On March 8, 2024, a demo for the game was mistakenly released on the PlayStation Store in the United States. It was taken down twenty-five minutes later and rendered unplayable on systems where it had been downloaded if they connected to the internet after the takedown. This was the first time Sony had ever done such an act, with many pointing out that they didn't even do it when P.T., the demo for the cancelled Silent Hills, was removed from the PlayStation Store by Konami.

Stellar Blade became rather controversial with critics in large part due to the sexualization of its protagonist Eve. They argued that the game's marketing leaned heavily into her sexual appeal by focusing on elements such as revealing costumes and suggestive character designs for its promotional strategy. This got to the point where the South Korean version of the game received an "Adults-Only" rating due to suggestive images, nudity, and violence. Hyung-Tae Kim, the game's director, defended these design choices, stating:


This controversy culminated when the game released with a Day 1 update that patched out unintentionally offensive graffiti, and censored two revealing outfits for Eve, the Holiday Rabbit and the Cybernetic Bondage, but these are not the only affected outfits. When the player finds their first unlockable Nano Suit blueprint on the overworld, a tutorial pop-up appears featuring a video that scrolls through a montage of other Nano Suits that can be unlocked, and among them is an uncensored version of the Moutan Peony, an outfit that features dark pantyhose covering Eve's skin up to her waist in both the base game and the Day 1 patch. It appears that the developers forgot to remove this video when changing the costumes during development, and it's currently not known if other outfits in this video were changed in the final game.

These changes contradicted a claim from the game's official Twitter account stating that all versions of the game worldwide would be released uncensored, leading to the changes being widely criticized by players on social media and speculation that the game's publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment mandated the changes after addressing the offensive graffiti. However, Kim addressed the matter during a Q&A at a launch event for the game, stating that the costumes in version 1.0.0.2 was their "final product", but claimed that "the answer is not enough to convince our users" and that an ongoing internal discussion was proceeding. Kim later reaffirmed his stance on the changed costumes in a later interview, stating:


Despite this, the version 1.0.0.3 update would cater to the complaints, adding two new variants of the Holiday Rabbit and Cybernetic Bondage with the censored parts reverted, as well as two new eroticized costumes, the Black and White Kunoichis.

The speculated tensions between Shift Up and Sony during development were actually highlighted by Drakengard and Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro, a developer with a history of tensions with Sony, during a joint interview with him and Kim for IGN published a little over a week before the game's release:

On April 24, 2024, when the game's review embargo lifted prior to its release, a reviewer tweeted a discovery made while playing through the game, that being an accidental reference to a racial slur through the game's graphics. This happened when a graphic of graffiti art spelling "Hard", a design which is reused in numerous places throughout the game, ended up being placed next to a neon sign pointing to the "R Shop", referring to one of the game's information brokers named Roxanne. Put together, this text reads as the "Hard R Shop", including a slang term for a racial slur used against black people. When IGN contacted Sony regarding this discovery, they released a statement claiming the game's developer Shift Up had no intention of creating offensive artwork or including the objectionable phrase in the game, and vowed to remove it before the game's release. The "Hard" graphic in that spot would be quickly replaced by a different piece of graffiti spelling "Crime" in a pre-release edit that also added New Game+ to the game, and would be added to the released game as part of a Day 1 patch. Interestingly, this entire span of events from the text being discovered to it being replaced occurred in less than 97 minutes, and the changes stand in contrast to a claim from the game's official Twitter account three days prior that all versions of the game in all countries would be released uncensored.

When Stellar Blade was first announced as "Project Eve", it was stated to be coming to the PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. However, during the September 2021 PlayStation Showcase, it was announced that the game would instead be exclusive to the PlayStation 5, after Sony Interactive Entertainment had agreed to publish the game.

Some of the character models in Stellar Blade were created using a 3D scanning process. This is most notable with the game's protagonist Eve, whose character model was based on the real life Korean model Shin Jae-eun.