You might remember that last week, Kojima revealed during the PSX 2016 panel that Death Stranding would use Guerrilla's Decima engine.
Mark Cerny, Lead Architect of Sony's PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro, was instrumental in the partnership. He and Kojima visited several studios for a couple weeks last January, so it's understandable that Cerny would be featured in IGN's post-panel video interview alongside Guerrilla Games' CEO Hermen Hulst and Hideo Kojima himself.
When discussing the amazing graphics showcased in the latest PSX 2016 keynote, Cerny said:
I think one of the things you're seeing is just the benefit of focus on a single platform. You can know the technology down to the tiny hardware details and then take advantage of them in your engine. And that really pays off. I mean, I was sitting there this morning at the keynote at PSX 2016 and it's clear that Guerrilla and Naughty Dog have somehow found the button you push that makes more polygons come out.
It's easy to concur with Cerny's statement. Guerrilla Games and Naughty Dog have long been able to squeeze every drop of power out of PlayStation platforms to deliver graphically stunning games in franchises like Killzone, Uncharted, and The Last of Us.
Now, Kojima Productions will be able to benefit from the same technology that's powering open world action RPG Horizon: Zero Dawn. Cerny points out in the interview, though, that while Decima started as a donation from Guerrilla to Kojima Productions it is now a full-blown cooperation with a merged code base.
Hermen Hulst also said that there will be "substantial benefits" going forward for Guerrilla Games because of this collaboration, though one can imagine those might manifest in Guerrilla's next project after Horizon (due for release at the end of February 2017).
Finally, at the very end of the interview, Kojima stated that Death Stranding will enter development in full swing next year. This can be considered a hint towards the release date, too: Kojima-san likes to take his time to create polished titles, so 2019 seems a more likely candidate than 2018 for the game's launch.
