As Hideo Kojima works on his first big departure from the Metal Gear series in a long time, and his first project since leaving Konami last year, the director has been pretty careful about revealing information before he’s ready. Little bits and pieces trickle out, though. In an interview with the PlayStation Blog this week, a few more tidbits slipped out, and while they’re hardly concrete information, the picture starts to come into focus.
“You can think of Death Stranding as an action game,” Kojima said. He explained that he wants the game to be accessible and intuitive to get people into the experience, but says that “when they play it for a bit they will realize there is a certain new type of depth to it, something they might not have seen before.”
There are other ways to play this game.
The experience will be that of “an open world game, with a lot of freedom,” Kojima said. You can hop into vehicles if you want to and things like that.
“If you’re a fighter, there’s plenty of opportunity for that,” he said. “If you’re not that type of player, there are other ways to play this game. I can’t say much more.” That could mean a stealth option, for example. That certainly wouldn’t be a far reach for him. Or maybe you can, like Mads Mikkelsen’s character in the second trailer, take control of other characters in the game and operate through them, sort of like human drones. This is all pure speculation, of course.
It seems like Kojima feels somewhat tied to gunplay, but wants to get away from it.
“In action games, generally, the player has a gun and plays against enemies in a single player environment – or they take it online and play against other players in a competitive environment,” Kojima said. “They join in together with guns – [laughs] it’s almost always with guns – to take down a stronger opponent. In this game you can do that but I wanted to go a little deeper beyond that with something that doesn’t focus on a weapon like a gun and that’s what has a connection to the strand concept.”
The online aspect of the game will blend into the single player, but Kojima says it isn’t necessary. From that, it almost sounds like a structure like that of Dark Souls or Ni-Oh. Pulling in players from other worlds through a “strand” of some kind would definitely fit the themes Kojima seems to be chasing.
Kojima’s games are always some combination of silly, serious, and outstanding, and I’m looking forward to seeing how these ideas come together.
