Death Stranding 2: On the Beach director Hideo Kojima has said that there are currently no plans for any episodic post-launch DLC for the game. Speaking in a recent episode of his radio show – as caught by X user naven0m – Kojima said that he believes that episodic DLC is an outdated concept.
While there aren’t plans for post-launch DLC, Kojima has said that the studio will continue to release updates for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, improving the title and fixing any bugs that might make it through the game’s June 26 launch. He didn’t outright dismiss the possibility of some sort of post-launch content coming to the game, however, simply saying that he couldn’t be sure about it right now.
“As for DLC – right now, there aren’t any plans,” said Kojima. “That kind of thing isn’t really the trend anymore, is it? I’m not sure though. Before, we used to add stuff post-launch pretty regularly. But now – maybe there will be something like that. After the release at the end of June, if any bug pops up – we’ll fix them. We’ll keep improving the game. We might even create something that didn’t exist at all in the first game. Who knows. I can’t say for sure right now.”
Another interesting detail that Kojima spoke about with regards to Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the fact that protagonist Sam Porter Bridges was originally conceptualised as having hair that can grow out over the course of the game. According to Kojima, the original plan was to have Sam start out with shorter hair that would grow out. Considering Norman Reedus’ own hair, however, the decision was made to scrap the feature.
“At first, we were going to have him cut [his hair],” said Kojima. “His hair would grow out, and he’d shave his own beard. We actually built a system for that. If you keep playing, it grows naturally – so if someone wants him to grow it out, they can just keep playing as-is. And if not, you can stand in front of a mirror, trim his beard, and we even planned to let you dye his hair. We were going to implement that – but Norman Reedus is, well, a superstar. And once you allow blond hair, red hair, aand so on – there’s just so many options, right?”
“Just like in [Death Stranding], once you let people color outfits, everyone ends up going for gold or silver in the end. It turns into something like Osaka’s flashy fashion. And when that happens, you can’t help but feel like, ‘Well, this is Norman we’re talking about…’ If it were just an avatar, it’d be fine, but – we ended up scrapping that system. There was even a chance that he could’ve gone blonde. We really did have a system for changing his hair color.”
In the same episode of his radio show, Kojima had also spoken about getting so many people that wanted to be scanned to become part of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach that half of them had to be turned away.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is coming exclusively to PS5 on June 26.