Official news regarding the PS4 exclusive Death Stranding is widely believed to be set for today (May 29). Ahead of this, it seems the Kojima-developed title’s release date has leaked online.
Various sources have now reported that Death Stranding will be launching on November 8 this year, and may well even end up releasing on the upcoming PlayStation 5 as well as the PS4.
Over on the official PlayStation Twitch account, you’ll find a bizarre looped video that has been teasing something Death Stranding related all day. The assumption was that the stream would eventually yield a proper gameplay reveal, along with a 2019 release date.
This theory was further legitimised by the fact that a pre-order page for the game appeared on the PlayStation Store earlier, implying Death Stranding would indeed be launching by the end of the year.
Now, a tweet from Italian Journalist Antonio Fucito claims that the game will release on November 8. While a single tweet from one journalist should usually be taken with a grain of salt, Twitter user Nibel then discovered a now deleted post from the official Taiwanese PlayStation Facebook page that posted the same release date, which was then backed by Kotaku’s Jason Schrier.
Unfortunately, if Death Stranding is launching in November 2019 (which is seeming more and more likely), that spells bad news for The Last Of Us Part II, which was reportedly previously scheduled to launch in that period.
Jason Schrier added to the reports of the Death Stranding release date by suggesting that The Last Of Us has indeed been bumped to early 2020, most likely February. I mean, were any of us really expecting Joel and Ellie’s next adventure to arrive before the end of 2019?
I was certainly hopeful that was the plan, but life comes at you fast – especially when you’re developing a big budget AAA sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
It is, after all, incredibly unlikely that Sony would release two massive PS4 exclusives so close to one another, and it also seems much more feasible that Naughty Dog would have had to push its game back a little further, perhaps leaving Death Stranding to jump into the late 2019 slot that The Last Of Us Part II was set to occupy.
The good news is that we don’t have long to wait to find out for sure the fates of both titles. The Last Of Us Part II will reportedly be getting a release date before the end of the week, while Death Stranding’s official reveal is hours away.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.