And a few months after Death Stranding was launched, the outbreak of covid soon upended everyday life, including Kojima’s. The isolation he felt almost mirrored the sense of solitude that’s so prevalent in the first Death Stranding. The sum of these experiences inspired him to rewrite Death Stranding 2 as a cautionary tale. I was informed by the PlayStation PR team that Kojima didn’t want to risk getting ill again for the rest of the Death Stranding 2 world tour. Death Stranding 2, meanwhile, has a greater focus on combat than the first, a feature that Kojima also partly attributed to Metal Gear’s popularity.