Death Stranding - Kojima on Our Impact on NPCs and Theme of Connecting
During his visit to Moscow, Hideo Kojima told a bit more about his latest work, Death Stranding. He said a few words about the players' objective in the game, the multiplayer mode and how our actions will affect NPCs.
Last week, Hideo Kojima visited Moscow. On Friday, he took part in a public discussion organized by the Garage Museum of Modern Art, during which he revealed some interesting details about his latest, unusual and not easily classified production, Death Stranding (via Reddit). At the beginning, the creator of the Metal Gear series emphasized that the upcoming game will be a metaphor of the contemporary world, showing what our society can achieve, but also drawing attention to the lack of unity among people. It will be up to the players to change that. To quote the words of Kojima:
"There has been nothing but a stick in the gaming industry for the past 30 years. Of course, I love stick games, but it’s time for the rope to appear. If you continue this thought, then you can connect the whole world with a rope. It is like building bridges. And in our game, this is how it happens - you can connect locations. Since this is an open world game, you can choose the order of your actions."
An important element of connections in Death Stranding will be cooperation with other players, which has been talked about for a long time. It is supposed to work a bit like network functions from the titles developed by FromSoftware. Let's see what Kojima thinks about it:
"Imagine that Katya and I (Ekaterina Inozemtseva, senior curator of the Garage Museum) are sitting in cardboard boxes. And how do we play on the internet? Katya is sitting in her box, I am in my own, and we shoot each other. And there are two ways to go beyond these boundaries: the first is to tear cardboard boxes and hug. But this is difficult, so I decided to go the other way - we tear the boxes, but we can’t see each other.
We can only see traces - this is a connection through an “intermediary”. We see that somewhere another player exists, but we can’t touch him ... And Death Stranding actively uses an approach with user interaction through third-party things, but without direct contact."
Watch out for possible spoilers below
During the conversation with fans in Russia, Kojima also revealed a very interesting thing about NPCs in Death Stranding. Apparently whether we complete the game will largely depend on what relationships we establish with individual characters and whether, for example, we let them die or not.
"We have a character who lives deep underground. He is sick and needs medicine, and Sam can deliver it. Since this happens at the beginning of the story, this is a must. After completing this quest, the player himself chooses the following actions: you can constantly go to the old man and carry medicine; can deliver other items; You can listen to his stories from the past.
But the player is constantly moving forward and moving away from the character. And I'm sure that there are gamers who forget about this old man. And then they will remember and return to it. Since they have not carried medicine to him all this time, he will die by this moment. Through such actions, a connection arises with the character.
We really hope that the significance of the connection between people - how it is formed, how it develops - will be revealed, and it will be interesting for you to play it."
Such threads can in quite an interesting way put the player's morality to the test. It is possible that they are can also signal several different endings, which you will be able to see in the finale of the game. However, we will find out the truth on November 8, when Death Stranding will be released on PlayStation 4.
