With the Stellar Blade demo now already out ahead of its release on April 6, the game's developers, ShiftUp, are now doing their usual marketing rounds to hype the upcoming PlayStation 5 exclusive. In particular, a recent interview with Famitsu reveals a lot about the game.
As per @Genki_JPN on X, "the movement of things such as clothes and hair" in Stellar Blade are because of the "extensive functions of the PlayStation 5." But, that's not all. The game's director, Kim Hyung Tae, also joked that they had to delay Stellar Blade by at least a year because of hair.
Apparently, the developers thought about giving the game's protagonist, Eve, shorter hair but ultimately decided against it. Instead, players will have the option to choose a long or short ponytail for Eve, thanks to the efforts of the game's development.
While it may sound like a joke, hair is one of the hardest things to animate and render in a video game. Thousands of strands and follicles make up each strand of hair. This means that games have to calculate their constant movement in real-time and what happens when it gets wet, blown away by the win, or when there's too much light, and so on. Consistently getting every frame or movement of hair to make them look as realistic as Stellar Blade has shown is a momentous feat.