Does your Mac, iPad, or iPhone make the cut for 'Death Stranding Director's Cut?'
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
"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
"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.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
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/
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.
https://wccftech.com/resident-evil-village-release-on-iphone-15-pro/
5:18 in the video:
The game uses PS4 assets (around 30GB size) and runs at 720p/30.
Here someone connects an external display over USB-C:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy8lBdDpDrI&t=830s
Price is listed at the above site as around $30 (I'd guess they'd go with $29) and IAPs are around $13. Kinda expensive but they will probably have sales over Christmas and they are probably launching to tie in with Halloween promotions.
At 8:36 in the first video above, they tested iPhone 15 vs 14 and it didn't show much difference with power consumption under load but graphics showed a 25% improvement in a normal test and 44% in raytracing. I expected the raytracing test would be higher given that Apple mentioned up to 4x faster raytracing vs software but maybe they aren't using the hardware RT cores.
The Nvidia 4090 gets around 760FPS in the Solar Bay raytracing test:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFNa_IDlnJM
The iPhone 15 Pro gets around 24FPS. If Apple doubles the chips at each level e.g M3 = 2x A17, M3 Pro = 2x M3 etc. M3 Ultra would be 16x the A17 so would get 384FPS if it scales up well. This is around half a 4090. Hopefully they can get a bit closer, the iPhone chips are probably heavily constrained due to thermals and power usage.