'Death Stranding' release date news: Possible launch in 2018; Kojima Productions explains how fog was made

"Death Stranding" promotional poster featuring Mads MikkelsenTwitter/DeathStranding

Since the sneak peek of the game was revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last year, more details for "Death Stranding" have slowly been coming out. However, Kojima Productions has recently hinted as to when "Death Stranding" will come out, and explained how they made really cool fog in last year's first reveal. 

Seeing how elaborate the video effects and the motion captures are, it is clear as to why it would take a while before the game officially comes out. There is no set release date for "Death Stranding" yet, but Hideo Kojima of Kojima Productions hinted in September last year that the game might be launching in 2018, which is only a few months from now.

Kojima revealed that "Death Stranding" would be out before the 2020 Olympics. He later on added that before the Olympics, a movie called "Akira" will be released by 2019. Meanwhile, when the first reveal of the game came out last year, many were intrigued by how impressive the visuals looked, and most especially how they managed to create the fog.

Recently, at the 2017 Siggraph in Los Angeles, California, Giliam de Carpentier, the Principal Tech Programmer of Guerrilla Games, along with Kohei Ishiyama of Kojima Productions served as hosts for a presentation called "Decima Engine: Advances in Lighting and AA." The presentation featured a look into the process of how they made the fog in "Death Stranding." 

The "Decima Engine" is not only being used by Kojima Productions for "Death Stranding," but it is also used for another game called "Horizon: Zero Dawn." The engine has a very flexible atmospheric scattering system that is linked with clouds and outdoor lighting. However, Kojima Productions needed an optimized system for photo-realistic rendering.

The engine's today usually use precomputed atmospheric scattering to create the photo-realistic fog, but the downside of this is that it limits the ability to change the fog's color or density. Compared to the current fog engine systems, Ishiyama and Carpentier shared that the engine's developers made a new fog system that would allow more artistic flexibility over the game's appearance. 

"Death Stranding" stars Mads Mikkelsen, Guillermo del Toro, and Norman Reedus.