Death Stranding 2 was officially revealed at The Game Awards on December 8, and it now looks like the launch date has been leaked early by an artist working on the game. Frank Aliberti, a senior artist at PlayStation Studios Visual Arts, working on the sequel, noted the game as a 2024 project on his art station profile.
As noted by Comicbook, his profile has since been changed, but a screenshot of it lives on in a ResetEra thread. This isn't definitive proof that the game is coming out in 2024, however. Video games are taking longer than ever to make, and given Death Stranding only came out in late 2019, it's likely we'll be waiting till 2025 or beyond.
The artist is possibly only slated to work on the game until 2024, or maybe it's when all work will cease and the marketing machine will spin up, we just don't know for sure at this point. That being said, God of War Ragnarok only took four years to make, as it made clever use of existing assets, so a Death Stranding sequel could do the same, making 2024 a reasonable window to aim for.
So far, we know that Fragile will play a "significant" role in Death Stranding 2. This supports speculation that she'll be a playable character this time around. She featured heavily in the trailer, even more so than Sam, and with their ages seemingly reversed, it may make more sense to play as her instead.
So far, fans have ruled out time travel due to Fragile holding Louise, the BB Sam carried with him in DS1. Reverse timefall has been theorised, which I guess is sort of like time travel. What would happen if that fell on a BB? Would it return to the womb or just cease to exist? Would it come back eventually? Many questions, not as many as Maushold pose, but still a lot.
The story of the game had to be rewritten due to the Covid pandemic, so who knows how accurate any of these theories are or were?