Last week, we reported on some minor tidbits of information revealed about Death Stranding at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was reaffirmed that Death Stranding will be an open world game, which is certainly easy to wrap your head around, compared to the rest of what we’ve seen. Kojima noted that “connection” will be a significant theme, as well. Today, Geoff Keighley, mastermind of the annual Game Awards ceremony posted a snippet from a talk he had with Kojima during a panel at the film festival.
Keighley asked Kojima about why it was important to have Norman Reedus’ tattoos in-game, when presumably, we aren’t playing as Reedus, but rather the character, Sam Bridges. Kojima said the following through a translator:
In Death Stranding I’m trying to put every aspect [of Norman] in there, and you will see his … everything, in the game. You’ll see Norman as Sam in the game, and you’ll see his acting, and you’ll enjoy that. You have to become Norman when you play. And Norman says a lot of things that you’ll probably feel, playing as Norman. So he’s Norman and Sam as the same time.
Reedus asked, “So, they’ll play as me?” To which Kojima responded, “No, they’ll be you.”
Hideo says that if Norman gets a new tattoo, he will patch it into Death Stranding as DLC. From our talk at @tribeca last week. pic.twitter.com/uQvPszCHSw
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 1, 2019
This conversation was sparked because Reedus got a new tattoo, which Kojima insisted on rescanning to put it into the game. This is something that most game directors would never consider, but we’ll just chalk this up to it being a typical Kojima move. They then joked that if Reedus got another tattoo after the game shipped, they’d implement it as DLC.
All of that being said, we still don’t have much of an idea as to what this game actually is, other than some sort of open world adventure. It’s unclear if it really will be mind-blowing of if Kojima is just speaking like this to generate interest. Whichever it is, we are curious to find out more about Death Stranding, which should be in a month or so, according to Techradar’s post.