With Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, one of director Hideo Kojima’s major goals was to make sure that players finish the game. Lead level designer Hiraoki Yoshiike revealed this in an interview with PCGamer, where he noted that, with the original Death Stranding, the team had to be “very elaborate” in introducing “all the new concepts and what the world is like.” However, this “might have been a little bit slow,” according to player feedback.
“Kojima wanted more people to enjoy the game all the way to the end. This was an order he provided,” Yoshiike said.
Further in the interview, he noted that the studio decided to tone down the worldbuilding elements for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. That isn’t to say there isn’t any extra detail to be found in the game’s story, however, and Yoshiike even noted that completionists can discover and enjoy these elements on their own. For everyone else, however, the title offers a clearer path forward that doesn’t meander as much.
“In the second game, we didn’t need to provide too many worldbuilding elements, we could make it less elaborate,” said Yoshiike. “For completionists, they can enjoy it, but at the same time, people who don’t necessarily care about it that much, we made sure they can follow the story through other supplemental elements within the game. That was one of the design choices that we made. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that it’s much easier to recommend DS2 to people. And we’re able to see the metrics, and we saw that people progress much further than they previously had. So that was just as we designed, I think.”
Kojima has been known to make changes to his games based on player feedback in the past. Back in June 2025, musician Yoann “Woodkid” Lemoine revealed that the story for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach had been changed after earlier versions of the game were already in playtesting.
“There’s a key moment where we had a discussion, probably halfway [through] when we were doing the game, where he came to me and he said, ‘We have a problem,’” said Lemoine in an interview.
“Then he said, ‘I’m going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.’ And he changed stuff in the script and the way some crucial stuff [happens] in the game because he thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions.”
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was released on PS5 back in back in June. After seeing a positive critical reception at the time, Kojima Productions, alongside support studio Nixxes, would work on bringing the title to PC, where it would arrive this month. For more details about the latter, check out our review of the PC port. Also take look at how many players rushed to play the game on launch day.