In a recent interview with director Hideo Kojima, revealed that the upcoming sequel to Death Stranding will revisit the meaning of the word ‘strand’ due to the global pandemic of COVID-19. Kojima had already begun to write the story for Death Stranding 2 before the global pandemic hit but after he lived in the world underneath the pandemic, he found how similar it was to the situation in Death Stranding. This similarity caused Kojima to go back to the drawing board for the sequel.

Kojima elaborated on his restructuring of the sequel by saying, “At the beginning, there was the theme of “connecting,” and after that, I made a lot of notes about character settings, game ideas, and so on. Like how to connect it. I put it together while maintaining a balance…But I had to rewrite everything because of corona. In Death Stranding, it was justice to connect, but with the corona crisis, pseudo-connections such as remotes have come to be emphasized.” He then went on to add, “On the other hand, I felt that such pseudo-connections alone would not lead to fulfilling human lives. After all, humans need to go out into the outside world and move.” Essentially, Kojima was saying that the isolation and the fragmentation of the world underneath COVID-19 altered people’s ways of existing and their definitions of what it means to be connected to one another. This phenomenon is what lead Kojima to revise the meaning of ‘strand’ in Death Stranding 2. 

Kojima saw the importance of delivery services during the corona pandemic as threads that kept society together. As such, In Death Stranding 2, the main character who you play as, Sam Porter Bridges, is a courier for a logistics company who builds bridges across the sci-fi wasteland by delivering packages. The connection between Sam in the sci-fi world and Kojima’s experience during COVID-19 is the importance of those packages which serve as the ‘glue’ to keep society together.

As of now, it is impossible to tell how the word ‘strand’ will manifest itself in the sequel. Right now, however, we do know he’ll likely discover even more uses of the word to explore in codexes and cutscenes acted out through his 3D-scanned Hollywood actors.