Bill Skarsgård with star in Hideo Kojima’s PHYSINT

Hideo Kojima has shared a video giving a broad update on the two projects he’s working on with Xbox – OD and PHYSINT – and revealing that Bill Skarsgård will star as the lead character in the latter action-espionage title.

“PHYSINT is the culmination of more than 40 years of my career,” he says, “a project that will redefine “action-espionage,” unbound by any existing genres in digital entertainment.”

Following on from last year’s confirmation of Charlee Fraser, Don Lee and Minimi Hamabe for the cast, Kojima has now found his star for the protagonist in Bill Skarsgård.

A part of the Skarsgård dynasty of Hollywood actors – son to Stellan and brother to Alexander, Gustaf, and Valter – Bill Skarsgård is best known for portraying Pennywise in the modern It films.

Just in case you missed the news from last week, PHYSINT is now being published by Xbox, after Sony decided to pull their funding and support from the project. This includes the multimedia ambitions that Kojima has for PHYSINT, but strengthens the ties that were already established for the Xbox-exclusive horror game OD.

There had been reporting that the Sony split was down to a mix of Death Stranding 2 underperforming and PHYSINT running behind schedule and missing early development targets. Kojima doesn’t address this directly, but asserts that OD’s production is getting back on track after filming resumed following actor strikes last year, and that PHYSINT work “continues to make steady progress”.

It’s not clear how development resources are being juggled between these two projects, but that progress currently means that the team is working through casting, getting scans of actors in their various outfits, and working on outside collaborations.

The expectation is that OD will be released first, with PHYSINT then becoming the sole focus of the studio. No dates have been discussed for the release of either, but the relationship between developer and publisher will be much easier when both projects are at Xbox, while Sony might have felt a bit put out that they would be waiting for work on a rival manufacturer’s game would have to be completed first – this effectively making development last much longer from their perspective.

Source: Kojima Productions

Tags: Hideo Kojima, Kojima Productions, OD, Physint