Tag: hideo
‘Death Stranding 2’ is Hideo Kojima’s next game
Hideo Kojima’s next project is Death Stranding 2. The reveal trailer for the sequel shows Fragile, played by Léa Seydoux, and Sam, played by Norman Reedus, in a world still infested with lethal BTs. There’s no word on a release date, but according to the trailer’s YouTube description, it’s heading to PlayStation 5.
Kojima took the stage during The Game Awards to introduce Death Stranding 2. Its cast is just as star-studded as the original, featuring Elle Fanning, Shioli Kutsuna and Troy Baker alongside Reedus and Seydoux.
Death Stranding came out in 2019 and it steadily became the industry’s favorite walking simulator (despite the fact that it may have been a better movie than a video game). By the end of 2022, more than 10 million people had played Death Stranding. Its primary gameplay innovation was an online system that allowed players to communicate with each other, even though it was a single-player experience. Death Stranding was the first title out of Kojima Productions, the studio Kojima himself founded after parting ways with his longtime employer, Konami.
Ahead of The Game Awards on December 8th, Kojima tweeted some teases for the show, including an image that seemed to be Fragile from Death Stranding. The tweet included the text, “How come?” and Kojima added, “‘WHO’ ‘WHERE’ ‘HOW’ and now ‘WHY’.”
We now know what Kojima was talking about — not that he asked.
Footage of what appeared to be Kojima’s next project leaked online in early November in the form of a super strange video. It showed a character resembling Mama from Death Stranding traversing creepy corridors with a dark presence at her back, and ended with a title screen reading, “Overdose.” It also included the reflection of a lounging shirtless man recording the footage off-screen, but that’s likely unrelated to any gameplay mechanics. Today at The Game Awards, Kojima said his studio is also working on a second, completely new project with an experimental edge, so there’s still some hope for whatever this was.
Hideo Kojima’s next game is Death Stranding 2
Death Stranding is back. Hideo Kojima revealed his next game at the Game Awards this evening — and yes, it still has creepy babies. Death Stranding 2 will once again star Norman Reedus and Lea Seydoux and it looks just as strange as its predecessor, at least based on the debut trailer. It also appears that DS2 is a working title right now. The game doesn’t have a release date but it’s coming to the PS5.
The enigmatic director had been teasing the reveal in the lead up to this evening’s event, going so far as to reveal key cast members like Elle Fanning and Shioli Kutsuna. This will be Kojima Productions’ second major release, following the original Death Stranding, which debuted on the PS4 before expanding to other platforms. The sequel…
Hideo Kojima can’t help but tease his next game, this time with some fancy logos
Hideo Kojima just can’t seem to stop teasing his next game, whatever it might be, this time showing off some logos which… well, they look nice, I guess!
At this point I think we all get the deal with Kojima. He’s a bit of a showman, he likes to do things in a way most other people won’t, like pretending his eventually-cancelled Silent Hill game was made by an indie developer. This time, with his next, untitled game, he’s been posting some teasers, like his reveal that Elle Fanning will be in it. His latest tease for this next game? Logos! Nice logos, though.
“Start a new journey,” wrote Kojima on his English Twitter, paired with a logo for something called the Automated Public Assistance Company (the most generic and yet still believable name I’ve ever seen for a fictional company), another logo we’ve seen in previous teases showing what could be a door, and a third logo that kind of looks like an octopus.
Hideo Kojima, man whose body is “made of movies,” unsurprisingly wants to try making some
If you’re familiar with Hideo Kojima’s work, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that he’s pretty interested in actually making a movie one of these days.
As reported by VGC, Kojima recently spoke at the Anan Awards in Japan (via Famitsu), as he one the top honours in the culture category for Death Stranding. At the event, he noted that even though his career has been entirely games focused, “all fields are connected in digital works, so I would like to expand from games to fields such as film and music.”
Music isn’t a hugely surprising thing either, as it’s been a majorly important aspect of all of his titles, including the most recent one Death Stranding. But Kojima being a film love in particular is probably the easiest piece of trivia you could offer about the game developer. His English Twitter quite literally jokingly states “70% of my body is made of movies,” which you could easily say about his games too, with the length of cutscenes they all have.
‘Metal Gear Solid 2’ mod adds a third-person camera to Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece
Twenty years ago this month, Konami released Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, an expanded reissue of MGS2: Sons of Liberty. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to revisit one of the most important games of the 21st century, now is the perfect time. Over the weekend, modder oct0xor released The Substance of Subsistence, a mod that adds a third-person camera to Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece.
If it’s been a while since you played MGS2, you may have forgotten the game employed an overhead camera that was a holdover from Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid. It wasn’t until 2006’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, the expanded rerelease of Snake Eater, that Hideo Kojima and Konami implemented a proper third-person camera. That bit of history is also where the mod’s name comes from, with The Substance of Subsistence referring to the expanded editions of each game.
Adding a new perspective to MGS2 was no easy task. “The code to have a normal third-person camera was never present in the game, and in order to implement it, I had to reverse engineer and rewrite many things in the game engine,” oct0xor told PC Gamer. You can learn more about the work that was involved in a developer diary oct0xor shared a few months back.
You can find instructions on how to install the Substance of Subsistence on Github. The tricky part is finding a copy of the game for PC. Konami delisted Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 from GOG and other digital storefronts over a “temporary” licensing issue in 2021. In July, the company said it was still working on resolving the dispute but did not provide a timeline for when the games would be available to purchase again.
Cancelled Stadia-exclusive Death Stranding sequel never existed, says Hideo Kojima
Despite previous reports, according to head-honcho Hideo Kojima himself, a Death Stranding sequel exclusive to Google Stadia was never going to happen.
Back in September a report emerged claiming that at some point in time, a Death Stranding sequel of some sort was in development for the Stadia, but was ultimately cancelled by Google Stadia’s general manager Phil Harrison as the company believed there wasn’t a market for single player games any more. Well, that report was wrong by the sounds of it, as during the 10th episode of his Brain Structure podcast, Kojima put speculation to bed (thanks, GamesRadar).
“How do you react to that?” Kojima asked hypothetically about the numerous things that players come to him with. “Users send me stuff like this directly, like ‘word is going around about so and so.’ It’s constant, almost every day, and I don’t know where the original source came from, so I can’t say much about it.”
Kojima Productions will stay independent “as long as I’m alive,” says Hideo Kojima
Hideo Kojima apparently keeps getting offers for Kojima Productions to be acquired, but he’s insistent on staying independent until he’s dead.
If you’ve somehow missed out on the last seven years of Kojima-related news, back in 2015 he formed his own studio after a pretty messy divorce with Konami. His own studio, named after himself, has remained independent since then, and the Metal Gear Solid creator has no intention of changing that. As on the latest episode of his Spotify podcast, he made it clear that Kojima Productions is staying clear of a buyout (via Eurogamer).
“I created this company in December 2015 after leaving Konami,” Kojima explained on his podcast. “It was 100 percent out of my pocket – no funding from anyone whatsoever. We are indies, we have no affiliations whatsoever and are not backed by anyone, and are on good terms with everybody in the industry.