While many of the biggest games released these days tend to be built using famous engines like Unreal Engine 5 or Unity, Kojima Productions has stuck by its choice of Guerrilla Games’ Decima Engine for both Death Stranding titles. In an interview with Automaton Media, studio chief technology officer (CTO) Akio Sakamoto has revealed details about the studio’s engine of choice.
When it came to choosing Decima, the most important of its aspects for Sakamoto was that it would support the technologies that Kojima Productions needed for its open-world games. Despite it being less accessible when compared with more commercial offerings, its strong runtime rendering analysis tools was a standout feature. He also noted that, while no engine tends to be the singular best choice, studios have to make their own decisions depending on their needs. For Kojima Productions, this was Decima.
“When we were considering adopting Decima, I had the opportunity to evaluate the engine directly,” Sakamoto explained. “It offered many of the capabilities needed to build an open-world game, and while some aspects are less immediately approachable than commercial engines, its runtime rendering analysis tools stood out. Being able to access such a rich set of data without relying on external tools is incredibly valuable. The development environment – built for large-scale, multi-disciplinary teams – also included features I had long hoped to implement in the engine I worked on previously. With all of that in mind, we decided to adopt Decima.”
“It has now been nearly ten years since we began using the engine. While no engine is the best choice in every scenario, Decima enables us to accomplish many things that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere.”
Further in the interview, Sakamoto also spoke about wanting artists to work directly with Decima to create their own shaders rather than only having programmers working with it. He noted that engines tend to contribute more to a game’s development than just offering a graphics pipeline. Thanks to that, just about every developer works with the engine in some way, at least indirectly.
“When people talk about game engines, attention tends to focus on the parts that relate directly to the game’s visual expression,” he explained. “But in reality, a game engine provides a wide range of functions that support every aspect of development. In that sense, the number and type of tools used may differ depending on one’s role, but I don’t think there is a single developer whose work is completely unrelated to Decima.”
Just last week, Kojima Productions had announced that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach will be coming to PC on March 19th. The announcement was made with new trailer giving us a look at some of the game’s visuals on the platform. The studio has also confirmed that it will support uncapped frame rates for gameplay, support for DualSense features, and the ability to run at 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios for ultrawide displays.
For more details about Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, check out our review of its PS5 version.