Death Stranding 2: On the Beach runs on Decima, not Unreal Engine 5 and not Fox Engine. That is the short answer to what engine Death Stranding 2 uses: Kojima Productions stayed on Guerrilla Games' proprietary Decima for the PlayStation 5 release on June 26, 2025 and the Windows port dated March 19, 2026.
That choice looks stubborn in 2025. Almost every open-world sequel at this scale rents Unreal. Kojima had every reason to switch: a bigger map across Mexico and Australia, more vehicles, more combat, and PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced ambitions. He did not. My reading, separated from the facts below, is simple: Decima is a hiking engine, not a shooter engine, and Death Stranding 2 is still a hiking game wearing combat armor. Kojima picked the only AAA engine whose core fantasy is walking beautifully while other players quietly build the road for you.
What Decima actually is
Decima is a proprietary engine made by Guerrilla Games and released in November 2013, with tools for artificial intelligence and game physics plus support for 4K resolution and high-dynamic-range imaging. It now lists PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and Xbox Series X/S as operating targets.
The credit list matters because it explains what the engine was tuned for:
- Killzone: Shadow Fall was the first game to use Decima.
- Until Dawn used Decima with Havok physics.
- Horizon Zero Dawn moved to Decima in development, and Horizon Forbidden West was powered by Guerrilla's in-house Decima engine.
- Death Stranding in 2019 used Decima, and Death Stranding 2 uses an improved version of Decima with PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced functionality.
Guerrilla's own note about the partnership is unusually blunt for engine marketing. The studio says it is sharing its engine with Kojima Productions and collaborating on the future of it, and that it set up a small Kojima Amsterdam outpost to make that work. Engine sharing here meant people sharing, not just code sharing.
Even the name is a loan story. Decima was originally just called the engine inside Guerrilla, then named for marketing in late 2016 to symbolize the Dutch-Japanese partnership after Dejima, the former Japanese island that hosted a Dutch trading post. A trading-post island is a good metaphor for what Death Stranding does: isolated nodes, foreign tools, slow connection.
Why Kojima could not just reuse Fox Engine
New players often ask whether Death Stranding uses Fox Engine because Kojima built Fox at Konami. The confusion is understandable, but the ownership answer is clean.
Fox Engine is a discontinued proprietary engine by Konami, started by Hideo Kojima after Metal Gear Solid 4 with the goal of making the best engine in the world. Its first commercial release was Pro Evolution Soccer 2014. After seven years on Pro Evolution Soccer, Konami discontinued Fox Engine in favor of Unreal Engine for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X development.
Death Stranding was the first game from Kojima Productions after its split from Konami in 2015. Kojima left the Fox Engine behind because he left the company that owned it. That homelessness explains the next step.
In June 2016 Kojima said he was inspecting two engine candidates, of which the latter had been used to create the first teaser shown at E3 2016. After receiving the Industry Icon award at The Game Awards 2016 he premiered a trailer with the engine logo, and at PlayStation Experience in December 2016 he announced the partnership with Guerrilla Games to use Decima for Death Stranding.
This is my interpretation, not a sourced quote: most studios pick an engine for rendering or hiring. Kojima picked Decima for shelter. He needed a working open-world editor, a PS4-ready renderer, and a team willing to hand over source in months, not years. Guerrilla offered all three plus an Amsterdam desk.
What Death Stranding 2 asks the engine to do
Death Stranding 2 is a third-person action-adventure game with asynchronous online functions, set primarily in Mexico and Australia as large open worlds. The core loop is still delivery: navigate difficult terrain while balancing cargo weight on Sam's backpack, then connect preppers to the Chiral Network.
The sequel adds more systems that stress terrain and infrastructure rather than pure shooting:
- Players unlock vehicles early, can customize them with batteries and gun turrets, and must route around earthquakes and sandstorms.
- Players rebuild roads and bridges and can eventually build a monorail system to move goods from mines to cities.
- The hub is the tar-traversing ship DHV Magellan, used for rest, VR training and fast travel via tar.
- Structures built by one player can appear for others, and players can like other players' structures.
