When legendary game designer Hideo Kojima announced to the world that Death Stranding 2 would soon be released, he made it known that Covid-19 had completely changed his idea for this sequel.
“We released Death Stranding before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world was moving toward isolation and division—as with Brexit. The idea behind it was ‘Let's connect. We’ll face disaster if we don’t connect.’ The theme, the story, and the gameplay of the first chapter all revolved around that idea,” Kojima tells WIRED. “After the release, just three months later, a pandemic broke out, and I was very surprised. It really felt like Death Stranding, in a way.”
WIRED headed to Tokyo in April for a long and comprehensive preview of the game and asked Kojima about all the secrets behind Death Stranding 2’s creation. The game is set to be released June 26 and will be available on PlayStation.
The Meaning of Human Connections
“In the real world, in the 21st century, we have something similar to the Chiral Network—the internet. It was different than, for example, the Spanish flu pandemic a century earlier. We survived the pandemic because of the internet and the fact that people were about to connect online. Now there are people who work for our studio from home and whose faces I don’t even know. Live concerts were canceled, and everything moved to online streaming. I understand that it was inevitable during the pandemic. It was the same with school. Instead of playing with friends or learning from teachers, you watched a screen, as if you were watching a YouTube video.
“Everything was converging toward the metaverse. You’d turn on the TV and everyone was talking about how we were now in the metaverse era, where there was no need to physically interact with people. I thought we were going in the wrong direction. Communication between human beings shouldn’t be like that. You meet people by chance and see unexpected things. With the path we were on, all of that would be lost.”
As Kojima explains, the initial concept for Death Stranding 2 was very different, and even his idea of connections between people changed after the pandemic: “I already had an idea for Death Stranding 2 before the pandemic,” he says, “but after going through that experience I felt something wasn’t right, and I rewrote it.”
“The strangest thing was that after creating a game with the theme ‘let’s connect instead of isolating,’ the pandemic came along, and I started thinking, ‘Maybe connecting so much is not such a good thing.’ So we went back to the stick-and-rope theory [from Death Stranding] again. There is a lot of anticipation of that theme in the game, and I’m sure many people will understand what I meant by coming to the end of the experience. For example, there’s a character who will express the same feelings that I felt during the pandemic.”
