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Chief technical officer at Kojima Productions, Akio Sakamoto, has explained why the studio chose to adopt the less popular Decima game engine for Death Stranding, despite it being "less immediately approachable."
In the world of game engines, two continue to be king: Unity and Epic Games' Unreal Engine. However, Kojima Productions chose to use Guerilla Games' proprietary, and less widely known, Decima engine when creating its open-world walking simulators.
Guerilla Games uses the engine for its own games, including the Killzone and Horizon series, but it has also been adopted by a few other studios. Aside from Kojima Productions using it to create the Death Stranding series, Supermassive Games also uses Decima for the Until Dawn games.
In an interview with Automaton, Sakamoto outlines the reason for the studio's unusual choice of game engine. "When we were considering adopting Decima, I had the opportunity to evaluate the engine directly," he explains. "It offered many of the capabilities needed to build an open-world game, and while some aspects are less immediately approachable than commercial engines, its runtime rendering analysis tools stood out."
He goes on to explain that this type of analysis was instrumental in the studio's game development. "Being able to access such a rich set of data without relying on external tools is incredibly valuable," Sakamoto says. "[It] also included features I had long hoped to implement in the engine I worked on previously. With all of that in mind, we decided to adopt Decima."
On reflection, Sakamoto stands firm with the choice of engine. "It has now been nearly ten years since we began using the engine," he says. "While no engine is the best choice in every scenario, Decima enables us to accomplish many things that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere."
