At WWDC 23, legendary game designer Hideo Kojima appeared on the virtual stage to announce that Death Stranding Director’s Cut would be coming to Mac later this year.
Kojima-san revealed to have been a ‘die-hard Apple fan’ ever since he bought his first Mac in 1994, making him even more happy to be able to bring the game to the platform.
Kojima then said Death Stranding Director’s Cut takes full advantage of the latest Apple technologies for gaming. He added to have been blown away by Apple Silicon and by the Metal low-level API, while MetalFX upscaling allowed ‘amazing graphical fidelity’.
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit was the latest one as Kojima parted with fans, promising that his future games would be released on the Mac, too. Following Death Stranding Director’s Cut, the obvious choice seems to be Death Stranding 2.
After a couple of ‘leaks’ on its existence provided by Norman Reedus, the sequel was announced at The Game Awards 2022. The game will be released for PlayStation 5 first, just like the first installment, possibly in 2024. So far, the confirmed cast includes returning actors Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, and Troy Baker as well as newcomers Elle Fanning and Shioli Kutsuna.
Given the timetable of the first game, a PC version could be released around seven or eight months after the PlayStation launch. It is presently unclear whether the Mac version would launch at the same time or later.
Beyond the announcement of Death Stranding Director’s Cut, Apple also revealed the brand new Game Mode, which will prioritize a game’s process on both CPU and GPU over other processes.
Game Mode also dramatically reduces the audio latency users would experience when using AirPods, as well as massively decreasing the input latency when using Xbox or PlayStation controllers thanks to the doubled Bluetooth sampling rate. Game Mode will work with all Mac compatible games.
Apple is also making it easier for developers to port their games to the platform with the new Game Porting Toolkit. The toolkit allows a far quicker estimation of how long it would take to port the game (days rather than months, according to Apple), a simplified conversion process for shaders and graphics code, and an overall much shorter development time.
