Kojima u svom podcastu:
"So, for the first Death Stranding I was already envisioning a sequel as I was making the first one. It was already in my mind. I had all the details worked out too. Then 3 months after DS1 released COVID happened. And it's still happening today. There was a lot that I thought about during the pandemic, and the way the world was headed, and my previous screenplay didn't make sense anymore. So I rewrote all of it. The ideas you had pre-COVID are more than likely no longer applicable post-COVID given what the users, the audience, have gone through. I think the same could be said for every type of entertainment, and I think creators of all media think this way. And so DS2 is the result of starting from zero.
At the end of the teaser you'll see the line "Should we have connected?", that is the theme this time around. The last game was a rope game where you connected the divided, isolated people. Connecting was righteous. Then the pandemic occurred. So now the question is what happens from here? And DS2 is all about that."