《Phantom Blade Zero》总监 Soulframe Liang 谈用童年木剑通关切磋功夫哲学

From traditional Chinese wuxia to the clockwork machinations of steampunk technology, Phantom Blade Zero fuses the two to create something new: Kung Fu Punk. In addition to our new hands-on with the opening hours of Phantom Blade Zero on PC, we also had the pleasure of fielding some questions to S-Game's CEO and Founder, Soulframe Liang, as part of a larger group interview. You can find it transcribed in its entirety below; as a reminder, Phantom Blade Zero is out on October 29 for PC and PlayStation 5, so look forward to our full review in the next few weeks.

With so many weapons in the game, how did you make each one feel unique and balanced? Do you expect players to master just a few or keep switching between them?

Soulframe Liang: We’ve designed 30 different weapons, and we put our heart into each one. We want everyone to experience as many different weapons as possible, but we don’t limit how you play. You can play from start to finish with just one weapon.

We also have a challenge weapon: the wooden sword from childhood. Theoretically, you can use that to finish the game. That reflects a philosophy in Chinese kung fu: when you develop your skill to the extreme, you no longer need great weapons. You just need wood to beat everyone. We hope you enjoy as many different weapons and combat styles as possible. Many are completely different, not only in movement but also in mechanics.

By the way, did any of you use the drunken blades from the second level? It’s a different weapon, with a different range. You make yourself drunk, and the swords start flying. The more drunk you are, the more powerful you become.

We have many things like that. We want you to experience more, but it’s hard to balance them. Fortunately, we aren’t making a PvP or multiplayer game. We want to create different kinds of excitement for everyone. As long as you feel the charm of the different weapons, I think we’ve accomplished most of our task.

More important than balancing, we want to create different locks, with different weapons serving as the keys. As you progress, you’ll encounter different difficulties and mechanics. Each mechanic requires a different countermechanic to resolve the problem.

A simple example is that when you get the axe, you encounter enemies with shields, and you can break those shields with the axe. But it isn’t necessary, as you can still use other ways to break them. There will be other mechanics that call for different keys to resolve different problems. Everything is about having fun and keeping the experience fresh.

Phantom Blade Zero is a huge step up in scale for S-GAME. What was the biggest challenge in transitioning to a full-scale AAA console game, and how did the project evolve along the way?

Soulframe Liang: Previously, we only made mobile games. This is our first large-scale, three-dimensional AAA game with Unreal Engine 5. All of this is new to us. But I’ve developed this IP for over 20 years, since I was a student. I’ve been writing the stories and creating the world since then. The IP and world have existed for 20 years, but the scale is different.

Another factor is that China doesn’t have many experienced developers in this kind of game. We have to build everything from the ground up. Fortunately, we have rich development resources in China. Many outsourcing studios do animation, 3D modelling and concept art. They’ve been doing that for 20 years for Western or Japanese studios, so they’re skilled. What they need is domestic studios making games with our own culture. We’re supported by those production resources, and we feel lucky about that.

If you ask what’s difficult, I’d say everything. Everything is new, and we have to build it from the ground up. We also have to innovate in a new way to accomplish what we want. We often work with very young developers. We recruit people directly from school, including indie developers with no experience on projects of this scale. Then we hand them something important, like the final boss or the opening, and say, “That’s yours.” We’ve done that many times, and I think that’s the spirit.

People ask whether Phantom Blade Zero is an indie game. In terms of scale, I wouldn’t say so: it’s large-scale and, to some extent, large-budget. But in terms of spirit, I would say it’s an indie game. We keep a fresh spirit when making games. We try to approach something new and extreme, and we aren’t afraid to go beyond the boundaries. That’s important to making the game a reality.

Phantom Blade Zero is deeply rooted in Chinese culture but built for a global audience. How did you preserve that cultural identity while making the game accessible to players around the world?

