The first game Hideo Kojima released after his acrimonious split with Konami was an open-world delivery game that is more of a walking sim than a traditional action-adventure blockbuster. Death Stranding 1 and 2 are both excellent, but neither is the spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid some fans have long been pining for. Kojima is now positioning his upcoming espionage game Physint as being exactly that, suggesting the game will be more of a conventional crowd pleaser than some of his other work.
“This is the biggest selling title I could possibly create,” Kojima told The Washington Post in the context of Sony’s surprise decision to cancel it (Xbox will now publish it instead). “I didn’t think Physint would be on the list of being canceled.”
He elaborated on Physint‘s origin story in a separate interview with IGN. Kojima had a health scare during covid, the story goes, and realized he has limited time left to make new games. He wanted a new type of Metal Gear Solid IP to be among them:
And then I was looking on the internet, and I get so many messages from people saying, “Please make another Metal Gear!” I wasn’t really interested, because Metal Gear is the past. I want to do something new. But I saw so many people requesting it. And I was thinking, maybe I only have 10 years left. Of course, I can’t make Metal Gear — that’s Konami’s IP. But I was thinking, “Okay, maybe I should create a new action espionage game.” And I started to think about this new concept.
While the specifics of the new concept have yet to be shared publicly, and some foundational elements like which game engine it will use remain unconfirmed, Kojima suggested that he’s experimenting with new ways of doing enemy AI that could impact the final shape Physint takes on. “But the game system for the new technology, like enemy AI and stuff, I’m still experimenting on all of this,” he told IGN. “I have to change the story depending on how the game experiment works.”
The Physint team remains small while Kojima Productions focuses on getting OD, an Xbox horror collaboration with Hollywood filmmaker Jordan Peele, out the door first. But the long-time game developer is trying to project confidence in the wake of the unexpected implosion of the Sony publishing deal. Physint will be more obviously “fun,” he suggests, in a way maybe the Death Stranding games were not.
“I have to say this very carefully: anything espionage is going to be fun, period, no matter what game it is,” he told IGN. “Death Stranding is a delivery game. People were like, ‘What? Delivery? What kind of a game is that?’ When I was working on DS2, and after OD was decided, I needed to think of the next project for after DS2.”
He continued, “As I explained before, in order to keep the studio alive, I have to plan ahead and pitch for the next title, although that also means I can’t direct a live action movie still. OD was going to be an edgy game, so for the next one, I was thinking of going even more extreme.”