Kojima Clears The Air
Last week a new trailer for Death Stranding was on display at The Game Awards 2017. As strange as the trailer was, it was certainly one of the most talked about moments from the show. Kojima, Death Stranding creator and also the mastermind behind Metal Gear Solid, recently sat down with IGN to address some community concerns on the game’s development.
Kojima said:
I”’ve been reading a lot on the Internet of people saying I’ve spent the last year just traveling around and having fun. A lot of people saying I’m wasting time and money. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
So, over this past year, we’ve been working on Decima. There are things we don’t know, we ask them, we make some requests. On our end, of course, we use the Decima engine very differently from the way they use it, especially when it comes to the cutscenes. So we make our own things there, and send it to them, show it to them, get their feedback. We are at that pace, currently.
There’s been a lot of stuff going on through this time, so it makes me pretty sad when people say ‘Oh, you’re just having fun and joking around and wasting money.’ You could ask so many people, but I really think that I’m doing this pretty fast. If you have a company, if you already have an engine, you already have the tools and the team together, and even then, it’s pretty standard for a AAA game to take three to five years to develop their games. For some games, it can take up to 10 years.”
It sounds like Kojima and his team are still coming to grips with Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine, which is understandable but also doesn’t exactly instill confidence that Death Stranding will launch anytime soon.
If you recall, a little over a year ago Kojima-san hinted that the game would be out before the Tokyo Olympic Games. Considering that the Olympic Games are due to begin on July 24th, 2020, there’s still plenty of time for Kojima Productions to keep their word; it does sound like this will be an end-of-the-generation kind of game, though.
Death Stranding is scheduled to hit PlayStation 4. A PC version was listed in the original announcement but hasn’t been mentioned since, which makes its status unclear.