Soulframe Liang: Did any of you have difficulty understanding the story? I think it’s quite accessible and straightforward. Phantom Blade Zero is an original IP. Its world is completely original, imagined first by me and then by our team. It’s our own story, with Chinese cultural elements. The story is straightforward: an elite assassin is hunted by his organisation. It’s like John Wick—John Wick with Donnie Yen. I don’t think it’s hard to understand.

We want the game to be heavily based on Chinese culture and kung fu. We’re proud of our culture and want to express its authenticity. But we don’t want the culture itself to become an obstacle to understanding the game. It should make the game better, add flavor and make it feel fresh, rather than confusing or difficult to understand.

That isn’t easy. We try to keep the story and emotions universal: friendship, love, revenge and hatred. Those emotions can be felt and understood through human nature. On the surface, we try to maintain authenticity in the movements, weapons and landscapes, showing the beauty of Chinese landscapes and culture. We want a good combination of those elements with the story and emotions.

There are also deeper cultural expressions at a philosophical level, like Bruce Lee’s ideas about water and the moon in the water. We have things rooted in Chinese philosophy and culture, but understanding those isn’t necessary. If you understand and feel them, we’ll be proud and happy. We want to express something deeply rooted in our culture, but that comes after the universal experience. The surface has visual and cultural elements. At the core, some parts are based on Chinese philosophy, but most are universal. That’s how we approach the combination.

The combat looks highly cinematic and choreographed. How did you translate real martial arts into gameplay while keeping the player fully in control and maintaining that?

Soulframe Liang: That’s what we’ve struggled with over these years. We want to create something different from what we’ve seen before: a playable kung fu movie. But we don’t have enough references for how to do that, so we have to explore and build everything from the ground up.

We study classic movies and learn from Donnie Yen, kung fu masters, and traditional kung fu schools. Most of that experience comes from cinema, where the movements form smooth, continuous sequences. To make a game, everything has to be playable. We have to reorganize those movements, break them into segments, design the mechanics, and consider how the mechanics can work with that fluidity. We also add effects to the movements, like the flowers on the Flower Bride’s huge blade.

We have a core kung fu team handling this. They absorb experience from outside, from Donnie Yen and others. I see our in-house team as a processor or translator: they translate cinematic language into game language. They design every pause, every stop-and-start frame, and different ways to connect segments of movement. They try to make every possible connection as smooth as possible.

Phantom Blade Zero is often compared with Soulslikes, Sekiro, or Devil May Cry. How do you define the game, and what were its biggest influences?

Soulframe Liang: I’ve talked with some of you, and many of you were surprised by how the game actually plays. Previously, we only showed the tip of the iceberg: mostly combat in our trailers and vertical-slice demos. People could easily think it was a hack-and-slash game where you fight one group of enemies, then move linearly to the next group. But when you play, it’s clearly not like that. It has substantial story, exploration and hidden-secret elements.

I’d define it as a mixed or hybrid genre. We extract the essence of different genres, reduce their complexity and combine them. If it’s a pyramid, the base is the RPG system: side quests, the map and clear guidance through icons. But we don’t fill the map with tons of icons; we only mark important ones to keep it simple, clear and straightforward.

It’s still an RPG system. You talk to someone and get a clue about a secret in the world. That’s exploration. In the middle is complicated level design, borrowing aspects from Souls games. But the whole game clearly isn’t a Souls game.

At the tip is fast-paced, combo-driven combat from hack-and-slash games, but the whole game is more than that. We borrow the essence of different types of games and make something new. I think it’s easy to understand: the game is about story and exploration, and when you encounter bosses, it becomes fast-paced and exciting. Everything is integrated naturally into Phantom Blade Zero. Using existing genres, I wouldn’t call it a Souls game, a hack-and-slash game or an open-world RPG. Maybe it’s an adventure game.

What is your philosophy behind the difficulty options, and how does the game change at higher difficulties beyond simply increasing enemy health or damage?

Soulframe Liang: This follows on from the previous question. Souls games have one difficulty, and everyone has to beat the boss at that difficulty.

One factor for us was the Chinese domestic market. Many of our players have moved over from mobile games and don’t have enough experience with high-difficulty games. We had to make it accessible to Chinese players first.

