Stellar Blade has emerged as a popular upcoming title on the PlayStation 5. It may be because it is one of the few exclusives releasing on the platform this year. It may also be because of Sony’s advertising support. And it may be because of its upfront fan service content.
But now fans have a reason to dislike Stellar Blade. As reported by Twisted Voxel, a YouTuber testing the Stellar Blade demo’s input lag found that it has a timeframe of 13.8 frames, or 230 ms of latency, in Performance mode.
Now, input lag is a popular topic among gamers, but it’s possible that not everyone has the same baseline of basic information they need to understand the discussion about it. So we’ll get into it a bit.
As explained by Wikipedia, video games are animated differently from animated movies, with new animation frames, or pictures, coming out after the calculations needed to make the frame are completed. Animated movies, of course, all have their animation frames completed in advance before you even get to see them.
The amount of frames a video game makes per second is the frame rate. On a 60 Hz monitor, one can see a maximum of 60 frames per second. If you do the match, the minimum possible input lag in thi situation, with 1 frame for every 60 FPS, is 16.67 ms.
This current generation of consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, were sold to gamers on the promise that they could run games on high resolutions, and at a 60 FPS framerate, at the same time. However, as we have seen, some titles that have released on both consoles for the past few years aren’t able to output at 60 FPS. Most of the time, gamers have had to choose between a high resolution image at 30 FPS, or a lower resolution image at or closer to 60 FPS.
In this regard, Stellar Blade developer ShiftUp is not that much different than other developers in this regard. But it’s not a good look for the studio, which was put in a position where they would debut a major PlayStation 5 title, with Sony’s direct support.
ShiftUp did make a tweet responding to this issue, saying:
“If you notice that your controls are slow to respond, we recommend turning on TV’s “Game Mode”. The response will be more immediate.”
But you can see from the responses to this tweet that many gamers aren’t satisfied with this response. In a way, this is the opposite of fan service. It does fans a disservice to put the onus on gamers to check their setup, when the lag looks like a huge detriment to playing the game itself, and setup changes aren’t enough to fix it for everyone.
While it looks like ShiftUp won’t have a lack of fans defending it, its fan service will not put it above criticism. Some fans are already comparing the lag to design decisions on FromSoftware’s games, but it remains to be seen if the title will compare favorably to those now highly esteemed titles.
We’ll see if ShiftUp fixes this issue sooner or later, or tries to defend this as a design decision, but they should be mindful as well that they are in the unique position of representing the Korean game industry, after Lies of P already proved its success, with promotional support from no less than PlayStation.
Stellar Blade is releasing exclusively on the PlayStation 5 on April 26, 2024.
