Death Stranding, interview with Akio Sakamoto

For a few days, even PC users have been able to play Death Stranding, released with a well-studied port capable of bringing the charm of Hideo Kojima's work to a new, potentially very large audience. We were able to talk to Akio Sakamoto, PC Technical Lead of Kojima Productions.

You have just released the PC game: do you expect a different reaction from PS4 users?

I think the difference is not so much between PC and PS4 users, I believe that the reaction of the players may be different for what is happening. The release on PS4 took place last November and since then much has changed in the world, the game is based on the concept of connections and people, because of what happened, have rethought the way they are connected to others. I therefore think that whoever starts playing Death Stranding today will do so with a different look than who did it last year.

Did the greater power of many PCs compared to PS4 allow you to create an experience closer to the original vision? What was it like adapting the Tenth Engine on PC?

The game has been thought to be played at 60 frames per second and now on PC this is an achievable result; it is even possible to go further. In addition, those who can play with an ultrawide monitor can afford a more immersive gaming experience. The Decima Engine is an engine built and optimized around PS4, so bringing it to a PC and making it work with a whole series of configurations was a challenge, the most difficult thing.

What was the most important lesson important learned during the development of Death Stranding on PC?

It is not so much linked to the PC version, but the current situation caused by the virus has forced us to solve a series of small problems and work remotely, we had to update our way of acting and in the end we we managed.

There are features that you don't have the time or resources to implement? Any regrets?

I wouldn't say regrets, but there are many people who have asked us to put the ray tracing , which we have not been able to enter this time. Of course we thought about it and we studied the thing, we were very interested in it. However, we were at the same time aware of the need to bring the game on PC as soon as possible: to us, the users, are the most important thing and we didn't want to bring a feature that is not completely satisfactory.

With Death Stranding you took the risk of creating a new intellectual property : the rifarete in the future, or do you prefer to work on some pre-existing brand?

Personally, I think that the most important thing for a developer is to bring users the best content possible. That said, in Kokima Productions, we very much appreciate the technical challenges, regardless of whether you work on a new IP or not. There are many new technologies that come out, and we want to study all of them.