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Kojima on his Konami depature
"Originally I'd planned to fly a bit low key. I wanted to do an indie game, something on a smaller scale," Kojima tells Red Bull Games at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. He's in great spirits, all the pressure from his dramatic Konami departure gone. "But, well, my good friend [film director] Guillermo del Toro said, 'No Hideo. You can't do that, people want more and you have to give them a new big game'."
Del Toro was originally going to work behind the scenes in their partnership, but for Death Stranding, Kojima Productions upcoming PS4 exclusive game, the Hollywood director is playing an even bigger part than planned. As the second trailer reveals, he was 3D scanned and plays a big role in the game, clutching a robot fetus in a jar, a classic bit of Kojima nightmare fuel.
What does the scene mean? Kojima is cryptic, but we can take a guess. He's wearing a suit and could be an American politician in some post-apocalypse North American state, perhaps even the president, given that his pin reads 'Bridges – United Cities of America'. Many American authority figures wear a pin, from secretary to senator. "It's [Del Toro's] voice, but we use an actor for the full performance motion-capturing because I don't want to steal too much time of Guillermo. He would get involved too much, and I want him to focus on his movies," Kojima jokes.
Even though building up an entirely new studio from scratch proved to be a challenge for his management team, consisting of Metal Gear lead artist
Yoji Shinkawa and producer
Ken Imaizumi. "It was a big challenge. So I was searching for a partner, and Sony Playstation was the perfect fit," Kojima says.
Not only programmers, designers, software engineers and graphic artists applied for jobs, but also some big names from Hollywood.
"I felt very grateful and humbled when so many studios and people across the entire industry offered their support," he says. Although, even though Kojima is keen on not talking about his dramatic departure from Konami, it's clear that his former employer didn't allow him to take the FoxEngine from Metal Gear Solid V with him. Luckily, Sony had its own in-house alternative.
'I was on the hunt for a new engine, so I've done quite a trip together with
Marc Cerny around the world.' Cerny is the lead architect of the Playstation 4 and
Playstation 4 Pro.
"When we visited Guerrilla Games and I played Horizon: Zero Dawn, I felt in love with their philosophy of technology. And then things went quickly in an almost crazy way.
"Hermen Mulst [Guerilla Games managing director] sent me this cool box with a USB drive containing the entire source code of the engine. This was quite a special moment for me because at that time we didn't even have a contract. They just trusted me and my team with the code base. It's fair to say that Hermen is as insane as I am," Kojima laughs.
What started out as a tech collaboration quickly evolved into a friendship between Guerrilla and Kojima Productions, and they're currently setting up a satellite studio in Amsterdam next to Guerrilla. "If someone out there wants to work with us, please apply and join," says Mr. Kojima with a big smile.
The Hollywood Death Stranding dream team
Kojima's been leading the recruitment drive personally, we learn. "I like to call people myself directly on the phone," he says. "So I've talked to Guillermo, he gave me the number of Norman [Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead], and he turned out to be quite a fan. I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead and his work, and he kinda likes my games.
"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."
And because Kojima will always remain Kojima, we're not getting any more details on the story than that (though for context, Metal Gear's lore took in everything form the Cold War to nano-machines, bipedal robots, zombies and watermelons. So, expect crazy). "It's too early to talk about the broader details of the story or to reveal the female lead, but we have a core structure already," as he frames it.
First gameplay secrets about Death Stranding
While Kojima isn't ready just yet to talk about game details, simply saying, "there's a ton of information and hints in the trailer." Hermen Hulst from Guerrilla Games however shared some secrets.
"Our engine, called Decima, is able to pull off an extreme level of detail, even in a vast open world. With 'Physical Based Rendering' we can give every material its own touch and really go into details. Whether it's skin on a face, animated hair in different weather conditions or the dusty metal of a war helmet."
Kojima also recently mentioned that, "Death Stranding is fully playable in single player, but also a unique co-op experience, where I want to tie people together with the equivalent of ropes. Also, the story is all about connections, that are called 'strands' in psychology."
This explains why in the gameplay Mads Mikkelsen's antagonist is connected via black braided cables to a bunch of soldiers, and seems to control them that way (telepathy being a hallmark of Kojima games). And even though Kojima is tightlipped about characters in the story, it appears that people from different time zones are trapped within the same scenario, because we're seeing modern tanks and soldiers wearing high-tech goggles, but also American Paratroopers from World War II – so perhaps some sort of afterlife?
The game also appears to be about global pollution, because in every trailer so far we've seen dead dolphins stranded in thick oil. But who knows, perhaps that's a red herring: you might remember the burning whale from
The Phantom Pain trailer, which turned out to be just a hallucination from Big Boss.
What Kojima wants to talk about though is tech. "Decima is a groundbreaking rendering engine, but if we would create the same worlds there's no point to that.
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."
What this weird baby doll with needles in its head represents remains Kojima's secret for now. But the gameplay we’ve seen so far really is gameplay. "
Yes, it was rendered in real-time on a PS4 Pro. And it will look much better when the game comes out," enthuses Kojima.
http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331833663341/death-stranding-hideo-kojima-interview
