PREVIEW – Hideo Kojima got rid of Konami’s ropes, and he’s working under Sony on his latest game. The Silent Hills team is almost entirely together, but the name, the location, and the idea is different. Death Stranding continues that usual Kojima-style.

 

Last December, Hideo Kojima and Sony Computer Entertainment (which changed to Sony Interactive Entertainment this April) announced that Kojima Productions is coming back. The first game of the team was officially revealed at the E3, featuring the naked Norman Reedus!

Engine?

Kojima Productions didn’t decide what engine they will use yet, but they are close to picking the one that Death Stranding will use. My guess would be the Frostbite engine, which might be a shocker: Kojima‘s game might be the first non-Electronic Arts title to use Frostbite. I’m likely wrong, but we will see the answer probably by the autumn.

The E3 teaser is only for testing the visuals, but KojiPro also does gameplay tests in a different engine as well. The real-time rendered cutscene will be in the final game, and we will be able to pause it to rotate the camera and walk around freely!

Teaser

Kojima‘s plan with the teaser was to figure what kind of world he would be able to express visually, with the fears of how many gaming elements it could include. Fortunately, they see that light at the end of the tunnel, they only have to decide on the engine, and the development can begin. The teaser is not tied to a genre, allowing its watchers to think freely: is it going to be a sci-fi? A horror? Is it related to occultism, or maybe philosophy? Who knows?

As Kojima says, people have two items: a „stick” to keep others away, and the „rope” that allows to pull them closer. In Death Stranding, we will have both of these, as well as guns, because Kojima thinks that we wouldn’t like the lack of them in his action game…

Kojima is currently working on the script (because there is none yet!), and works on tests – he cannot say anything else yet. There’s a reason why no script exists yet – Kojima doesn’t know what and how much he can implement in Death Stranding. No exact details are being done at the moment.

Tsunami

Kojima brought up an example that will not be in the game: a tsunami running over a city. He would like to figure out how big this tsunami can be, how big of a city can the game render, how much of it can the tsunami was away, and the speed of processing is also a question. These points need to be figured out before the scene can be created.

While the game’s world will be entirely new, Kojima plans to create it in a way that helps us associate with it. He also said that he wants to work together with directors such as John Carpenter and Dario Argento.

Waiting

As it’s unlikely to see the game before 2018, we can only provide the details that Kojima talked about at the Comic-Con. It’s pointless to think about how the final game will look. If Kojima gets the ambiance done, and Sony allows him to finish the game properly, Death Stranding is likely to be at least a 9/10 title. The audiovisuals always tend to be great in Kojima‘s games, and the story is usually a detailed to unbelievable extents…

Death is stranding.

-V-

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Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Kojima Productions

Genre:  Action

Publication: TBA