With essentially no hard details about the upcoming game, Kojima fans are forced to take whatever they can get when it comes to Death Stranding. The developer’s latest bits of released information include a possible release window, as well as the fact that a female protagonist will be joining the already (very) revealed Norman Reedus.
Speaking at TGS (via IGN), Kojima teased fans, saying of the game, “It will be out before the Olympics,” referring specifically to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. “To go a little further, there is a movie called Akira, and it will be out before the year in which Akira is set,” he continued. Akira is set in the year 2019, meaning ‘before’ could be pointing to a 2018 release window.
Posting on Twitter, the developer joked further, “Yes, Death Stranding has a set release date. Duh, how else would we be able to set a budget?”
During the TGS discussion, Kojima also suggested there will be a female protagonist, following on Twitter with, “Death Stranding’s casting is still under way… Will there be a heroine? Who should play her?”
Earlier this month, Kojima also opened up about what he has since explained on Twitter is “a new form of co-op play.” Referring to the basic need to bring people together, he stated his ambitions at the TGS PlayStation keynote: “Talking about action games in early days, a game was really the player and the PC hitting each other with a rod or a club. Next, players were connected to one another online, later emerged the concept of co-op where players co-operated with each other against the CPU as a common enemy. Although players were connected, still the connection was based on clubs or rods. In Death Stranding I want to propose the next step.”