Then we realized players around the world need this too. Many people are interested in kung fu culture. They love the excitement of the movements, the coolness of the blades and the clash of skills, but only some are interested in very high-difficulty games.

We decided to offer different difficulty options. We don’t want to miss players who are excited by this subject and aesthetic but don’t have enough experience with this kind of game. We want to fulfill their needs too. Difficulty options also let us explore something more challenging than an average Souls game, like our 66 Days mode. It’s very hard and limits your retries to 66. I think many of you have already used 20 retries in today’s playthrough, and that’s only Chapters One and Two. It’s very challenging.

Difficulty options let us fulfill the needs of lighter players while giving YouTubers, streamers, and experienced players something else to challenge themselves with. We don’t just change the stats. We change the AI and enemy behavior trees. At higher difficulties, enemies are more active and have more skills, including more dangerous ones.

Did any of you fight the Flower Bride on Hellwalker difficulty? That’s hard, even for some of our in-house designers. At higher difficulty, she attacks more actively. The white flower becomes three white flowers attacking from different directions, requiring completely different strategies. The challenge isn’t just one more powerful flower. The whole behavior changes.

There are many examples like this in later bosses. We want to provide fresh replayability and challenges for skilled players, and new fun for everyone. Of course, that requires a lot of extra work. Sometimes we spend a long time making high-difficulty combat that many players will never experience. But as long as someone is excited by it and enjoys it, I think the work is worthwhile.

You coined the term “kung fu punk” for Phantom Blade Zero. What does it mean to you, and what rules define whether something belongs in this world?

Soulframe Liang: This is about our style, lore and world. It’s an original world we created ourselves. As we bring it to a global audience, we see an opportunity not only to create a world but also a new concept or category of style. Our ultimate goal is to make “kung fu punk” a universally recognized idea, like cyberpunk or steampunk.

Kung fu is something we’re proud of. It comes from our culture and is a way of paying tribute to tradition. But we add new elements, excitement and fantasy to make it part of modern, universal pop culture. Bruce Lee did something similar many years ago. He brought kung fu to Hollywood and made it a global culture. Although it’s based on Chinese culture, it’s no longer only Chinese. It inspires people around the world, including through ideas like being like water.

In the gaming industry, we want to borrow that spirit and add elements that influence us: Hollywood, Japanese manga and anime, kung fu and wuxia culture. We mix them into something creative and new, but coherent.

It’s a fantasy world. There are hollowed faces, machine towers with red strings, and bells with red strings connected to your body as guidance. Those iconic elements create a coherent aesthetic and world system that we call kung fu punk. The fantasy is fresh, but it isn’t as obvious as a dragon flying through the air, ghosts, skeletons or necromancers. It’s subtle, grounded in our culture and follows its own logic. Through our continued work (not just Phantom Blade Zero, but perhaps future works as well), we hope to make kung fu punk a term everyone recognizes.

WCCFTECH: Are there any specific PlayStation 5 Pro enhancements in the works for Phantom Blade Zero?

Soulframe Liang: Of course. We have PlayStation 5 Pro enhancements, including lighting and ray tracing, as well as high-quality modelling for characters and landscapes and subtle lighting. We’ll detail those features on the PlayStation Store in the future. I think some features were already shown at the very end of the State of Play.

What’s your initial core element when designing a boss? Where do you start?

Soulframe Liang: I can start anywhere. Sometimes I might look at a flower, and that becomes the starting point. It could be a prop, an emotion or a piece of music. Ultimately, a boss is a way to tell a story and give you an experience. Several elements come together: a weapon, a story, a look and music.

We treat each boss fight like a show you might see on Broadway or in Las Vegas. There’s music, set design, the scene, how the boss enters the stage and how you fight. Everything combines to make an epic boss fight. We might start by studying an authentic weapon and its prototype. Then we consider the boss’s character and put that character into the weapon, making appropriate twists and expanding it to make the boss feel cool.

