Hideo Kojima says Death Stranding won’t release on PS5; offers insight on development and sequel

Hideo Kojima is a very ambitious man and always creates these massive games. Hell, even the announcements for his games are big. When he announced the now cancelled Silent Hills, players had to spend days solving obscure puzzles in a demo for a game that no one knew was actually a Silent Hill game until they beat it.

His next game, Death Stranding, is looking to be pretty ambitious as well. During an interview at RTX Australia, Kojima talked about the idea of the game's mechanics. He looked back on how the technology in the industry has constantly been evolving, but mechanics have mostly remained the same. For most games, you have a weapon and you're pushing enemies back. It's what humans have been doing since the day we were put on Earth. Online gaming has somewhat changed this by adding real humans to the game, allowing you to go against or team up with others.

He talked about some of the very first inventions of mankind, the stick and the rope. The stick was used as a weapon and he sees a rope as something to connect things. As seen in the trailers, some characters are connected by what appear to be some sort of rope or "strands". He wants to create a new type of gameplay using "connections".

Hideo Kojima went on to briefly discuss the open world of the game. He says you'll be able to do almost anything (we've all heard that before) and it'll be something new and different. Even if you're a gamer who plays all sorts of open world games on high-end systems, you'll quickly realize this game is original and something new.

The legendary developer also took a moment to talk about the trailers which have been well received but slightly controversial among gamers. Although the trailers are pretty awesome, people are concerned it's slightly misleading because it isn't actual gameplay and the game seems like it won't release for a few more years. It's made people question if he's showing too much.

Kojima addressed the situation by talking about how they're using the trailers to not only tease people and give them hints for the game but to create internal pressure on the team. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain suffered from years of delays before finally being released in 2015 which made people wonder if the same thing will happen here. Kojima promises that he has a schedule and budget he is held to and releasing trailers helps put a good kind of pressure on the team to work harder. It builds up hype from fans and gives them a motivation to finish the game on time.

The trailers shown so far have also not been outsourced. They're being created by people developing the game, so they're showing something they think is close to the actual product that will be released.

Kojima Productions has been running tests with their partner Guerrilla Games for the last year or so on the Decima engine to see how the game runs. Supposedly the game is "moving" and runs pretty well in the engine.

The two studios are actively working together to improve the engine at twice the speed by sending assets between each other. This'll help the game release faster than it would if Kojima decided to build the engine and game from scratch.

Kojima was also asked about how likely Death Stranding is to releasing on the PlayStation 5. People speculate Death Stranding will release around 2019/2020, which would be around the time people are expecting to start hearing about the next generation of consoles. Kojima was very straightforward with his answer and confirmed the game will not pull a situation similar to The Last Guardian and get delayed to the next generation. Death Stranding will exclusively be on PlayStation 4 and not PlayStation 5.

Kojima also has no plans to really build a franchise around Death Stranding. If the game does well, he'll consider making a sequel but at the moment he just wants to create a solid, standalone game. He believes if you create a sequel, things need to change and evolve for it to be worthwhile otherwise what's the point? This can clearly be seen in all of the Metal Gear Solid games as each one takes some big leaps in gameplay. It makes sense that he wouldn't want to think about a sequel at the moment, especially with this mindset. You wouldn't want to be creating two drastically different games in your head while only working on the first one.

In related news, prior to the interview Kojima and Kinda Funny's Greg Miller took to the show floor to record a let's play of 1-2-Switch on the Nintendo Switch. You can watch the let's play by clicking here.

Death Stranding will release sometime in the future on PlayStation 4.

[DualShockers]