Topic: Death Stranding OT

I've also beaten the game. It was a great road, but the ending was quite boring. For me the climax was about half the game as new tools were getting added. As soon as I had all the gear and structures, the experience was downhill for me. The last 5 hours of the game I was rushing it.

Marvellous game regardless. Not GOTY material tho.

Neat! I just discovered that truck has an indicator on the back that tells you how much space is remaining. I never noticed it.

103 hours in. I've just got my last five stars, except for the pizza guy. Going to continue with the next chapter (or whatever Heartman wants me to do) tomorrow. Hope to see some story bits again.

So late game question. I'm on episode 12 I think.

@KratosMD Yeah I did. Apparently the issue was that my package was ruined nearly all the way and after the fight Sam was out of stamina, so he tripped, fell, and broke the package. But it turns out that the game saves after the fight, so I didn't have to do the boss fight again fortunately.

Does Death Stranding have any branching narrative? Like can the condition you deliver a person in effect what happens?

@Jaz007 No, you just get less, or no points. If you fail a mandatory mission, you can redeploy the cargo at the pickup point.

So, I was in the mood to finally pull this game from the backlog and give it a whirl. I was waiting for the right time for me, because I knew this game was so different from any other game out there that I needed to be ready to learn new mechanics and have the time and energy to devote to a new IP. And I’m pleased to say, the wait appears to be worth it. So far, I love it.

I’m only a couple hours into it, and I had to pull away to do some chores, but I can’t wait to go back. It’s a strange world, for sure, but it is starting to make some sense to me. The trailers were so weird that I didn’t know what to expect, but it looks like Kojima actually has created a unique world with its own rules and situations that do actually have some logical direction. I can’t wait to see where this goes!

More Early Impressions

I just have to talk about this game.

I’m getting into a decent rhythm with the game now - probably about 6-8 hours into it. Man, this is great. I did not expect Death Stranding to be this compelling and resonate with me so much. Such a breath of fresh air with its unique gameplay. Yes, it’s technically a series of fetch quests, but that’s not the point. The enjoyment isn’t in the fetching and retrieving, its in the journey and the strategy. Calculating a path, managing your load, building structures and interacting with the network.

Say what you will about Kojima, but the guy is a bona fide visionary. I mean, I can’t help but see echoes of the COVID-19 isolation in this game, where people are all locked up in their locations and not interacting, and in order to restore the world order with any hope of humanity subsisting we need to reconnect. It feels very familiar to our situation where society as we know it is prone to collapse if we can’t restore social function in the midst of this pandemic.

> I was also interested to see in one of the supplemental documents in the game that they termed people to have “Delivery Dependence Syndrome”; sounds like what we are starting to see already where we are addicted to our Amazon orders, grocery and food delivery to the door, and heck - even buying a car now can be done online and they deliver it to your house. In the game, the advent of drone and non-human delivery with less social interaction resulted in decline in physiological hormone production and oxytocin deficiencies that resulted in human despair.

Then the whole thing is mirrored in a real life interaction in the game with the asynchronous online multiplayer collaboration and interchange which just further drives home the theme. As an example - after a tough trek through steep and rocky landscape filled with BTs to get to a station and bring it online, I was dreading the laborious crawl through the rough terrain filled with BT’s, only to find with the chiral network online now, there were extremely useful bridges and rest areas in place! I was so thrilled! I could feel my oxytocin levels surge!

The game is quite ingenious, in my opinion. Granted I’m early into it and I’m glazing over its weak points — like some of the acting and script is a bit cheesy, starting with the characters’ names, and the combat is a little weak, for example. But it’s a great ‘chill’ game, and then add the wonderful music in there and the gorgeous scenery, and the hours fly by while I play. After having just finished Assassin’s Creed Origins — which was a great game, mind you, but extremely iterative and a ‘safe’ recycle of well-established game mechanics and themes — it has been refreshing to have a very different experience like Death Stranding. The timing was ripe for me to play it. I really can’t understand the vitriol with which some of the gaming community reacted when the game was released and all the condescending insults thrown at Kojima. Most have surely never played the game. I suppose it’s the same people who are flaming Naughty Dog and tearing down TLoU2.

@Th3solution glad your enjoying it. I played before lockdown but have thought of the games a few times, mainly when trying to tentatively navigate supermarket isles viewing careless boomers like BTs! I love the text in the message entries, I can completely see emojis being part of standard text, irrespective of how formal the content within the next 10-15 years. A handful of pictures can remove any doubt about the tone of the content. On Kojima, im in the camp that although mgsV story is a mess, its still one of the best games on the ps4 for the systems in the world and this game has some of those hallmarks. Thats Kojimas real strength, though I wish he would let others influence dialogue and production. I'm glad I played it but I also get why it splits opinion, I very much have issue with some things in the later game. Hope you enjoy and keep on keeping on 👍🏻👍🏻

@Th3solution I really enjoyed Death Stranding as well, if only because it's so different to other games I've played. I also played offline, which kinda felt like the hard mode to me, with no help from people online lol.

@Th3solution without spoiling anything for you, the games traversal becomes quicker later in the game as long as you stay online. It's a great game.

It hasn't stayed with me though, maybe it's the weak boss fights or real slog once you get in the mountains. The only gaming masterpiece I have straight up refused to ever play again.

I’m still loving this game, but I have to admit - the voice acting is a bit inconsistent. Some of the performances are really good, and some are really poor.

I’m in Chapter 5 now and the story is really interesting. I continue to really like the gameplay as well. I know people say it starts to grate soon, but so far I’m still utterly enticed.

@Th3solution I haven't cleared it, doubt I'll get back to it now frankly. But yeah the voice acting (and storylines in general) seem inconsistent. It starts strong, gets pretty bad, and I hear it picks up again considerably toward the end.

@Th3solution @kyleforrester87 I think around chapter 4 or 5 you get in the main gameplay loop. It's all about how much time you want to spend building the network. I think you can get it done pretty quickly if you just follow the main story. I went for 100%, meaning that I spend most of my time making deliveries, but since I played offline it was quite challenging, and so it was still engaging towards the end. But story-wise the middle part of the game takes a back seat. I wouldn't say it gets bad, it's just different from the cut-scene heavy beginning and end.

@Th3solution I don't recall any performances that were notably bad, which characters do mean by that? The regular NPCs or the main characters?

@Octane That annoying woman who gets married sticks in my mind. Also that woman you have to lug across the mountain who had the invisible baby. She drones on worse than I do.

Fragile makes up for it by far though, shes the best character in the game - at least as far as I played.

@kyleforrester87 Oh yeah, I think that Japanese girl is some kind of famous person in Japan, and I think they got her to do the English VA as well. It was kinda hard to decide for me if it was just bad acting, or if it was just her trying to speak English.

Mama was alright, but her facial animations in some cut-scenes didn't look quite finished.

@Having the great voice actors just made the poorer ones stand out all the more, unfortunately.

@Th3solution When you hit the mountains the pace comes right down. Initially its a big relief to get to the top of the first big one, then it opens up more and its depressing as hell. The slow pace when you have previously with roads and Bridges makes it a bigger slog.

I loved DS. Wouldn't ever replay it though.

@KratosMD Very true. It's easy to forget all the good parts if there are a few hiccups here and there.