Some fans believe Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima is teasing a new video game with his annual Christmas card.
The founder of Kojima Productions posted the simple festive greeting “Happy Holidays” alongside a previously-unseen image by Yoji Shinkawa featuring three new characters on Twitter this morning (December 24).
Almost instantly, fans started speculating that the artwork was Kojima’s way of announcing that he had a new game in the pipeline, and this was his way of sharing a first look at the title.
A few optimistic players in the comments believe the three characters look like they belong in the new Silent Hill game while others think this is our first look at the character art of Death Stranding 2.
That design looks suspicious
— Patrick Jane (@thementalist_12) December 24, 2021
There must be some clues in there. pic.twitter.com/BOMgrWliaT
— Nico (@NukePistols) December 23, 2021
However, other fans are refusing to get their hopes up. In a thread on ResetEra, one user said: “Not everything Kojima tweets about is a tease”.
It follows an image Kojima shared of himself and Square Enix‘s Shinji Hashimoto, which again caused fans to speculate a collaboration could be on the cards.
A Square-Enix + Kojima Productions crossover is the kind of mind fuckery we need right now
— Thorzilla (@Thorzilla) December 24, 2021
Earlier this year, Blue Box Game Studios had to confirm that their upcoming survival shooter Abandoned was not the next Silent Hill game, and that Kojima wasn’t involved.
“We receive emails or tweets on a daily basis from people saying: ‘Hey Kojima, I know what you’re doing!’ or stuff like: ‘Are you really Kojima? Are you working on Silent Hill?’ We always responded to these rumours, but we stopped responding after my last video because at this point, I was like: ‘No matter how much you try to respond, no matter how much you try to be against it, it’s not working’. At that point, I stopped responding to these rumours,” explained studio founder Hasan Kahraman.
In August, Kojima conformed he was still inspired to create though. Writing on Twitter, he said: “My creativity is not waning yet. Until my brain loses its creative power, I’ll continue to strive to create things. That’s my instinct, and that’s what I love to do.”
Kojima Studios released Death Stranding: Director’s Cut in September.
While Kojima hasn’t confirmed a sequel, Norman Reedus – who voices the main character Sam Porter Bridges in Death Stranding – has stated that a sequel is planned and currently in very early stages.
At the start of December, Sony had a patent approved for a Kojima created invention that is “a method for influencing a gaming world of a video game” and plots out a way for online players to affect the terrain of single-player worlds, which are delivered to localised (single-player) versions of the game through a “cloud gaming system”.
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