On the Beach Will Feature Real-Time Terrain Changes Caused by Earthquakes, Forest Fires, Floods, and More

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’s State of Play trailer was a packed one, and several days on from when it premiered, we’re still diving deep into its nitty-gritties and discovering all the details it’s hiding. And though crafting trailers that are deliberately mysterious and raising a constant stream of questions is very much Hideo Kojima’s MO for marketing his games, during a recent episode of his YouTube show HideoTube (the first in over seven years), he shared some significant new details on the game himself, while providing commentary for the aforementioned trailer.

One key detail that Kojima revealed was that Death Stranding 2: On the Beach will feature real-time terrain deformation. Players will encounter natural disasters like earthquakes, forest fires, floods, and more, due to which the terrain will change dynamically and in real-time, forcing players to change their plans and improvise on the fly.

We did, of course, see glimpses of how that will materialize in the game in the recent trailer, where a flash flood was shown destroying a bridge, not to mention an entire mountainside crumbling in the middle of an earthquake. Whether or not we can expect all natural disaster events in the game to be that severe, and how much variety there will be in the sort of disasters you’ll have to deal with, remains to be seen.

Speaking about the aforementioned scene with the flash flood, Kojima said, “This is a flood. The terrain changes in real-time during the game. There are earthquakes, forest fires, floods, so you need to be careful. A road can be cut off.”

In the original Death Stranding, analyzing your surroundings and figuring out how best to navigate them and overcome their natural obstacles was a key element of the gameplay, so the prospect of having dynamic natural disasters throwing a wrench in the works on that front is certainly an intriguing one.

During the episode of HideoTube, Kojima also confirmed that not only is Death Stranding 2 not set in the United Cities of America (as its most recent trailer made abundantly clear), it’s set in an entirely different continent altogether. Read more on that through here.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is due out in 2025 for PS5.