Kojima Productions says the Decima Engine lets it chase high-end visuals without sacrificing stability, and the studio argues that the tech foundations behind Death Stranding 2: On the Beach are the payoff of nearly a decade of accumulated know-how.

Talk around game engines has increasingly revolved around the so-called “dictatorship” of Unreal Engine 5. It is not hard to see why: Epic Games’ toolset has become the default choice for studios of every size, even as a lot of recent results have left players feeling the promise does not always match the reality.

Against that backdrop, Kojima Productions has largely held its line with the Decima Engine, widely viewed as one of the strongest proprietary options in the industry. The stance, however, sits awkwardly next to the Japanese studio’s longer-term plans. Speaking to Automaton, technology director Akio Sakamoto explained that the team actively assessed the engine before adopting it, and that several specific strengths ultimately tipped the balance.

Sakamoto highlighted internal tooling aimed at real-time rendering analysis as a major factor – strong enough that it effectively pushed the studio to take a leap of faith on technology built by Guerrilla Games, the engine’s owner. In his telling, Decima already offered many of the capabilities required for building a complex open world from day one. And while it may be less approachable than off-the-shelf commercial solutions, it is particularly well suited to large, multidisciplinary teams. That is why the first Death Stranding was built on Decima, and why the studio is still there almost ten years later.

The accumulated expertise is now reflected in a noticeable technical step forward for Death Stranding 2, especially in its environments. Sakamoto pointed to work recreating real landscapes such as Fonts Point in California, where the team carried out extensive on-location research and documentation. With Decima, they managed massive geometry budgets – up to 25 million polygons in a single scene – using dynamic levels of detail while keeping frame rate stable even across large-scale spaces.

That progress is not confined to static terrain. Sakamoto emphasized that Decima is not treated as a programmers-only tool inside Kojima Productions; essentially every discipline interacts with it in some way, including artists. The studio also does not limit itself to the engine “as is.” When specific functionality is needed, they modify the technology and share those changes directly with Guerrilla Games, maintaining an ongoing technical collaboration.

Even So, The Studio’s Future Includes Unreal Engine 5 With OD

Still, the engine story is not a simple either-or. The studio does not appear ready to abandon Decima outright, but Hideo Kojima’s next project, OD, is being built on Unreal Engine 5 – a choice that sparked immediate pushback from players familiar with the performance issues often associated with UE5. At the same time, the decision is easy to understand from a production perspective, particularly because UE5 is considered far easier to learn and onboard teams onto.

Timing also mattered. With OD entering pre-production while Death Stranding 2 was still in development, adopting Epic Games’ engine made it possible to staff up in parallel with a new group without directly disrupting the studio’s ongoing work.

Source: 3DJuegos