Interview highlights
TASS, a Russian news agency, discussed Death Stranding with its director, producer, and designer Hideo Kojima. The article was posted on October 7th, 2019.
Values and themes
When asked about Death Stranding’s themes and values, Kojima told TASS that players need to understand the role of connections. Kojima said that connections hold the game together. He added that through connections, players can positively or negatively affect others. Further, Kojima said that connections have an influence on the various other game themes. He listed various of these themes such as life and death, love and friendship, and parents and children.
Kojima described Sam as a character that struggles to cope with other characters.
He has personal trauma and this trauma determines his pattern of behavior and relationships with others.
Its Genre
When asked about its unique genre, Kojima mentioned how peculiar it felt to see a new genre come to life. Kojima wanted to build on the concept of connections and allow players to form bridges with one another. He established that Death Stranding is a single-player open-world game that gives players the freedom to carve their own path.
Kojima told TASS that in certain parts of the game, the player can find traces of others. It seems that Kojima wants players to interact without breaking the game’s immersion. This seems to resemble Dark Souls’ message system rather than the face-to-face interactions of most other multiplayer games. Kojima purposefully incorporates interactions, albeit indirectly, in bits and pieces in his concept of the social strand.
When you walk you leave traces – someone else can see your footprints, and you can see another player who passed here. So you do not see each other, but you know that there are other players who are taking the same path in the game.
Hopes for the future
When asked about the prospect of other games adapting the genre, Kojima told TASS that he is uncertain. He talked about the success of the stealth genre and how other developers drew inspiration from it. Ultimately, he said that any hope of spawning adaptations relies on the success of Death Stranding.
Understanding the story
Kojima didn’t say much when asked about the how of the game the player has to complete to understand the story. He said that he would break the game’s immersion if he revealed the necessary completion rate. He encouraged players to enjoy the game and pick up on the story as they go along. Despite having said all of this, Kojima eventually shared that about a third of the game should suffice to have a decent grasp of the story. Kojima also teased that if players can assemble the trailers in the correct order, they can figure the story out.
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