Hideo Kojima games have always been known for their immense focus on storytelling, and its deficiencies in that area was one of the many reasons a lot of people were disappointed with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. In choosing to go with an open world approach, The Phantom Pain put its mechanics and gameplay front and centre, and as such, the narrative aspect of the experience ended up being significantly pared back.
Kojima’s upcoming Death Stranding is also taking an open world approach, so obviously, there are some who are concerned that it might be faced with similar problems as well- but according to Kojima himself, that’s not going to be the case. Speaking in an interview with 4Players, Kojima got to talking about how, after having worked on The Phantom Pain, the idea of going back to a non-open world setting doesn’t appeal to him. In spite of that, however, he went on to acknowledge the storytelling shortcomings of his previous title, before giving assurances that that wouldn’t be the case with Death Stranding.
“After experiencing an action game in an open world, you can’t just go back to other things,” he said (translation via Reddit). “That’s what I thought because of the interactivity. Of course, there are other ways to make a game. A linear game, for example. But I can’t go back after having experienced a large scale world in one game.”
“The problem is the technology,” he continued. “Of course, it’s technically difficult to create an open world. The player has the greatest possible freedom in an open world. So you’re never really sure what the player will do. In this context, storytelling is the biggest challenge in a open world game. As there is more and more freedom, this means that the story sometimes gets in the way like a distraction.
“So in Phantom Pain, I started a kind of experiment by beginning it linearly, and as soon as the world opens up, the story fades in a way. Some Hideo Kojima fans weren’t happy about the fact that the story was pushed into the background, but this was done very consciously.”
That, however, won’t be the case in Death Stranding, according to Kojima. He said, “This time with Death Stranding, the biggest challenge and the biggest obstacle was: it’s an open world game, but at the same time, we don’t want to reduce the importance of the story, so that fans of Hideo Kojima games will not be disappointed.”
From what we’ve seen so far, it definitely feels like the story is going to be front and centre in Death Stranding once again, so much so that we’ve seen a ton of story stuff, and very little of actual gameplay- at Gamescom though, we saw a bit of both. Check it out through here.
Death Stranding is out on November 8 for the PS4.