After the reveal of Death Stranding 2 at The Game Awards, director Hideo Kojima appeared on stage to say that the story of the announced sequel was completely rewritten following the pandemic, even though he had it all drafted in 2020 before the global crisis.

Kojima joked that the reason for this decision was due to how Death Stranding came very close to predicting the future, or ended up paralleling the developments of our real world after the epidemic. He said "Well, I had the story written before the pandemic, but after experiencing the pandemic I just rewrote the whole thing, the story from scratch. I also didn't want to predict any more future, so I rewrote it". The themes of Death Stranding also have a great focus on the importance of genuine connections, and the need to facilitate these connections in a dying scattered world, so his feelings are somewhat justified.

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It's not particularly out of the ordinary for a sci-fi story to have common elements with our present reality, as the genre is often concerned about accurately depicting future scenarios using present trends and concepts. Kojima isn't even hiding his obsession with the topic – as he mentions in his book The Creative Gene – and is always looking closely at the influences of the digital era on our modern social climate. He is also a big fan of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is observed by many to have predicted many future trends such as space travel and artificial intelligence.

Death Stranding 2 lea seydoux and child

Ironically enough, we are now living in a future that Kojima has outlined all the way back in 2001 in his magnum opus Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. The game was mainly concerned with how information gets passed on in our modern world, including cultural and social trends, and how it is hard to achieve political liberty and freedom of thought in the information age. Whatever Kojima ends up writing, it is bound to hit home to our modern lifestyle, so it's possible that he rewrote his story to provide a more hopeful interpretation of the future he predicts, but only time will tell.

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