Hideo Kojima has praised Horizon Zero Dawn developer Guerrilla Games for their outstanding game engine.

　　Kojima’s upcoming new game, Death Stranding, will run on Guerrilla’s Decima engine, and according to the legendary designer, Guerrilla’s technology is far ahead of the rest.

　　“I visited many studios all around the world, meeting many great people. Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam: their technology was just a league ahead of everywhere else”, Kojima said in a recent interview as posted on the US PlayStation Blog. “Even though they have an open world they are able to render very rich scenes with many objects. As you know their upcoming game Horizon Zero Dawn, which is coming out in February, has an artistic sensibility, particularly with regards to the use of color, whereas we’re looking for a very photo-realistic sensibility.”

　　“Their engine is built for their purposes, for the game that they wanted to create, and as I said we wanted to create a game that even at the very base levels looks very different from that, so we needed to test it to see how far we could tune their engine to fit our purposes”, Kojima added.

　　Kojima reformed Kojima Productions as an independent studio after his departure from Konami back in 2015. During Sony’s 2016 E3 press conference, Kojima’s Death Stranding was officially announced. Prior to the announcement, the designer visited various development studio’s in the search for a game engine alongside PlayStation 4 lead architect, Mark Cerny.

　　Earlier this year, Kojima showed off some Death Stranding rendering samples running on the Decima engine. An exact release date for Death Stranding hasn’t been announced, but the game is expected to release somewhere in 2018.