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Hideo Kojima has taken to Twitter to update everyone on the development of upcoming whatever-it-actually-turns-out-to-be 'em up Death Stranding, and it turns out the team is working hard. Too hard.
After the usual spiel about Death Stranding being something that's never existed in video games before, Kojima said that the team at Kojima Productions is 'trying our best to deliver the product launching on Nov 8th. Still in crunch time of dev.' And then he put a lovely rainbow after it, perhaps to throw people off after saying something absolutely ludicrous.
DEATH STRANDING has the element of something never existed before, the gameplay, the world atmosphere, the visuals which we aimed to create. The studio I established was tiny indies but trying our best to deliver the product launching on Nov 8th. Still in crunch time of dev pic.twitter.com/sNvTAc7wwB
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) August 1, 2019
Alright. Maaaaaaybe Kojima was using it flippantly and instead meant that everyone working on the game is in fact just putting in a great shift, within the working day. But, if we take Kojima at face value, he's using the word 'crunch' as a sort of badge of honour. In 2019, crunch is definitely not that.
It's been a huge topic of conversation in the games industry over the last number of months, and rightfully so; the health and well-being of the developers is far greater than any game's pencilled-in release date. Naughty Dog was the latest studio to come up in the crunch conversation, as a number of employees spoke up about long days at work.
Do like Snapshot: the developer has delayed the launch of Phoenix Point because 'Snapshot has a commitment to keep crunch to a minimum.' Simple.
Death Stranding is scheduled to launch on PlayStation 4 on November 8, but hopefully someone will see sense and delay it if the folks at Kojima Productions are working stupid hours.
