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Does your Mac, iPad, or iPhone make the cut for 'Death Stranding Director's Cut?'

Death Stranding Director's Cut

Last updated

Legendary game designer Hideo Kojima has listed which Apple devices which will work with "Death Stranding Director's Cut," coming in 2023.

"DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT for iPhone, iPad, and Mac will be released in 2023," wrote Kojima (in Japanese) on Threads.

Kojima said that supported devices include the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and all iPads and Macs equipped with an M1 chip or later.

Originally published for the Sony PlayStation 4 in 2019, Death Stranding is an open-world action game in a post-apocalyptic setting, featuring the voice and likeness of Norman Reedus (Daryl Dixon of The Walking Dead) as the lead character.

The world of Death Stranding has been overrun by invisible creatures that lay waste to all they touch. Players control Sam, a courier who delivers packages to remote cities and connects them to a wireless communication network.

Sam must avoid and defeat both supernatural creatures and more mundane enemies, traveling between the land of the living and the dead in the process. It's a trippy, weird ride featuring cameos from many familiar Hollywood faces and voices, including Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) and Pacific Rim and Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro.

Death Stranding earned high marks after its release, with critics lauding Kojima's original game design and nightmarish, surreal imagery. It's the first game Kojima released following his departure from Konami, the game publisher responsible for publishing Kojima's enormously popular Metal Gear stealth action game series.

The Director's Cut edition of Death Stranding followed the original game in 2021. The Director's Cut sports additional content and improvements to the core game engine, and it's that release that's coming to Apple devices.

Kojima announced plans to release Death Stranding: Director's Cut for Mac at WWDC in June.

Hideo Kojima Hideo Kojima

"We are now entering a new era for gaming on the Mac," he said, lauding Apple's MetalFX Upscaling, a feature Apple introduced in 2022 which provides better performance in 3D apps and games while retaining visual fidelity.



6 Comments

M68000 8 Years · 890 comments

I casually looked at this article.  But, wondering does this mean it only runs on the newest iphone 15 pro models? 

kdupuis77 16 Years · 160 comments

M68000 said:
I casually looked at this article.  But, wondering does this mean it only runs on the newest iphone 15 pro models? 

Yup.

Marvin 19 Years · 15356 comments

M68000 said:
I casually looked at this article.  But, wondering does this mean it only runs on the newest iphone 15 pro models? 

The PC version is 80GB in size, it's a full AAA game with large environments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAwPiYX6FJs

Maybe they will drop the texture size to come in around 20GB.

The iPhone 15 isn't much faster than 14 (20% faster GPU) so the 14 might be able to run it but they will likely target 720p/30 on iPhone. iPhone 14 Pro would run it at 25 FPS. The iPhone 15 Pro also has 8GB RAM vs 6GB on iPhone 14. The PC minimum requirements are 8GB RAM + 4GB VRAM.

Apple could start getting into promos with games. Some hardware manufacturers give games away with new purchases. Apple will probably sell 20m+ of the Pro models, they could gift a $20 game like Death Stranding or RE4. Nvidia and AMD do this:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/diablo-iv-geforce-rtx-40-series-bundle/
https://www.asus.com/us/site/gaming/Game-Bundle-Starfield-AMD/

mpantone 19 Years · 2254 comments

Clearly Apple tested this game on a variety of Apple hardware and deliberately excluded the iPhone 15 (and 15 Max) as well as all versions of the iPhone 14, regardless that MetalFX is supported on last year's models.

An incentive to push potential customers to the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max? I'm not convinced.

The game promo for iPhone doesn't make much sense. Unlike a fancy aftermarket PC graphics card, phones are purchased for a vast array of usage cases. When you buy one of these cards, there are a limited number of usage cases. Otherwise you'd buy something inexpensive or even a CPU with integrated graphics.

And a bundled game promo would also do something that Apple doesn't want: divert attention from Apple to the game, its studio, its publisher and in this case its director.

When Apple does a promo, they do it by highlighting one of their own premium services (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+), not a one-off third party comp. Their ultimate goal is to hook a user into a recurring subscription for ongoing revenue.

longfang 17 Years · 522 comments

Marvin said:
M68000 said:
I casually looked at this article.  But, wondering does this mean it only runs on the newest iphone 15 pro models? 
The PC version is 80GB in size, it's a full AAA game with large environments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAwPiYX6FJs

Maybe they will drop the texture size to come in around 20GB.

The iPhone 15 isn't much faster than 14 (20% faster GPU) so the 14 might be able to run it but they will likely target 720p/30 on iPhone. iPhone 14 Pro would run it at 25 FPS. The iPhone 15 Pro also has 8GB RAM vs 6GB on iPhone 14. The PC minimum requirements are 8GB RAM + 4GB VRAM.

Apple could start getting into promos with games. Some hardware manufacturers give games away with new purchases. Apple will probably sell 20m+ of the Pro models, they could gift a $20 game like Death Stranding or RE4. Nvidia and AMD do this:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/diablo-iv-geforce-rtx-40-series-bundle/
https://www.asus.com/us/site/gaming/Game-Bundle-Starfield-AMD/

To what end. It’s not like there are other mobile options for this game. Graphics card bundles are to entice you to choose one brand over another