Death Stranding 2: On the Beach creator, Hideo Kojima, reportedly changed the game halfway through because playtesting results were "too good," and he doesn't want his work to be "mainstream."
There is very obviously a language barrier issue at play here that people are ignoring just to take what he said at face value. There’s zero chance that what he meant was the game was too good and that as a result he wanted to make it worse.
He almost certainly meant something more along the lines of the plot, or something to do with the game mechanics were too streamlined, or otherwise not challenging enough in some way.
The first Death Stranding was controversial in that its gameplay was very in depth and communicated a mindset at the expense of wider appeal. Go to any social media post about the game and look at all the people who A. Dismissed it for being “boring” due to the gameplay decisions that were made and B. The other group of people who believed it to be a masterpiece, who might not have were the game more streamlined and generic, for example if it was built like an MGS-lite with package delivery mechanics.
If you took a lot of the more “tedious” but immersive features out of DS1 and added more generic combat the game would likely have a wider appeal, but those of us that really liked the little touches that were seen as “tedium” would have liked it less and that’s the kind of thing he has to be referring to DS2. Like adding a bunch of action and making the deliveries trivial to complete might make more people dig the game but nobody would truly love it the way DS1 was loved by its fans. Kojima is definitely a fart-sniffer but he does deliver and he very obviously sees himself as an artist, not a corporate exec who wants to make the line go up the fastest.
There is very obviously a language barrier issue at play here that people are ignoring just to take what he said at face value. There’s zero chance that what he meant was the game was too good and that as a result he wanted to make it worse.
He almost certainly meant something more along the lines of the plot, or something to do with the game mechanics were too streamlined, or otherwise not challenging enough in some way.
The first Death Stranding was controversial in that its gameplay was very in depth and communicated a mindset at the expense of wider appeal. Go to any social media post about the game and look at all the people who A. Dismissed it for being “boring” due to the gameplay decisions that were made and B. The other group of people who believed it to be a masterpiece, who might not have were the game more streamlined and generic, for example if it was built like an MGS-lite with package delivery mechanics.
If you took a lot of the more “tedious” but immersive features out of DS1 and added more generic combat the game would likely have a wider appeal, but those of us that really liked the little touches that were seen as “tedium” would have liked it less and that’s the kind of thing he has to be referring to DS2. Like adding a bunch of action and making the deliveries trivial to complete might make more people dig the game but nobody would truly love it the way DS1 was loved by its fans. Kojima is definitely a fart-sniffer but he does deliver and he very obviously sees himself as an artist, not a corporate exec who wants to make the line go up the fastest.