When I first sat down to play Horizon Zero Dawn, I was floored by how stunning it looked. Seeing the red grass sway in the breeze and the moonlight reflecting off the backs of deadly machines made me feel like I was truly living in Aloy’s world. Death Stranding also instantly wow’d me with its stunning visuals—the bleak and beautiful mountains of the first and the endless desert of the sequel, On the Beach—so it should be no surprise to learn the two games were both made in Guerilla Games’ 13-year-old Decima engine.
“It offered many of the capabilities needed to build an open-world game,” says Kojima Productions CTO Akio Sakamoto in a recent interview with Automaton. “While some aspects are less immediately approachable than commercial engines, its runtime rendering analysis tools stood out.”
A truly impressive feature of the Death Stranding games is the scale of their worlds. When I first saw the snow-capped mountains in the original game, I assumed they were just part of a background skybox, so imagine my surprise when the mid-game took me right through them.
In stark contrast to Death Stranding’s rainy hillside opening, On the Beach starts with Sam looking over a huge expanse of sandstone formations. “The final polygon count reached approximately 25 million, yet the scene still maintained a stable frame rate,” Sakamoto says, attributing this to “Decima’s rendering capabilities.”
Using Decima has fostered collaboration between Guerilla and Kojima Productions. When the Death Stranding studio alters the engine to suit their own needs, they share the changes with the Horizon devs. “I’m not sure whether our contributions warranted a Special Thanks credit in Horizon Forbidden West,” Sakamoto says, but clearly the relationship has been beneficial to both groups.
In an era when a lot of studios are switching to Unreal Engine, such as CD Projekt Red, it’s cool to see a bespoke piece of software being utilised so well. And don’t expect Kojima Productions to stop using Decima any time soon.
“It has now been nearly ten years since we began using the engine,” Sakamoto says. “While no engine is the best choice in every scenario, Decima enables us to accomplish many things that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere.”
