Death Stranding – “Social Strand System” Is The New “Tactical Espionage Action”

The veil is half off the upcoming game from Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding. Despite a big trailer that revealed the game’s date, there’s still a lot of mystery about what the game is about or how it plays. We probably won’t really know until it’s in our hands, to be honest, but Kojima has tried to clear up one thing with trying to clarify what it means for the game to be dubbed Social Strand System.

Metal Gear Solid fans know the games were often dubbed Tactical Espionage Action, a term that never really had a clear definition but basically became known as a fancy way of saying it was a stealth game. Death Stranding isn’t a stealth game, according to Kojima, it’s a new bred of action game based on the social connection the game aims to have (whatever those actually are), which he calls Social Strand System. He decided to come up with the name to continue that tradition started with Metal Gear Solid. You can see his tweets below.

Death Stranding will release exclusively on PlayStation 4 November 8th.

As I'm getting similar questions so I shall re-post. DS is not a stealth game. Could move subjectively but not a FPS shooting game either. By incorporating with the concept of connection(strand), it's totally brand new genre called action game/strand game(social strand system). pic.twitter.com/1KaQUVH9zL

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) June 5, 2019

The name of the new genre is not made by the creator but it comes after. I know that but I just like to name it as I did in my past titles. Calling it as Social Strand System is similar case when I called Tactical Espionage Action before it was categorized as Stealth Game.👍 pic.twitter.com/721xPxcxeW

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) June 6, 2019