Only Five Single-Player RPGs Beat Phantom Blade Zero’s Steam Launch

Phantom Blade Zero peaked at 723,876 concurrent Steam players on October 29, its launch day. Only five single-player RPGs have drawn bigger crowds on Valve’s store. Still, PC performance remains the main complaint, so S-GAME shipped a 5 GB day-one patch to tackle it.

Phantom Blade Zero Climbs Steam’s All-Time Charts

The count passed 431,000 within three hours of the unlock. It then kept rising until it peaked at 14:00 UTC, as KeenGamer’s SteamDB breakdown shows. That figure covers Steam alone, since the game also launched on PS5 and the Epic Games Store.

Among single-player RPGs, SteamDB figures now place it behind only these five:

Black Myth: Wukong: 2,415,714 players, the record for the genre.
Cyberpunk 2077: 1,054,388 players.
Elden Ring: 953,426 players.
Hogwarts Legacy: 879,308 players.
Baldur’s Gate 3: About 875,000 players, roughly 151,000 above S-GAME’s debut.

Sales look strong as well. Alinea Analytics estimated 850,000 copies across Steam and PS5 before launch. Counting China’s WeGame store, analyst Rhys Elliott believes the total is well past one million.

Critics Love the Swordplay, Players Split by Language

Critics mostly praise the combat, the boss fights and the long weapon list. IGN, Push Square and TheSixthAxis each gave it 9 out of 10, according to Notebookcheck’s review roundup. It now sits at 88 on Metacritic and about 90 on OpenCritic.

Not every verdict was glowing, though. Eurogamer stands out with a 6 out of 10 and cites balance problems. Meanwhile, Push Square disliked the storytelling, and VGC found the characters thin and the levels linear.

Steam users split along language lines. The Steam store page shows English reviews at Very Positive, with 86 percent of 1,429 recommending it. By contrast, the much larger pool of Simplified Chinese reviews sat at Mostly Positive, around 79 percent, on launch day.

A 5 GB Patch Aimed at Path Tracing

Negative Steam reviews mostly target long shader compilation, stutter and ray tracing problems. Some players also find the encounters too easy.

Reviewers saw the same split on PC. Wccftech hit about 100 fps at 4K on an RTX 4080. Glitched, however, reported severe frame pacing on an RTX 5080.

In response, S-GAME’s launch post announced a day-one patch of about 5 GB. The studio says it significantly improves ray tracing and path tracing performance and fixes several bugs. According to Kotaku, S-GAME also suggests rolling back the latest Nvidia driver if problems persist.

The PC version uses Denuvo, as DSOGaming confirmed alongside the official specs. On the plus side, it supports DLSS 4.5 with Multi Frame Generation. For 1440p at 60 fps with upscaling, S-GAME recommends an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT.

From Rain Blood to a Record Launch

According to Happy Gamer, the team traces back to 2015’s Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage, a small Steam release. Phantom Blade Zero casts you as Soul, a swordsman framed for his master’s murder with 66 days left to live. S-GAME calls its blend of wuxia, mechanical prosthetics and dark fantasy “Kungfupunk.”

A Steam Giant That Still Owes PC Players Polish

Phantom Blade Zero has earned its numbers, because few action games this year fight this well. Even so, the day-one patch is a promise rather than proof.

Mid-range PC owners should watch the next round of Steam reviews before buying. If S-GAME fixes the stutter quickly, Baldur’s Gate 3’s peak may fall during the first weekend.