Death Stranding – Yoji Shinkawa Talks About Designing Characters And Working With Famous Actors

There’s a lot of curiosity surrounding Death Stranding, partly because of how cool it looks, and partly because of the fact that it’s being developed by Kojima Productions. Yoji Shinkawa, the studio’s character designer, recently sat down for an interview French site Gameblog and gave a few brief answers on the process of working on the game to further feed that curiosity.

When he was asked how different the process of working on the game is from his previous work on the Metal Gear Solid games, Shinkawa said that it was actually not all that different. “There isn’t really a difference,” he said (translation via ResetERA). “In all the games we work on, we do things quite naturally, we do the things we want to do. For example with Metal Gear Solid 1, we did not say “we’re going to sell a lot”. It happened naturally. The main thing is that we create games that we would like to play and we create worlds that we like.”

Unlike most games in the Metal Gear series, though, Death Stranding is going to feature real life actors who’ll be portraying different roles in the game, and as per Shinkawa, this actually makes his work as the character designer a lot easier. “In fact, working with real actors is easier for me,” he said when he was asked about the same. “I start by meeting the actors and thanks to that, I get to have an idea of the kind of people that they are and the characters that they will be. After that, I will create the whole image of the character, whether it’s their clothes or everything around. For me, it makes things a little easier.”

Death Stranding is without a release date (though we don’t expect it to launch before 2019, at the earliest), but it is slated for a PS4 release, followed by a PC launch as well. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for continued coverage on the game.