PC debut surpasses 99K concurrent players and 1,000 user reviews on Steam, earning an Overwhelmingly Positive rating and setting a new PlayStation record.
While I agree that Denuvo is bad, some of the information on that site is just plain wrong.
For example, it says Denuvo doesn’t work on Linux and macOS through wine which is just plain wrong. It works perfectly fine as long as you don’t keep changing wine versions or you will run out of activations for 24 hours.
Your account being disabled if you have a problem with payment methods also needs a giant [citation needed] next to it. Has this ever actually happened or is this made up?
BG3 and Cyberpunk have boobs and were a success, which would support that statement. But Wukong, Palword, and Monster Hunter Wilds were even more successful (according to concurrent Steam players), which means animals are the true secret to success.
Well, the fan service is a factor for sure... (Seriously, I find the discussion quite hypocritical: Sex sells, most actors/singers are quite good looking and most block buster movies have a cast of sexy/good locking people displaying status symbols. That is not even mentioning product placing and other shit going on in popular movies/TV shows.)
A PS 5 original which is optimized well enough to run on the Steam Deck and some potatoes smoothly
Responsive controls
Great enemy design which telegraph their intentions clearly
No in game purchases or other dark monetization schemes
A complete game which seems mostly bug free (from what I heard so far)
Shift Up Corporation seems like a company of gamer which create the games they want to play themselves
Stellar Blade and Shift Up Corporation fully deserve a great start, and I happily payed the full price of admission w/o feeling bad about it.
Shift Up already had a great start lol, they printed money off the gacha games Destiny Child and Nikke. The Nikke fans who already owned Stellar Blade are currently pissed at them because the ones that already had it on PS5 got told if they wanted the collab bonuses they'd have to buy the game again.
I'm not sure why they're surprised, ShiftUp is the kind of company that sells $60 gooner skins. It's honestly amazing to me that Stellar Blade has all the content it does without spamming out micro transactions.
I remember when I first saw an ad for this game and thought it looked neat, added it to my wishlist and everything. I looked it up a few weeks/months later and all I saw were gooner posts, or articles about how she's saving games with her jiggle physics. I removed it simply because I didn't want to be involved with that community. It was so gross. 🤢
I had the same reaction to it, but ended up buying it after looking into some gameplay. I’m glad I did because there’s a really enjoyable game outside of the “sex appeal.” Combat is good and fun, there’s an interesting story there too. My only major complaint is that about 2/3 or 3/4 through the game it turns into a boss rush, and almost feels like the devs ran out of time or budget so cut some story.
As for the community, it’s easy to get around that by just not taking part. I’ve avoided it for the same reasons you’re not wanting to play. It’s a shame there too because I imagine there’s well meaning people who truly love what the game has to offer outside of fan service, and would love to discuss lore, etc.
One bit that’s nice about being a gooner game is, there’s enough outfit options you can just pick something “cute” and tasteful, and then just play the game. So while many people are ogling, people that are not as interested can just play the game.
EDIT: Adding onto this, though I consider myself a gooner I actually had the opposite reaction to Nier Automata, the game’s carbon copy. I didn’t quite like the bare-ass-thong look of 2B, and it felt like it was consistently distracting enough to make the game’s emotional moments feel silly. At the least, if I put SB’s “Eve” in a denim skirt, that’s my own choice.