Hideo Kojima finally talked about what went down behind the scenes regarding Sony’s attempted cancellation of PHYSINT, the director’s upcoming espionage action game largely believed to be a spiritual successor to his legendary Metal Gear franchise.
And what he revealed, in all honesty, shows just why Sony decided not to trust him with the project any longer. It turns out that, according to Kojima, the game is still very much in the experimentation phase, with the game not even having an engine attached to it yet. Actors continue to be hired, marketed, and scanned, but the game isn’t a game at this moment.
As Kojima told the Washington Post, he is still “experimenting” with PHYSINT but hasn’t yet decided on what engine he will use. It was speculated that Kojima wished to use Decima, the same engine he used for Death Stranding, but given that Sony owns the engine through its subsidiary Guerrilla Games, that is likely off the table at the moment.
A lot of staff was reassigned to OD: Knock, Kojima’s upcoming horror game collaboration with Jordan Peele. Since that title utilizes Unreal Engine 5, it’s highly likely they will have gained the necessary skills to use the tech for PHYSINT as well.
While neither gameplay nor tech exists for the title yet, Kojima nonetheless has done a lot of work on it. Kojima has already written both the plot and the concepts and even has entire storyboards ready. The small team still working on the game is currently starting to develop 3D models while at the same time also scanning actors, likely using 3Lateral’s studio in Novi Sad, Serbia (owned by Epic).
That last point also indicates a potential switch to Unreal 5, since it’ll make the use of MetaHuman (Epic’s proprietary facial scanning tech) much, much more approachable. Kojima spends a lot of time in Novi Sad and at 3Lateral and has put the studio’s logo on PHYSINT‘s promotional material. It was also used in Death Stranding and OD.
In general, though, everything is pretty bare-bones when it comes to PHYSINT, and the game is probably some five or six or more years away from release. Even so, Kojima believes this will be his best-selling game. “This is the biggest selling title I could possibly create,” he said, which is one of the reasons he never could have imagined that “PHYSINT would be on the list of being canceled.”
