Sitting across from me in a beige convention center meeting room, Goichi Suda exudes a sense of gentleness and humility at odds with his reputation as a designer of ultra-violent video games. Lounging beside him is his new boss, Kazuki Morishita, a friendly Japanese man in casual clothing. While Morishita isn’t a household name in America, he’s one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary game designers, creator of the billion-dollar mobile sensation Puzzle & Dragons. Morishita’s GungHo Online Entertainment recently acquired Suda’s development studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, a deal brokered over nights spent drinking sake together and talking about the games they create.

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Let It Die Post E3 2014 4 IMAGES

Both men are relaxed, chatting amicably about their roots, Japanese idol singing groups, and Morishita's band, Super King Metal Dragon. After introductions we sit down and talk about their first collaboration to come west: Let It Die , a PS4 exclusive announced during Sony’s June 9 E3 press conference. Suda and Morishita drop some hints about what to expect from the newly unveiled project, highlighting the game’s focus on asynchronous multiplayer elements with a charming, offbeat hand-drawn sketch.Suda explains that whenever a player dies, their character’s death data (including inventory) is uploaded to servers. When another player starts a new session, this death data populates their individual game world with hostile manifestations of previously-slain player characters. Suda and Morishita explained that the deaths of other Let It Die players would create “a completely different experience even on the same stage” for each individual.“As you progress in the game, you defeat people and, you know, you take their stuff, their clothing and their weapons,” Suda explains through a translator. Players begin life wearing nothing but underwear and a gas mask, and rely on looting in combat to improve their arsenal. While the trailer focused heavily on the importance of weapons, Suda points out that this is a survival game, and other factors will also be important to staying alive in the hostile environment. “There are things you probably need, maybe even more than weapons,” he says, though he refuses to elaborate on just what these things might be.Suda and Morishita told me that the Grim Reaper skateboarding across the game logo appears in person within Let It Die. They confirmed the existence of a character creation process, revealed that the status bars visible in the trailer represent hit points, and told me that the game includes some elements of player growth to be revealed at a later date. It will also incorporate an integrated mobile application element, unsurprising given GungHo’s immersion in the Japanese portable games market.

Jared Petty is an Associate Editor at IGN. He once saw a duck fired out of a cannon. True story. Follow him @pettycommajared on Twitter and contribute to his sense of worth.