When you beat the boss, you get the weapon. You can extend the boss’s spirit into your own fights. A boss is a show made from many elements, and that spirit can continue through your own combat.

Is New Game Plus in the game? What changes compared with the original playthrough?

Soulframe Liang: We want the game to be accessible to as many players as possible, so we don’t want a clear hierarchy that separates content between difficulties and New Game Plus.

Most players can get their platinum trophy in one run, on any difficulty, as long as they spend enough time exploring, fighting and learning the mechanics. New Game Plus and new difficulty modes are about personal satisfaction and the excitement of different weapons.

Although there’s no new content revealed in New Game Plus, there are new experiences. We have many weapons, including ones you receive late in the game from powerful bosses or final bosses. Building those weapons also requires extra work.

Soulframe Liang: If you only play once, you don’t have enough room to use them. A final-boss weapon effectively becomes a collectible because you don’t have a chance to use it.

At least the last 10 weapons can create a new experience in New Game Plus or 66 Days mode. It’s a bonus: you can use powerful weapons against early bosses in your second run and unlock a different experience. That’s the balance. We don’t lock new content behind New Game Plus, but we leave new experiences, weapon uses and excitement for experienced players to explore in New Game Plus and 66 Days.

How long is the game? I played six hours and feel like I hardly played anything.

Soulframe Liang: I think a full walkthrough will take around 25 to 30 hours for an experienced player who doesn’t get stuck on bosses. I can’t predict how much time you’ll spend. But every minute and second you spend should be fun and exciting. The important thing isn’t the length; it’s the density of the experience. We don’t want you to repeat things, grind for resources or walk meaninglessly through empty maps. Those are things we want to avoid.

You can see that the side quests are about kung fu. They aren’t about unblocking a toilet or finding a cat for an old granny. Every side quest enriches the world and makes you feel like a hero, a badass swordsman. As long as you feel that density and that every minute is worth playing, that’s what we’re looking for. The length depends on how long you get stuck on different bosses.

Even if you get stuck, it isn’t like an average Souls game. This is an RPG: you can change your build, weapon set or accessories, and that may make the boss much easier. You don’t need to retry 100 times with the same build.

At Summer Game Fest 2024, Phantom Blade Zero was the last game shown. How did the negotiations to be part of the show work, and how important was that appearance? Now that the game is almost here, two years later, how do you look back on that moment and its importance to development?

Soulframe Liang: That’s a good question to wrap up with. Looking back, we feel moved and lucky. We feel the love from the community and all of you. I remember the PlayStation Showcase in 2023 and Summer Game Fest in 2024, when we first showed our demo. We weren’t known by anyone in the industry or by players.

Now millions of players are looking forward to our game. We have over three million wishlists, I think. I’m not sure that figure is correct, but I think it’s three million. It’s been an incredible three-year journey. The most important thing is to keep growing and evolving. Every time we bring out something new, like a trailer or demo, we have to make sure we’re proud of what we present to the community. If we’re proud of it, I believe it will excite you too.

Summer Game Fest may have been the first time we met some of you. I remember there were only three bosses, without exploration. We fought those three bosses in sequence. Some of you said that making 12 bosses like that would be enough for a complete game. Today, we’ve made far more. We want to share our excitement about kung fu. We want to show you our kung fu punk style, motion capture and teams, including young developers who graduated from school and were suddenly given these tasks.

They have things to show you, too. It isn’t only me: our whole team wants to share its excitement and passion through the game. Most importantly, I hope you can feel our team, our heart, and our passion for gaming through the game. That’s why we make it.

That’s why I chose to become a game developer 20 years ago, when I was a college student. That spirit continues for our team and me. Thank you very much for today and for the future.

Thank you for your time.

About the author: Kai joined the gaming team of Wccftech in 2016 and has since penned over a hundred reviews and interview pieces, covering a bit of everything from one-man indie gems to AAA masterpieces and whatever lies in between. Over the recent months, Kai has expanded into preview and interview coverage of not only the gaming side of the industry but also tech and consumer electronics.

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