- On the Beach has a greater focus on combat than its predecessor, but weapons are by default non-lethal, with stealth or rough-terrain avoidance as valid options.
- A dynamic day-night cycle affects enemy behavior, and the Automated Porter Assistant System skill tree covers porter, combat, stealth, servicemanship and bridge link skills.
This list is why Unreal would have been the lazy answer and Decima was the specific answer. Unreal can do all of this. But Decima had already shipped two things Kojima needed: Horizon-style long-view landscapes where empty ground still looks meaningful, and a production-proven way to stream huge natural terrain on PlayStation without turning every rock into a loading screen.
What Decima gained Kojima, and what it cost
Gained: empty space that holds attention.
Horizon's reputation was built on vistas. Death Stranding reuses that strength for a different emotion. Where Horizon makes you scan for machines, Death Stranding makes you scan for slope, river depth, and Timefall damage. Decima's 4K and HDR pipeline turns a 10-minute walk into visual content. That sounds trivial until you remember the first game sold 5 million copies by March 2021 despite mixed opinions on gameplay and story. People stayed partly because the walk looked worth it.
Gained: cheap multiplayer that feels like MMO without netcode bills.
Death Stranding calls itself a strand game built around social elements and asynchronous online functions. Other players never appear live; their ladders, ropes, roads and signs do. From an engine view this is brilliant thrift: no tick-rate war, no lag compensation, no 500-player shard. You get the emotion of cooperation — someone left a bridge — with the server cost of a message board. My take: this is the real reason a small newly independent studio could ship an online-feeling open world in 2019 and scale it in 2025. Decima did not need to become a netcode engine; it needed to become a mailbox engine.
Gained: shared R&D with Horizon.
Forbidden West used an updated version of Decima and went on to sell over 8.4 million units by April 2023. For Forbidden West, Decima even incorporated and built on the open-source Jolt physics engine rather than using a proprietary physics core. Kojima benefits when Guerrilla pays for terrain, animation and PlayStation optimization, just as Guerrilla benefits when Kojima stresses the engine with cargo physics and async structures. Friendship as middleware is fragile, but it is cheaper than building alone.
Cost: dependency and a late PC story.
Proprietary loans cut both ways. Kojima cannot hire from a large Decima labor pool the way Unreal studios can. Every PlayStation 5 Pro feature, like PSSR functionality noted for Death Stranding 2, has to be negotiated with Guerrilla's roadmap. The Windows version lag is visible: PS5 in June 2025, Windows in March 2026. Horizon had the same pattern, with Windows in March 2024 two years after PS4/PS5. Decima learned PC late.
Cost: not a shooter core.
Decima started in Killzone, but its modern identity is third-person traversal and machine combat, not crisp first-person gunfeel. Death Stranding 2's answer is telling: make weapons non-lethal by default to avoid voidouts and let players walk around fights. My reading: this is constraint turned into philosophy. If your engine makes walking prettier than shooting, reward walking.
My contrarian take: boring tech for boring work, on purpose
Most engine postmortems praise frame rate, destruction or lighting. I think Decima's contribution to Death Stranding 2 is more awkward: it makes weight readable.
Watch any delivery: Sam leans, stumbles, cargo shifts, Timefall chews containers. That legibility comes from years of Horizon work on traversal, cloth, terrain deformation and weather readability. Unreal could replicate it, but Guerrilla had already paid for it to make Aloy climb convincingly. Kojima essentially rented a climbing team to make a mailman.
Second, I think Kojima chose async because he distrusts live players, not because he loves them. Metal Gear Online taught him that live invasion breaks mood. The strand system keeps the generosity of multiplayer — roads appear — while deleting humiliation, griefing and voice chat. It is multiplayer for introverts, and Decima's world-persistence tools made it shippable.
Third, the Dejima story is not trivia. A Dutch trading post on a Japanese island is exactly what Kojima Productions Amsterdam was: a small foreign outpost allowed to trade technology inside a closed system. Sony published both sides, which helped, but the model does not scale. Indie devs should not expect Guerrilla to answer their email.
