Remember when he got rid of David Hayter, the iconic long-time voice actor of Snake, main character of his most popular series, just so he could replace him with some Hollywood actor doing a generic gruff guy impression? Then said actor ended up being so expensive that there was barely any dialogue... in a Metal Gear game?
I would buy it if the excuse was they wanted an actor that could do voice as well as motion capture, and maybe David Hayter wasn’t cut to do both at the same time. In some promo it sounded like they wanted someone who could do both. In the age of motion capture, it’s going to be jarring to record voice lines in a booth separately. Particularly if multiple actors interact with each other in a scene.
But no. There was barely any interesting acting at all from Snake. Most of the acting was carried by the other characters, while Snake was just grunting doing nothing in particular.
And it would have worked perfectly with Hayter as both parts. He's a voice actor; he can do a second voice of Ishmael pretending to be someone else. As for Venom sounding the same, well, hypnosis/mind control and plastic surgery are basically magic in this universe anyway (see Decoy Octopus, Liquid Ocelot, or hell just Ocelot in this same game).
Though that'd be torpedoed by Kojima's feud with Konami over crediting and its result of every scene in MGS5 listing (spoiling) its participants with a credit byline. In that case the intro could have used a different voice for Ishmael, and then the forced replay later that shows what actually happened could switch to Hayter.
On the other hand, it’s easier to bring out the details in older people or people with lots of freckles. I’ve tried to use Japanese people in the past, but it’s hard to make them look like their real-life counterparts. However, this time I used new technology, and I’m quite satisfied with the results. Well, I’d like to do even better next time.
It's normal for CG artists to do their best to make their work look like real life and not CG, though. Death Stranding is clearly attempting to look as realistic as they can manage