We still don’t know what Death Stranding is, but we do know that it has a whole lot of talent behind it, and that it looks absolutely incredible- the trailer we saw for the game at The Game Awards was visually stunning to behold.
And according to director Hideo Kojima, that’s not even the end of it. In an interview with Red Bull, Kojima said that the trailer had been real time footage running on the PS4 Pro, and that the final game would end up looking even better, crediting Guerrilla’s excellent Decima engine.
“Decima is a groundbreaking rendering engine, but if we would create the same worlds there’s no point to that,” he said. “Horizon: Zero Dawn has this fantastic artistic vision, but we’re more aiming for a very photorealistic style. I’m a big fan of physical based lighting, and we’ve created something which we call ‘Glass Room’, which is literally just a meeting room, where we can check the quality of reflections and accuracy of lighting on every single object, like tanks or the baby doll. It was rendered in real-time on a PS4 Pro. And it will look much better when the game comes out.”
Kojima sounds very confident- possibly because of the sheer talent that will be working on the game. He elaborated on that too, specifically talking about Guillermo del Toro’s involvement in the game. “We worked on a different project together [the cancelled Silent Hill reboot] and he was pretty sad that it ended. So I asked him whether he want to come on board, and now we’re actually collaborating on a deep level because we’re developing his character together and talk a ton about ideas and inspirations, camera angles and storytelling. It went the same way with Mads [Mikkelsen, who plays Galen Erso in Star Wars: Rogue One], who plays the main villain in Death Stranding.”
Death Stranding sounds like it will be a hugely ambitious game when it ultimately does release. It is slated for the PS4 exclusively, although a PC version is scheduled to follow afterwards as well.