So here is the unfashionable lesson I would steal: pick the engine that makes your dullest loop legible, not the engine with the best demo. If your game is 80% carrying, pick the engine where carrying looks and feels precise. Everything else — combat, skill trees, day-night AI — can be thinner if the walk never lies.
What indie devs can actually copy
Prototype the trudge first. Before weapons, test slope, stamina, camera shake and cargo UI for 20 minutes with no enemies. If that is boring in graybox, no engine will save it.
Fake MMO with mailboxes. You do not need real-time netcode to get social warmth. Ghost structures, shared signs, likes and lost-cargo returns give 70% of the feeling for 10% of the server cost. This is directly visible in how lost cargo from other players can be recovered to complete deliveries.
Default to non-lethal. If your AI and animation budget is small, do what Death Stranding 2 does by defaulting to non-lethal tools. You avoid fail-state rage, you justify simpler enemy behavior, and you turn combat into puzzle routing.
Borrow, but price the dependency. A proprietary loan is not free. Ask who fixes bugs when the owner ships their own sequel, how PC ports are staffed, and whether physics middleware like Jolt or Havok will change under you. Decima's history shows both Havok and Jolt phases; plan for middleware churn.
Train the same muscles in a browser
You cannot practice Death Stranding 2's balance model directly in a tab, but you can train the underlying judgments: line choice on bad ground, infrastructure thinking, and open-world vehicle discipline.
If you want to feel why route beats speed, try MX Offroad Master. It is a 3D downhill mountain biking game about steep, bumpy trails where braking early keeps the bike stable. The Mountain Ride mode has 14 downhill levels across winter and spring maps, while Free Ride is an open practice arena for jumps and landings. That split mirrors Death Stranding 2 well: push timed deliveries when you must, but learn braking, steering and jump control in a no-timer space first. The rule that sudden full-speed charges into rocks and drops usually end in a crash is basically the porter rule.
If you want to practice the building half — roads, bridges, monorails — load Mine Clone. It is a blocky creative playground where every block can be broken, collected and reused. Start in Creative Mode with infinite resources to sketch a network, then switch to Survival Mode where gathering and night threats force tradeoffs. My suggestion: start small with one shelter, gather wisely, then plan a road before you need it. That is the Chiral Network in miniature: infrastructure first, deliveries second.
If you want open-world driving without the apocalypse pressure, use Sandbox City - Cars, Zombies, Ragdolls. It is an open-world zombie sandbox where you roam, drive cars, fight on foot and complete missions for cash. Walk up and press E to enter or exit cars, use cars to cross the city fast and ram groups on wide roads, then get out to loot cash and ammo on foot. Turn on Disable Zombies in Settings for combat-free driving and looting when you want a quiet delivery run. That peaceful-cruise mode is closer to Death Stranding's empty America than any shooter is.
None of these are Decima, and none prove you can ship a strand game. They are useful because they isolate one judgment at a time: ground reading, building order, and vehicle-versus-foot discipline.
FAQ: the engine questions people actually type
Is Death Stranding 2 on Unreal Engine 5?
No. Its engine is listed as Decima, with an improved version for the sequel.
Is it still Fox Engine?
No. Fox Engine stayed with Konami and was later dropped for Unreal on new hardware. Kojima Productions started fresh after 2015 and partnered with Guerrilla.
Why not switch to Unreal for the sequel?
My analysis: switching would have thrown away six years of traversal tuning, async-structure tooling and PlayStation-specific optimization shared with Horizon. Unreal hires easier and ports faster, but it would have forced Kojima to rebuild the walk — the one thing players actually buy.
Will Decima stay PlayStation-only?
No. Decima now spans PlayStation, Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and Xbox Series X/S across its game list, even if individual releases stagger. Death Stranding 2 follows that stagger with PS5 first, Windows later.
Death Stranding 2 bet that walking is content if the ground, weather and other players' leftovers are readable enough. Decima, a borrowed Dutch engine named after a trading island, was the cheapest way to buy six years of that readability in 2016 — and the most stubborn way to keep it in 2025.
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