Composer says Kojima changed Death Stranding 2 ‘because it wasn’t polarizing enough’
“If everyone likes it, it’s mainstream,” Kojima told Death Stranding 2 composer Woodkid
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach composer Woodkid has said that Hideo Kojima made changes to Death Stranding 2 because early testers of the game liked it too much.
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach will be released on June 26, exclusively for PlayStation 5.
Now, in a new interview, Woodkid, real name Yoann Lemoine, has discussed his time providing music for the game, and working with creative director Hideo Kojima.
“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.’” Woodkid told Rolling Stone.
“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.
“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.”
VGC recently travelled to Kojima Productions in Tokyo, Japan, for an extensive Death Stranding 2 preview and interviews with the game’s development team, including director Hideo Kojima.
“As I sniped a guard from a watch tower, equipped a silenced rifle, and planned a sneaky infiltration into an enemy base to extract a prisoner, it was impossible to escape the thought that ‘oh wow, this really does feel like Metal Gear’,” we wrote.
