Best Stellar Blade Settings You Should Use Before Playing

From the reveal to the demo, Stellar Blade’s reception has been quite, well, “stellar.” Its quality character design, monster art style, combat mechanics, and … “the physics”, have put the game well on its way to reaching 1 million copies in 24 hours. Now, the demo didn’t have many settings for the players to tinker with. However, the full game just got released allowing me to trial and test different settings to bring you the best presets for each one. 

Summary Of All The Best Stellar Blade Settings

Difficulty Settings Or Gameplay Options

Difficulty: Normal Mode

There are various difficulty options in Stellar Blade to help tailor your gameplay experience according to your preference. There’s a Story Mode and Hard Mode difficulty options aside from Normal Mode. Hard Mode difficulty only unlocks after you’ve beaten the game once.

Hence, I recommend Normal Mode as it gives you a slight challenge and doesn’t bore you with an overpowered character defeating monsters easily. However, if you’re having trouble with Normal Mode, don’t hesitate to switch to Story Mode to get a better understanding of enemy attack patterns.

Action Assist: On

It is a nice feature that turns manual parrying and dodging into quick-time events. The combat for Stellar Blade is really fast-paced and not worrying about timing parrying and dodging right will help you focus more on landing combos. 

Hint: On

In the flurry of combat, you might lose your focus on where to progress or what action you need to perform next. It often happens with me too and random hint pop-ups really help me get back on track with the missions.

Show Tutorial: On

I’d recommend enabling tutorials during your first playthrough as there is more depth to Stellar Blade’s combat mechanics than I initially expected. Tutorials really help you get into the swing of things quicker.

However, if it’s your second playthrough, you can turn it off.

Show Records: On

There are Memory Sticks and Documents in Stellar Blade that contain vital lore of the game. If you’re not interested in lore items getting displayed instantly after you pick them up, you can choose to disable this option. Otherwise, enable it.

Auto-Loot Items: On

Chests in the game drop a lot of loot when you interact with them. Now, manually picking up each item by holding down the R2 button becomes quite a chore.

You can relieve yourself of this frustration by simply enabling auto-loot. It will automatically pick loot-able items in chests or the battlefield without hassle. 

Ponytail Length: Short

Why is this simple cosmetic change so important to keep short? Having the option for a long ponytail will simply cause hair clutter around your character. As your character moves and battles, the hair flying around the screen will become really distracting.

Display Settings

HDR: On

If you’ve got a display that supports HDR, I highly recommend that you turn this setting on. HDR really makes Stellar Blade’s visuals pop with brightness and contrast.

If you get an overly bright look by turning HDR On, I suggest tweaking your gamma and HDR brightness in the Display Settings section below.

Graphics Mode: Balanced

There are 3 distinct graphics modes available for Stellar Blade, Prioritize Performance, Balanced, and Prioritize Resolution. 

1. Prioritize Resolution: It looks amazing with crispy texture quality. However, you’ll get an average of 30-40 FPS in that mode. If visuals are your priority, this is the mode for you.
2. Balanced Mode: This is my favorite mode as it provides enough visual clarity for the game to look great while also keeping the performance rock solid.
3. Prioritize Performance: It does the opposite and lowers down visual fidelity to give you a locked 60 FPS experience in Stellar Blade. The game still looks great, even with reduced texture details. 

Motion Blur: Off

Motion Blur is a setting that I find distracting than aesthetically pleasing. It makes the game feel sluggish and even disrupts the visual clarity of the environment as you’re moving through it. However, you can leave it on if you like this effect.

Camera Shake: 5

There are players who get motion sickness from games. For them, I recommend turning this setting Off to avoid such an uncomfortable experience. However, Camera Shake adds a bit of action flair to the set pieces in Stellar Blade and 5 seems to be a figure to set this effect on. 

Control Options

Normal Sensitivity: 2

I would recommend making your camera movements a little faster by selecting 2 presets for both Vertical and Horizontal sensitivities. There are many moments when you’re surrounded on the battlefield and quick camera movements can be handy in quickly targeting another enemy while engaging one. 

However, this is sticky my personal preference, and default will work for most players just as well. 

Aim Sensitivity: Default

There’s no need to increase the Aim Sensitivity as the default preset works great for everyone. If you’re having trouble aiming, there are other settings below that I recommend tweaking instead.  

Flip Camera: Off

The Flip Camera option will invert the camera movement direction which can be disorienting. Best leave it at off. 

Camera Auto Rotation: Off

Camera Auto Rotation is one of the most annoying settings I’ve tested; it’s like being sent back to the PSP era where you had one analog stick. The camera snaps to your character’s back and moves in the direction your character is facing. 

Once you disable this feature, you’ll unlock free-flow camera movement. 

Adaptive Triggers: Off

While fighting off hoards of enemies, the adaptive triggers put a lot of strain on my fingers. I enjoy adaptive triggers in other PS5 games, but in Stellar Blade, it just makes my hands uncomfortable throughout the whole playthrough. 

Vibration: Off

Similar to Adaptive Triggers, there are several events in Stellar Blade that’s tied to your Dualsense controller. It becomes more of a nuisance when your hand keeps vibrating, even during intense cutscenes which are meant to relax your hands after combat.  

Ranged Aim Correction: 8

Ranged combat (i.e. aiming) can become tedious while slashing through enemies. Sometimes, it gets harder to shoot vital points at enemies as you can’t properly aim during all the action. Aim Correction is basically an aim assist that guides your aim to designated targets easily.

The 8 preset is a great selection as 10 became too much artificial i.e. introduced aim-snapping for me. 

Auto Lock-on When Attacking: Off

I’d like to freely target enemies on a battlefield rather than my aim auto-locking to the one nearest to me. However, it’s strickly personal preference and you might benefit from this feature more than I did. 

Bonus: How To Change To Korean Voice Actors

As you may know, the English dub for Stellar Blade is good, but it lacks the emotional impact in the tone compared to the original Korean voices. Me personally, alongside other players in the community prefer playing Stellar Blade with Korean voices and English subs for the most immersive experience. 

Here’s how you can change Stellar Blade voice actors to Korean:

1. Head Into the Settings > Go to Subtitles, Language tab.
2. Go to Voice Language > Change it to Korean.
3. Head over to Text Language > Keep it in English.

After you’re done, exit the settings and start up the game. If you haven’t tried hearing Korean voices, there’s a good chance you’ll be amazed at how better they sound compared to English. You can revert it back to English quite easily if you don’t like the change. 

Ending Thoughts On Stellar Blade Settings

Stellar Blade is a fun game that runs quite well on a PS5 due to its good optimization, even if you choose the resolution mode. I was fortunate enough to not face any issues like bugs or glitches while running the game. The amount of settings Stellar Blade offers to customize your gameplay experience is amazing. The game is fun as it is, but adjusting a few settings here and there will make your experience even better.