Death Stranding 2 Director Embraces Decima Engine for Ambitious Features Despite Its Challenges

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Akio Sakamoto, the chief technical officer at Kojima Productions, has shared insights into the studio’s decision to use the less conventional Decima game engine for Death Stranding, despite its steeper learning curve.

In the realm of game engines, Unity and Unreal Engine reign supreme. Yet, Kojima Productions opted for Guerilla Games’ proprietary Decima engine for their open-world experiences.

While Guerilla Games employs Decima for its own franchises like Killzone and Horizon, a few other studios have also embraced it. Notably, Kojima Productions utilized it for the Death Stranding series, and Supermassive Games has adopted it for the Until Dawn titles.

In a conversation with Automaton, Sakamoto elaborated on the studio’s unique choice. “When we were evaluating Decima, I had the chance to work with the engine firsthand,” he noted. “It provided many essential features for developing an open-world game, and while some elements are less user-friendly than mainstream engines, its runtime rendering analysis tools were particularly impressive.”

He emphasized the importance of this analysis in their development process. “Having access to such a comprehensive set of data without needing external tools is invaluable,” Sakamoto stated. “[It] also included functionalities I had long wished to see in the engine I previously worked on. Considering all of this, we decided to go with Decima.”

Reflecting on their choice, Sakamoto remains confident. “It’s been nearly a decade since we started using this engine,” he remarked. “While no engine is perfect for every situation, Decima allows us to achieve many things that would be challenging with others.”

Hideo Kojima, the visionary behind Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, believes that “we can’t go back” to a world without AI, drawing parallels to the impact of smartphones.