Hideo Kojima recently did an interview with Dengeki where he talked about the development of Death Stranding. Kojima said that development is going well, and that they’ve “surpassed the experiment phase.” He also mentioned that Sony is impressed by the progress that his team is making so far (he says normally it takes about 3-5 years to develop a game if they already have the tools ready), and that SIE told him that they’ve “never seen [someone make a game] with a pace as fast as this.” This is great news for a game that many feared might take an exorbitant amount of time to finish.

Here’s the full exchange from the translated interview:

Ever since December 2016 we had not published new information, and there ought to be many fans who were getting worried or even imagining many things, but please rest assured. Currently, we have surpassed the experiment phase, and by entering the next step, we’re feeling the response to the new gameplay.

In the schedule of the overall gaming industry, normally it would take about 3 to 5 years to develop a game with everything already prepared beforehand: organization, human resources, game system, engine, tools, etc. But we prepared them while producing the game in parallel. While doing that, we’re proceeding smoothly towards the schedule we have decided on. Everyone at our partner [company] SIE also said: “We’ve never seen [someone] making [a game] with a pace as fast as this.”

Death Stranding is being developed for PlayStation 4.

[Source: Dengeki PlayStation magazine]