Stellar Blade developer asks players to “go easy” on the demo

Stellar Blade’s developer has asked players to “go easy” on the game’s demo, with some players racking up over 50 hours of playtime.

The demo for the forthcoming action game was released on 29th March with progress carrying over to the main game.

As such, some players have been mining the demo for experience to level up main character Eve before they get to the full game, due out on 26th April.

“We’re so grateful for your love of our game,” said Shift Up in a post on X. “To enjoy the main game properly though, please go easy on the demo. 50+ hours of demo play… we’re scared!”

According to Ampere Analysis, as reported by Game World Observer, the Stellar Blade demo peaked at 690,000 daily active users.

This is reportedly almost twice that of the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth demo, which peaked at 380,000 DAU.

It’s clear the Stellar Blade demo has proven incredibly popular, which bodes well for the full release – even if much of the discourse has revolved around the overtly sexualised lead character’s skin suit.

Director Kim Hyung Tae told Famitsu that Eve’s skin suit lacks defensive capabilities so will increase the game’s difficulty, though I’ve no doubt this won’t deter players.

In an interview on the PlayStation Blog, the director also discussed the game’s difficulty options. While the game is meant to be “challenging to a reasonable extent”, there are a number of difficulty options as well as Action Assist in the Story Mode.

Action Assist will slow the game down during boss fights to allow players to learn attack patterns and out manoeuvre enemies, with the UI displaying the right moment for parries and dodges.

I checked out the demo myself when it released and came away hugely impressed with its combat mechanics – a mix of NieR: Automata and Sekiro.

For more on Stellar Blade, Digital Foundry analysed the impressive tech behind the demo.