Hideo Kojima has spoken about the importance of bringing Death Stranding to PC – and the challenges involved in meeting the demands of core PC players.
Kojima Productions’ debut project originally released for PS4 in November 2019 before making its way to PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store in July 2020.
The PC version features a higher frame rate, photo mode, ultrawide monitor support and Half-Life crossover content, among other features.
“When I first started in this industry, I worked on PC games,” Kojima said in a newly published video interview promoting the PC version of the game, which is currently on sale, for publisher 505 Games.
“It was quite a while before I started to make games for consoles, so I feel a lot of affection and affinity towards the PC. Games are developed on PCs, after all.”
Kojima said Death Stranding was released for PC in a bid to attract a new audience—”PlayStation gamers and core PC users are a different market”—so the game would be played by as many people as possible.
He said he was “most proud” of the fact that Kojima Productions developed the PC version itself rather than outsourcing the game, which he said is something that’s “usually” done.
“There are a lot of core PC users, so we tried to include features and gimmicks that would make PC fans happy,” he explained.
“In terms of what was hard… There’s a wide range of PC hardware, and it feels like there’s quite a gap between the top end and the bottom end. The question of where to set the baseline was therefore a major issue, and we struggled with that.
“Another issue was mouse controls. I’m not really good at playing the game with a mouse, but the PC version had to support mouse controls, of course, but configuring them was tricky. I left that to our staff, though. I play with a controller.
“Also, what might be the most important aspect is that core PC gamers are pretty vocal and opinionated about games, and making something that would satisfy them was very tricky,” he added.
“I’m glad we took on the challenge, though, because it seems people are pleased with the results.”
The PC version of Death Stranding has a Metascore of 86 on review aggregation site Metacritic, based on 54 reviews, which is slightly higher than PS4 version’s 82 Metascore, although that’s based on 111 reviews.
According to a New York Times profile of Kojima published in March 2020, the designer has “an encyclopedic knowledge” of Death Stranding’s review scores and believes America’s preference for shooters led to lesser scores for the console version of game, which a number of critics labelled a walking simulator.
In July 2020, Kojima Productions art director Yoji Shinkawa talked up the benefits of ultrawide support for the PC version of Death Stranding, stating that it feels like “watching a movie” compared to the console version.
Kojima has said he could work with Death Stranding star Norman Reedus again, perhaps in a sequel to the open-world game, although if he did create Death Stranding 2, he “would start from zero.”
Be the first to comment