Death Stranding 2 is official

At the 2022 Game Awards, Hideo Kojima revealed the game project he's been teasing for the last several months. And yep: It's Death Stranding 2.

The trailer above was one of, if not the, longest of The Game Awards, and in typical Kojima fashion is full of ambiguous scenes that'll have diehards dissecting their meaning for weeks to come. In recent months we've gotten teases leading up to this reveal, introducing several actors who'll be in Death Stranding 2, like Elle Fanning. We didn't see much of that new cast in the Death Stranding 2 trailer, but we did see a new masked man playing a guitar, potentially portrayed by famed videogame voice actor Troy Baker. He's basically Kojima's Doof Warrior from Mad Max: Fury Road.

Confirmed returning for the sequel are Sam Porter Bridges and Fragile, portrayed by Norman Reedus and Lea Seydoux. 

Though much of the trailer is focused on Fragile, one exchanged between Fragile and Sam toward the end suggests we'll once again be climbing into the boots of Sam Porter Bridges himself: "It's time for you to hit the road and start a new journey."

Taking the stage after the Death Stranding 2 trailer, Hideo Kojima said that he had actually written the story for this sequel before the Covid-19 pandemic... and then re-wrote it once the pandemic struck. "I didn't want to predict any more futures, so I rewrote it," he joked through a translator.

Kojima also mentioned that he has another project in the works alongside Death Stranding 2, which is apparently more experimental than what was already one of the more unique open world games of the past decade.