Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the game people point at when they argue consoles have not peaked. The reason is a 13-year-old engine called Decima, built by Guerrilla Games and pushed further here than ever before.
If you are deciding whether to play on PS5 or wait for a PC upgrade, the engine details are worth five minutes of your time.
Key Takeaways
- Decima was created by Guerrilla Games and also powers the Horizon series
- On PS5: a quality mode targeting 4K at 30fps and a performance mode at 60fps
- The PC version, ported by Nixxes, is the first Decima game with ray tracing
- Kojima Productions shares its engine changes back with the Horizon team
Why Kojima keeps choosing Decima
Kojima Productions' chief technology officer Akio Sakamoto explained the choice in comments covered by PC Gamer: after nearly ten years with the engine, it lets the team "accomplish many things that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere". The collaboration runs both ways, with the studio's engine changes shared back with the Horizon developers.
The payoff is scale. Decima has always specialised in enormous open worlds, exactly what a game about walking across a continent needs.
What the sequel actually improves
GamingBolt's graphics analysis calls it the first truly current-generation Decima showcase: dynamic global illumination, sharper character rendering, and volumetric clouds driven by the engine's Nubis system. The post-processing restraint stands out too, with effects like chromatic aberration used sparingly.
On PS5 you choose between two modes, as guide site Deltia's Gaming details: Prioritize Quality targets 4K at 30fps using checkerboard rendering, while Prioritize Performance runs a 1440p base upscaled to 4K at 60fps.
The PC version changed the engine itself
The PC release, handled by port specialists Nixxes, brought something Decima had never done: ray tracing. DSOGaming's performance analysis found a game that looks superb even with ray tracing off, and scales across a wide range of hardware.
That scalability matters in practice. You do not need a flagship graphics card to see most of what makes this game beautiful.
Choosing how to play it
- On PS5, pick the 60fps performance mode for play and the quality mode for screenshot sessions.
- On PC, treat ray tracing as a bonus, not a requirement. The base lighting already carries the look.
- Mid-range cards cope well if you drop resolution before settings, per DSOGaming's testing.
- Play the first game, or its story recap, before starting. The sequel assumes you know Sam's history.
Engines rarely deserve headlines. This one does, because it quietly proves a third path exists between building your own technology and renting Unreal.
Borrow a sibling studio's engine, feed your improvements back, and after ten years you get a game that makes the hardware look better than it is.
Reader Discussion