There’s been a bit of, oh let’s call it ‘debate’, among Stellar Blade enjoyers about whether the game’s revealing costumes were censored before release. Screenshots of several outfits for the game’s protagonist, Eve, did the rounds on Twitter, reportedly showing changes to some of her costumes to allow for a little extra modesty.
Dressing Eve up is one of the game’s more enjoyable pursuits, asking you to track down all the crafting materials required to make them and add them to her wardrobe. Because the game so squarely centres this aspect of its design, there are a lot of people looking for these outfits right now. Because of the demented, incredibly toxic online conversation around Stellar Blade, any discussion about censorship immediately devolved into feral screaming and pointing to supposedly incriminating screenshots like Phoenix Wright filing an objection. It quickly became difficult to know which of the costumes had actually changed and which were faked screenshots from bad-faith weirdos.
Noted From Software dataminer Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon on Twitter) is on the case, attempting to sort fact from fiction.
First up, McDonald looked at the Moutan Peony outfit. A post with screenshots of Eve wearing the outfit without black stockings had done the rounds, leading a number of vocal fans to suggest Stellar Blade developers had censored it. Not so, according to McDonald, who ensured the copy on his PS5 was a vanilla 1.000 install to confirm any changes made through subsequent patching.
“First of all, I can confirm that people saying this particular Stellar Blade dress was censored in a patch are 100% lying. It still had tights in v1.000, despite what some screenshots seem to show on Twitter. Proof here.”
The second outfit, the Holiday Rabbit bunny suit, on the other hand, did appear to have been altered.
“Yes, it was absolutely changed in patch 1.001 as others had shown in some fuzzy offscreen footage,” wrote McDonald. “Here’s some clean footage of the original design visible in 1.000 where it had no undergarments.” The outfit was updated in the game’s first patch to include a sports bra and boy shorts for a little added modesty. The original version, as you can see, left very little to the imagination. Some people are very upset about this for reasons that will be utterly perplexing to anyone who isn’t terminally online.
Those are the only two costumes McDonald has confirmed so far, but he’s also noted that costumes featured in previous trailers for the game remain unchanged in the current version. If you’d like to see for yourself, you can roll back your Stellar Blade install to 1.000 by uninstalling any current copy, disconnecting your PS5 from the internet, and reinstalling from any physical disc version. Every physical disc copy contains the 1.000 version. If you have a physical copy and install it while connected to the internet, your PS5 will roll the 1.002 version into the download.
Image: PlayStation, Kotaku Australia
Comments