Hideo Kojima is currently "checking the data" on your favorite Death Stranding 2 routes and weapons, and I hope he's personally counting every road I've restored without help from the ceramics-hording jerks I've been paired with

It's been a month since the launch of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, but Hideo Kojima is keeping busy. He's getting work done on projects like OD and Physint, yes, but he's also tracking specific Death Stranding 2 player stats in what I can only hope is an effort to personally punish those ceramics- and metal-hording jerks that are making my road restorations take forever.

"Well, I’m checking the data of the players all over the world," Kojima tells IndieWire when asked what he's doing a month after the game's release. "What kind of weapons they’re using, the routes they’re taking, all this data. And I also see these small bugs here and there, so I’m deciding where to fix and what to fix."

We've all got some extra insight into what other players are doing thanks to Death Stranding's asynchronous multiplayer system, which makes things like popular routes everyone's business by creating worn-down trails along well-traveled pieces of land. It also lets players share the burden of dumping resources into community projects like highways.

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At least, it should help alleviate the resource burden, but the hours I spent last night lugging a bunch of ceramics around the map to continue my highway system suggest that some of the players I've been connected with haven't been pulling their weight. Why did I need to provide one thousand and seven hundred of my own ceramics to activate one of those auto-pavers, huh?

The server systems that pull in player data have been something of a black box mystery ever since the first game, but that's not going to stop me from being specifically mad at the person I'm imagining somewhere in the world, sat in front of a PS5 and twirling an evil mustache atop a horde of digital construction materials.

Anyway, there are a lot of upcoming Hideo Kojima games, and he's also keeping busy with those projects – including starting work on Physint "all by myself," as he puts it. "Also I have all these interviews every day," Kojima adds, "and also promotional – photo-shootings, things like that – so I don’t feel like I’ve finished the title, to be frank." I don't think either of us are going to feel like we've finished until every single one of those highways is restored, Mr. Kojima.

Death Stranding 2 director Hideo Kojima says "DLC is not a trendy space because if you start doing that, you'll never finish the project."