Kojima Productions hasn’t officially announced it yet, but Actor Norman Reedus has confirmed that Death Stranding 2 is already in development. We have no more information about this second installment, unfortunately, but taking into account all the work time that the original needed to come to fruition, we can make a few things clear.
The first is the most obvious, and it is that Death Stranding 2 is going to be a next-gen game, that is, we will not see it on PS4. This has a positive side, and it is that Hideo Kojima will be able to consider a much more ambitious development and execution from a technical point of view, since he will not have to assume the limitations of the veteran Sony console.
On the other hand, it is also clear that Death Stranding 2 is still a few years away from hitting the market. Nothing concrete, but I remember Reedus himself saying that it took two to three years to complete the motion capture process of the original, so it’s likely that this second installment will be, at the very least, a couple of years away.
Death Stranding was released in November 2019, and despite the criticism it received, the truth is that it deserves to be considered a good game. It is a risky bet that has very boring moments, but in the end, when valued as a whole, is shaping up to be a game that is clearly on another level both for its approach and for its history, and that on top of that it has an excellent technical invoice, both for graphic quality and for optimization.
What can we expect from Death Stranding 2?
We have no official information beyond what Kojima said a couple of years ago, but it is possible. make an estimate pretty reliable seeing what happened with the first installment, and with what we know at the moment about Death Stranding 2.
The fact that it’s going to be a new generation game makes it clear that we can expect a significant leap at the graphic leveland that it is very likely to rely on state-of-the-art technologies, including ray tracing and the most popular rescaling techniques (DLSS, FSR and XeSS).
One can also expect a good optimization, and a similar gameplay approach, Unless Kojima decides to introduce drastic changes in Death Stranding 2. It would not be normal considering that the second parts always maintain the focus of the originals, but knowing the Japanese it is something that we cannot completely rule out.
I think the development of Death Stranding 2 started in the middle of 2020, because that’s when Reedus himself confirmed that he was involved in another project with Kojima. If this is so, and taking into account the development time that the original took, I think it is likely that its release will take place between the end of 2023 and the middle of 2024.
