Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima has spoken about a number of topics concerning Sony’s sudden shocking decision to back away from publishing his tactical espionage project, Physint. It was a decision made in June, and though Kojima was able to convince Xbox to pick up the Metal Gear successor and continue funding and publishing it, the transition raised a lot of questions.
One of the most obvious questions being: which platforms will the game be available on? Will it be an Xbox exclusive now, or will it still release on PlayStation?
“I don’t know the answer to that – that would be a question for Xbox,” Kojima told IGN in an interview. “In previous updates from Xbox, I thought that they have this kind of stance where they want to deliver to as many gamers as possible, no matter what the platform is.”
Xbox has indeed embraced a multi-platform strategy for several years, but that strategy shifted with new CEO Asha Sharma’s arrival at the beginning of the year. Xbox is now once again embracing exclusives
“I think all of that will be announced at a later time,” Kojima added. “I’m not sure yet, and I can’t really say.”
The other obvious, PlayStation-related question concerns the game’s engine. When Kojima left Konami and established his independent Kojima Productions, he spent a lot of time looking for the right engine to build his next project with – the game that would later become Death Stranding.
The engine that won out belonged to Sony; it was Horizon developer Guerrilla Games’ internal engine, which the studio gave to Kojima on the condition his team continues adding to it. The engine didn’t have a name at that point, but after several modifications, the two parties named it Decima.
So, will Physint share the same engine as the Death Stranding games – Decima? Kojima’s answer is complicated. “Well, I haven’t really decided yet. I’m still experimenting,” he said, when asked if he had to change the game’s engine after Sony dropped the project.
“After we decided to team up with Xbox, they said they will give us a lot of technological support. When I went to visit them during the Don Mattrick days, they had so many labs and everything, and they were experimenting on so many things, like state of the art, new, really new, cutting-edge technology.
“I was really surprised,” he added. “I was thinking, ‘There are so many Doc Browns from Back to the Future here!’ So I want to use all this new technology. Anything that I can use, I want to use, and I’m looking forward to teaming up with Xbox, but I really haven’t decided about the engine.”
It’s worth noting that Kojima Productions’ next project, the also Xbox-funded OD: Knock, is being developed on Unreal Engine 5, so there’s a chance the studio may decide on Epic’s popular engine to develop Physint. But considering OD: Knock does not itself have a release target, we maybe waiting a long while yet to see Physint.