An entire scene in Death Stranding 2 has as many polygons as a single model in Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite.

A Single Scene in Death Stranding 2 Has as Many Polygons as One Unreal Engine 5 Nanite Model

In a new interview, Kojima Productions' Technical Director, Akio Sakamoto, revealed why the studio continues to work with the Decima engine (created by Guerrilla Games) after nearly a decade, and what technological capabilities are being showcased in the Death Stranding sequel.

Sakamoto gave an example of one scene where the polygon count reaches 25 million. This scene runs smoothly even on the modest PlayStation 5 console. Essentially, they are boasting about having a Nanite-like feature in Decima, similar to Unreal Engine 5. However, UE5 can handle that many polygons in a single model, whereas a scene can contain dozens or even hundreds of such models.

This is the scene in question, by the way.

When asked why the studio hasn't switched to the extremely popular engine from Epic Games, Sakamoto replied that Decima is perfectly "tailored" to Kojima's vision. The deep understanding of the engine's architecture, built up over the years, allows the studio's programmers to make changes to the source code instantly, without waiting for updates from third-party developers.

Meanwhile, the studio's next project, already in development, is being built using the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.