Death Stranding: “We Can Learn Something From Kojima Productions”, Says Guerrilla Games

It’s well known at this point that Kojima Productions’ upcoming game, Death Stranding will be built on the Guerrilla Games-developed Decima Engine, the same engine that was used for the development of Guerrilla Games’ very own Horizon: Zero Dawn. However, it seems like while Guerrilla were working on updating and optimizing the engine for Horizon, they received more than just a little help from people at Kojima Productions as well.

In a recent Q&A session, Michiel van der Leeuw of Guerrilla Games, who served as the technical director on the Decima Engine, spoke about their collaborations with Kojima Productions. van der Leeuw revealed that while Guerrilla were developing the engine, developers from the Kojima team often helped them with several bugs and inconsistencies. In fact, they apparently even went as far as to help Guerrilla Games with the cutscenes pipeline before Horizon: Zero Dawn had been shipped.

“They did put a lot of stuff on our agenda,” van der Leeuw said at one point in the Q&A while speaking on this matter. “Like we had this lighting system, and one of the guys their – and as I’ve said, they’re very thorough – says ‘I made a reference render of your lighting system, and something if divided by pi here in this code. Could you explain to me what that is?’ And we were like, ‘whoops!'”

“If you’re making an engine,” van der Leeuw said later, “you don’t very often work so intensely with other people who are of the same skill level- or better, in this case. They have different ideas, they’re used to different things, and they want to get to the bottom of why it’s not what they expect. So it’s also really refreshing to get different eyes on your own work.”

Horizon Zero Dawn had a lot of cutscenes so Guerrilla Games faced a lot of troubles for its production pipeline. However when Guerrilla saw the cutscenes pipeline presentation created by Kojima Productions, they were surprised. It was a 50 page powerpoint presentation and they thought ‘we could learn something from these guys.’

So it’s fair to say that both he and Guerrilla clearly think very highly of the guys over at Kojima Productions- and it’s easy to see why. van der Leeuw talked about Guerrilla’s and Kojima Productions’ work together in quite interesting detail, so be sure to check out the entire Q&A session through here. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more updates on Death Stranding.