'Stellar Blade' (Image: Shift Up)
In April 2024, Shift Up Corporation released Stellar Blade, its new third-person action-adventure game, on PlayStation 5. Due to its immense popularity, selling over one million copies only two months after its release, the game has been updated to be playable on PC.
The PC demo was released on May 30, 2025, and the official game mode is scheduled to launch on Steam on June 11.
New Mods
Following the release of the anticipated demo, several mods for the game have been released. Currently, 53 are available, and the most popular ones are NSFW. These top mods give players the ability to play with a nude Eve.
These nude game mods aren’t unusual; the official Stellar Blade X account reposted an explicit fan art of Eve until recently removing it from its feed. Whether or not this repost was intentional is unknown.
Tailoring To A Male Audience
Along with Stellar Blade, various other games, commonly fighting/action-oriented ones, lean into the hyper-sexualization of their female characters. In 2016, Teresa Lynch, a media communications researcher at Indiana University, conducted an analysis of female characters in video games.
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In this study, Lynch compiled 571 playable female characters from 1989 to 2014 and examined them for signs of hyper-sexualization. These themes were prominent during an uprising in the gaming world in the 1980s-1990s. A time when female game developers only made up 3% of the workforce, and female characters were featured primarily as side roles.
The “Lara Phenomenon”
Following the release of Tomb Raider in 1996 and the creation of Lara Croft, female protagonists have become the norm. Her redesign in 2014 strays away from emphasizing her body lines and contributes to the progression of women’s representation.
Opinions
There are many explicit fan arts and mods of female video game characters, simply because that’s what gamers want.
In a subreddit called r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, a user uploaded a post regarding video games’ sexualization of women.
The original poster commented, “These games sexualize female characters because they’re meant to appeal to men. The targeted audience for these games is men; the majority of players of these games are men. It’s ok for something to be designed to appeal to men!”
Regardless of your opinions on the nude mods, stay tuned for the PC release of Stellar Blade on June 11, 2025!
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