Hideo Kojima Made Changes To Death Stranding 2 As Testers Liked It Too Much, Says Composer Woodkid

Yoann ‘Woodkid’ Lemoine, the composer for Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, has revealed that designer Hideo Kojima made changes to the upcoming sequel as the reaction from test players was too positive, and therefore the game wasn’t polarising enough.

Speaking with Rolling Stone, Woodkid revealed that the Metal Gear mastermind said that if everyone likes it, then it’s considered mainstream, which is something he wants to avoid. To be honest, this probably won’t come as as surprise to fans of Kojima’s work, as his various projects over the years are nothing short of esoteric in one way or another, so why should Death Stranding be any different?

There’s a key moment where we had a discussion, probably halfway [through] when we were doing the game, where he came to me and he said, ‘We have a problem.’ Then he said, ‘I’m going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.’ And he changed stuff in the script and the way some crucial stuff [happens] in the game because he thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions.

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And he said, ‘If everyone likes it, it means it’s mainstream. It means it’s conventional. It means it’s already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don’t want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn’t like when they first encountered it, because that’s where you really end up loving something’. And that was really a lesson for me; not doing stuff to please people, but to make them shift a little bit and move them.

Back in May, the game’s chief technical officer revealed that, while the technical leap from PS4 to PS5 isn’t as large as past hardware generations, it allows for ‘more efficient development.’ Meanwhile, Kojima himself revealed during an interview following press previews for Death Stranding 2 that the game has some similarities to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, his final project with Konami.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is scheduled for release on June 26, 2025 for PS5.

[Source – Rolling Stone via VGC]