Hideo Kojima Says A Battle Royale Was “The Easiest Thing” To Do After Splitting With Konami

Hideo Kojima has held a panel with Nicholas Winding Refn and Geoff Keighley at San Diego Comic-Con, where he shared a few interesting details about Death Stranding, of course, and Refn’s character. When asked about the long development times for the title, though, Kojima offered a quite interesting answer.

Hideo Kojima held a panel with Nicholas Winding Refn and Geoff Keighley at San Diego Comic-Con. Kojima shared a few new details about Death Stranding and Refn’s character. When asked about the long development times for the title, though, Kojima offered a quite exciting answer.

Kojima had already discussed in the past a detailed timeline regarding the making of the PS4 exclusive. He shared it only took three years for him and his studio to ship it — which is quite a usual timeframe for AAA games.

“When I first started my new company, I started from scratch and was alone,” Kojima said. This information was reported by IGN, regarding the days when he split with his previous publisher Konami. Interestingly one of the reasons why “this game is based on how you connect,” perhaps as a reaction to being completely alone and forced to start all over again.

Then, Kojima took some time to state why he is still in the field of story-based games, despite the industry going all-in with the games as a service and battle royale titles. He doesn’t have a reasonable opinion about those games.

“When I first started my production, the easiest thing for me to do is make a game where everyone is on an island and shoots each other…,” Kojima said. “Creativity is what moves civilizations forward. We’re living in an era when algorithms dictate creativity that it becomes meaningless almost. It’s important to counter that.”

Death Stranding is releasing on Nov. 8, 2019, for PlayStation 4.