Sony Interactive Entertainment and Kojima Productions’ next title, Death Stranding 2, may be planned for release in the year 2025, and a trailer is expected to be revealed at the upcoming The Game Awards.
According to the ArtStation profile of Aron Vajda, character artist at 3lateral who worked on Death Stranding 2, the game is scheduled for release sometime in 2025. It’s worth noting, however, that 3lateral is an outsourcing company, and Vajda may not have proper details regarding the project’s status.
Additionally, the official Twitter/X account for The Game Awards teased a possible new trailer for Death Stranding 2 at 2023’s show. Kojima Productions game director Hideo Kojima had tweeted about working on an audio mix, presumably for an upcoming trailer. The Game Awards’ twitter/X handle responded to it with an emoji, suggesting that it may be in preparation for the upcoming show on December 7, 2023. The Game Awards’ tweet was later deleted, lending further credibility to the theory that Kojima may have been preparing the audio mix for a new Death Stranding 2 trailer to be debuted at show.
Previously, a similar ArtStation profile of senior character artist, Frank Aliberti, had suggested that Death Stranding 2 would launch in the year 2024. Based on his resume, the developer has worked as a character artist on the project.
Death Stranding 2 was officially revealed at The Game Awards 2022. It was also revealed that the characters featured in the game are powered by Unreal Engine 5’s MetaHuman technology. Towards the end of the reveal trailer, it is stated that the game is powered by Unreal Engine 5’s MetaHuman technology. The feature had previously only been demonstrated on Epic Games’ modern game engine. However, it appears that Epic Games is now allowing developers to incorporate the technology in their in-house game engines.
Decima is the first non-Unreal Engine title to use MetaHuman. The technology paves the way for the creation of fully rigged photo-realistic digital 3D character models in a matter of minutes. This will undoubtedly save Kojima Productions’ a lot of development time and effort.
