Death Stranding got its major unveiling after many, many years of vague teasing and wild trailers. To say the least, it wasn’t what lot of people were expecting. One aspect of the game is also asynchronous online cooperation that can effect the world of one player due to your actions in your own. This, of course, opens up all kinds of problems for trolling and the like, but Director Hideo Kojima doesn’t think it’ll be a problem. His reasoning is adorable, too, in its own way.
Speaking with GameSpot, Kojima said that he didn’t think players would be intentionally nasty to each other through the system. He mentioned play tests he’s seen so far and that usually bad things were done unintentionally, and that he thinks it will lead to people being more thoughtful all around.
“It might not be intentional,” he said. “We do a lot of playtests in the office. So sometimes there’s a bridge that crosses a deep river, and people feel grateful, but it only goes to the middle of the river. Of course you don’t give that bridge a thumbs up, but it probably wasn’t intentional. I pretty much feel that there won’t be much intentional evil. I want people to think about that as well if they fall [off that bridge]… ‘I won’t do that to someone.’ And you might make the same mistake.”
“Say there’s a cliff and you go down a rope, but you need to go down further, but you can only reach a certain point,” Kojima continues. “So maybe then I see your rope and your footprints and I felt really thankful for it. But if I go down, I might see that it doesn’t go all the way and think about the reasons you did that. The best thing would be to put a second rope so other people don’t fall in the trap.
“When I check people playing Death Stranding, a lot of people only play for themselves, and they just use it. And others, these people change the way they think when they place the ladder, and think of a different perspective: what if I put the ladder here, will it be useful? It’s interesting to see this, and especially [in] the footprints. You might get lost and your footprints will scatter around, but when you find the footprints of others you might feel very happy at first. But you don’t know if that’s correct and you just follow it and it goes off a cliff, you know this person was probably lost too. So when you think about that you want your footprints to be accurate or correct.
“In Death Stranding, when you follow someone’s footprints, and then a person comes for a third time [to follow the footprints], the wilderness that was there will turn into a small path. People have a natural intention to follow the path, so it really depends on who you are playing with indirectly. The path might already be there if people are already follow it over and over again.”
Well, I’m not sure what world Kojima is living in (but based on this game, it’s probably not ours anyway), but it’s a cute thought that hopefully comes true. But considering how cruel and nasty people can be, I can’t imagine it will. Death Stranding releases on PlayStation 4 on November 8th.