Phantom Blade Zero Pulls DLSS 5 Support After AI Row

Phantom Blade Zero was, until very recently, listed as one of the launch titles for Nvidia's DLSS 5. As of April 10, it effectively isn't anymore, even if S-Game never said Nvidia's name out loud.

In a statement posted on X, S-Game CEO and game director Qiwei "Soulframe" Liang laid out the studio's position on AI with unusual clarity: "We are fully aware that a profound technological revolution is unfolding around us. However, to this day, every single piece of content in our game has been crafted by the hands of real artists. We will not use AI visual tech that could alter our artists' original creative intent." That last sentence is doing a lot of work. DLSS 5, which Nvidia revealed to widespread ridicule after players noticed it was generating warped, over-smoothed NPC faces, is AI visual tech. Phantom Blade Zero was on Nvidia's official list of supporting games. The math isn't complicated.

According to reporting by Wccftech, Phantom Blade Zero remains on Nvidia's DLSS 5 partner page alongside titles like Assassin's Creed Shadows, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy. S-Game hasn't issued a formal withdrawal. But Liang's statement makes continued support essentially indefensible, and this is the first time a developer who had apparently signed on to DLSS 5 has come out and said something that directly contradicts the technology's existence in their game. That's not a small thing for Nvidia, which is already dealing with questions about whether DLSS 5 can ever be properly integrated into a full character production pipeline.

What S-Game Actually Built Instead

The broader statement is worth reading on its own terms, separate from the DLSS 5 angle. Liang goes into specific detail about how the game was made, and it's the kind of development transparency you rarely see from a studio at this stage. Character models were built on 3D scans of the cast, who also performed facial capture. Voice acting in both Chinese and English was fully lip-synced. Combat animations were motion-captured by over twenty martial artists, with sword masters from Mount Emei and lion dance performers from Guangdong brought in for specific sequences. The team physically visited ancestral halls in Fujian, ancient towns in Zhejiang, and old steel factories in Beijing, scanning locations to build the game's environments.

Then there's the detail that stuck with me: the in-game maps are hand-drawn on Xuan paper using traditional Chinese brushes by students from the Chinese Painting department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Not digital paintings. Not AI-generated assets. Actual ink on rice paper. In 2026, when studios are quietly feeding concept art into image generators and calling it a workflow optimisation, S-Game commissioned physical paintings for a video game map screen.

Credit where it's due: Tencent has a stake in S-Game, and Tencent's own AI division has stated plans to use AI to "connect the virtual and real worlds and enhance the gameplay experience" in its games. S-Game making this declaration while operating under that umbrella is a meaningful choice, not a default one. The studio could easily have said nothing and quietly kept DLSS 5 support on the books.

The real question is whether any of this changes what the game is. Phantom Blade Zero has been one of the more genuinely exciting action RPG announcements in years, and the combat footage has consistently looked sharp. It launches on September 9, 2026 for PS5, with a Steam page already live. What Liang's statement does is give you a clearer picture of the people making it and what they think their work is worth. For Nvidia, losing a high-profile partner this publicly, even implicitly, is exactly the kind of signal the DLSS 5 rollout did not need.

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