Hideo Kojima's games have always been known for their willingness to delve into the utterly bizarre, and that's never been more true than it is in Death Stranding. With Death Stranding 2, Kojima is already promising – or perhaps warning – that Troy Baker's Higgs is going all in on the absurdity.
"Higgs is not like twice or thrice better – it's 100 times better than DS1," Kojima said via translator at the SXSW panel where the new Death Stranding 2 trailer was revealed. "So at the end, you're gonna watch Higgs and say 'what is this?' And you'll probably throw the controller, it's so ridiculous. I'll apologize beforehand."
"Mission accomplished, if you do," Baker himself coyly added. There's not a whole lot of Higgs in the new trailer, but we do see a squidlike tentacle emerge from his mouth to threaten Norman Reedus' Sam, so that's something. Add to that the electric guitar lightning gun Higgs wielded in last year's trailer, and I think we've got a decent idea of the kind of ridiculousness that might be in store for us.
"Higgs was so popular last time I thought 'I can't kill him,'" Kojima said during the panel. "So he's coming back, apparently. But Higgs is not a normal villain. He's a loved character. So I thought I would raise two, three steps higher for this character." Kojima says that he was inspired by Baker's guitar and vocal performances on Instagram during the pandemic to give a more musical bent to Higgs in DS2.
"Especially when you're creating a world like Hideo is doing, everybody is just trying to hit the world that is up in that head," Baker said, pointing at Kojima while discussing the performance capture process for the game. "It's a mind-blowing world with mind-blowing characters, and all we have to do is just play it beat to beat and scene to scene."
