Hideo Kojima says he already has a concept for Death Stranding 3 in mind, but insisted that he will not be the person to direct it.
Kojima, 61, is set to release the second Death Stranding game, On the Beach, exclusively for PlayStation 5 next month.
Looking ahead, the Metal Gear creator has a full slate, with Xbox title OD, a new action-espionage game for PlayStation, and a movie in the works. So it’s perhaps unsurprising he feels he likely won’t continue Death Stranding himself.
Speaking to VGC in a new Death Stranding 2 preview, Kojima said that a concept introduced in On the Beach, ‘Plate Gates’, could allow future Death Stranding games to take place in different countries around the world.
“If I use this Plate Gate concept, I could make endless sequels,” he said. “I, of course, don’t have any plans to do that, but I already have a concept for another sequel. I am not going to make it myself, but if I passed it on to someone else, they could probably make it.”
Kojima also discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic convinced him to change the theme for the second Death Stranding, which has the tagline: “We should not have connected”.
“We released Death Stranding before the COVID-19 pandemic,” Kojima explained. “The world was heading towards isolation and division, such as the UK leaving the EU. So I was saying, ‘Let’s connect. We’re headed for disaster if we don’t connect.’ That was the theme, story, and gameplay for Death Stranding.
“After the release, just three months later, we entered the pandemic, and I was really surprised – it looked like Death Stranding, in a way. In the real world – the 21st century – we have something similar to the Chiral Network, which is the Internet. This was a little different compared to the 19th century, such as the Spanish Flu or the like. We survived the pandemic because of the Internet and people were connected online.”
Kojima said he believes the same connectivity that helped people get through their lockdown experiences is now, in fact, dividing humanity.
“What happened was, there are now people in our studio who work from home, and I still don’t know their faces. Even music concerts were cancelled, and it all became online streaming. I understand this was unavoidable at the time of the pandemic. The same thing applies to schools; instead of getting to play with your friends or learning from teachers, you just look at a screen online which isn’t any different from watching YouTube videos.
“Everything was leaning into the metaverse. When you turned on the TV, everyone was talking about how it was the age of the metaverse now and there was no need to interact with people. I felt that we were going down a terrible path. Communication between human beings is not meant to be this way. You meet people by chance or see sights you didn’t expect to see. With the way we were headed, you would lose all of that.”
The Metal Gear creator said that even though he already had a concept in place for Death Stranding 2, after experiencing the pandemic, he felt that it wasn’t right and rewrote it.
“It’s the strangest thing. After I created a game with the theme of ‘let’s connect instead of division and isolation,’ we had the pandemic, and I began to think, ‘Maybe it’s not such a good thing to connect so much’,” he said.
“It goes back to the stick and rope theory. There’s a lot of foreshadowing in the game, so I’m sure many of you will understand when you play the game, and you’ll know by the end. The things that I felt during the pandemic – there’s a character in the game who expresses those feelings.
“The logo is a hint: you can see in the logo of Death Stranding that the strands are coming from below the logo – with the theme of ‘Let’s connect.’ This time in Death Stranding 2, you see that the strands are coming from above the logo. It’s like the Godfather logo.
“Even throughout the game, you see strands from many people, like Dollman and the mech soldiers. Those are all hints. When you really start thinking about what it means to connect, you start to wonder… That’s all I’ll say for now.”
