Death Stranding 2: On the Beach featured heavily in Sony’s January State of Play presentation. The PlayStation 5 sequel won’t arrive until some time in 2025, but its almost 10-minute trailer taught us a lot about it. Unsurprisingly, DS2, the latest game from famed auteur Hideo Kojima, may seem incomprehensible within the context of that trailer. To help you out, we’ve gone over it with a fine-toothed comb to help break down what we know so far.
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Death Stranding 2 News
February 4, 2024 – Death Stranding On The Beach In 16 Wild Images: Just a selection of beautiful screenshots from the game.
February 1, 2024 – Death Stranding 2’s Moving Hand Masks Are Freaky AF: Seriously what is going on with that weird hand mask grabbing Lea Seydoux’s face? Kojima, please explain.
February 1, 2024 – Yep, That’s Legendary Australian Director George Miller In The Death Stranding 2 Trailer: Mad Max director George Miller appears to have a part to play in DT2, appearing as a kind of chop shop doctor. That Australian accent you hear in the trailer? That’s his voice.
December 18, 2023: Hideo Kojima Says He Faced Opposition From ‘Peers, Colleagues, and Relatives’ When He Went Independent: Kojima recounts the heady and difficult early days of Kojima Productions as it began work on the original DS.
August 4, 2023 – Hideo Kojima Says Death Stranding 2 Will Redefine ‘Strand’: After claiming he’d made the first ‘Strand’ type game in the original, Kojima then claimed he would reinvent it for the sequel.
December 21, 2022 – Let’s All Judge Hideo Kojima’s New Spaceship Of An Office: As Kojima Productions staffed up for production on Death Stranding 2, it moved into a new office space that is straight out of its owner’s sci-fi favourites.
December 16, 2022 – Kojima’s Making A Death Stranding Movie With A New Story: Kojima finally gets his wish to make a real movie, and he’s using it to rewrite DS.
December 9, 2022 – Death Stranding 2 Stars An Older Sam Bridges And … Octopus Babies?: The official Death Stranding 2 announcement came during The Game Awards 2022.
September 28, 2021 – Death Stranding Director’s Cut Makes Its Private Rooms Even Creepier: One of the last stops on the DT content roadmap before development on DT2 began.
August 30, 2021 – Death Stranding 2 Is ‘In Negotiations’, Norman Reedus Says: Star Norman Reedus became one of the first people to indicate that a sequel to Death Stranding was on the table.
When is the Death Stranding 2 release date?
Death Stranding 2 does not have a confirmed release date at this time. We know that it is currently slated for release sometime in 2025. If we had to guess a window, we would say the latter half of the year. The original launched on November 9, 2019, and we’d expect a similar window again.
Death Stranding 2 platforms
Death Stranding 2 will launch exclusively on PlayStation 5- at least to start with. The original game was marketed as a PS4 exclusive ahead of its late 2019 launch. It then came to PC in July 2020, just eight months later. There is no reason to believe a similar scenario won’t play out again.
Gameplay
The last trailer gave us a clearer idea of what the gameplay in Death Stranding 2 will look like. To be honest, they look fairly similar to the original. Sam’s journey will again revolve around the delivery of various packages through treacherous terrain. Dangers lurk around every turn, be they killer robots, otherworldly monsters, the elements or even the terrain itself. A handful of stealth and shooting sequences appeared in the February State of Play trailer, but it didn’t dwell on them for long. There’s also a bit of driving involved, so hopefully Sam can upgrade his postie gear to a truck.
We’d fully expect to see the original game’s asynchronous multiplayer elements to reappear too. In the original Death Stranding, people could help each other out by constructing useful structures and leaving them for other players to find. It was an exercise in working together toward an easier, greater good.
Death Stranding 2 story
As expected, much of the Death Stranding 2 story is still under wraps. That said, we do know a few broad strokes details. The game picks up a number of years after the end of the original game. Having helped reconnect America in the original game, Sam now heads to Mexico. A similar Death Stranding scenario is taking place there, leaving the country isolated and disconnected. Fragile is now working for a civilian outfit called Drawbridge. This new corporation is attempting to unite the world in a manner similar to the Bridges company in the original. Along the way, Sam will encounter a host of new characters like a tiny living puppet played by Fatih Akin. Further, he’ll face off against old foes like Higgs, now clad in cybernetic gear and wielding a (rather literal) electric guitar.
Death Stranding 2 cast
The cast includes a number of actors from the original game reprising their roles. Normal Reedus, Lea Seydoux and Troy Baker all return as Sam, Fragile and Higgs. Joining the cast are Elle Fanning, Shioli Kutsuna and filmmakers Fatih Akin and George Miller. Mads Mikkelsen, whose character Clifford Unger died in the finale of the original, will not return.
The inclusion of filmmakers like Akin and Miller in DS2 continue the Kojima tradition of working with artists he admires. We look forward to seeing if his BFF Geoff Keighley will also make a return appearance.
Death Stranding 2 trailers
The February 2024 State of Play announce trailer was the first, formal unveiling of the game’s full title. Prior to that, a teaser trailer at The Game Awards 2023, introduced by Kojima, gave DS2 as the working title. Though most will still call it DS2, including Kojima Productions staff, the full title is, of course, Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. This is, seemingly, a reference to the original’s heavily-memed ‘Mario and Princess Beach’ scene.
Image: PlayStation, Kojima Productions
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