Yep, that’s Death Stranding, all right.
I wasn’t expecting to like this game as much as I am. My tolerance for Kojima cutscenes is a lot lower than it used to be.
But I really am liking it.
This must be the worst opening 2.5 hours to a game I’ve ever played. The first hour is like 55 minutes of cutscenes and 5 minutes of tutorials. And then you get 15 minutes of gameplay and an hour of cutscenes.
And the cutscenes are just trash. You should be making me interested in the backstory, or emphasize with the characters, or something. Instead it’s just been boring infodumps by characters that might as well be robots.
I really loved my time with it, but eventually it got overwhelming and I had to stop. I was happy delivering stuff, but dealing with all the time rain and shit became too much for my feeble brain to handle.
I had a hard time getting into it too but Death Stranding ended up being my favorite game of 2020. I’d try to stick with it for a while and see if it grabs you. I really loved its gameplay loop of struggling against the elements whilst being drip-fed new gizmos.
Yep. I’m committed to playing a significant amount of this (for a book club kind of thing), and anyway find the core gameplay concept intriguing.
But at least at the start, the game seems intent on not letting me actually play. I’m here for the logistics, and instead it’s just cramming these amateurish cut scenes down my throat. I realize that Kojima thinks he is an auteur genius, and doesn’t understand just what kind of tripe he has written [0]. But even if the writing was good, how could anybody think that this kind of pacing makes sense?
Let me play a few missions as a normal porter first, and use that opportunity to do some world-building. And then when you start off the real plot off, all these Very Important People can actually talk about the plot rather than just clumsy “as you know Bob” info-dumps.
[0] Here’s an example of what I mean. You’ve just been asked to do a delivery of morphine to the President.
Sam: Why do you need me to deliver the morphine, I’m sure you have some there already
Deadman: Of course we do. In reality, America’s last President wants to talk to you. Are you really going to say no?
…
So you do this difficult delivery, which consists of walking 100 meters in a safe zone.
Deadman: Thank you. This will ease her pain.
Sam: “Her”?
Deadman: The first female President of the United States. Surely you remember her? She is your mother.
Like, wtf? Literally nothing about this makes sense as a human conversation.
Kojima gonna Kojima. It is worth ploughing through. Though, as posted above, since you had the same reaction as me to the Kojimaness, I highly recommend not progressing past chapter 8 until you’re completely done with the gameplay.
I did, of course, end up progressing past it. What a garbage fire that last 10 hours is. No amount of warnings could have adequately prepared me for just how tedious, awfully written, and badly designed it is.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST NOT YET MORE CREDITS. NO. NO. NOOOOO. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
But hours 5-50 were really top notch. The world is beautiful, and the delivery and building gameplay are great for getting immersed in it.
Endgame should have been setting up a proper zip line network to all locations, then it would have been game of the decade.
I was enjoying this more than I expected to (although not exactly gripped). The asynchronous multiplayer elements were really well done. But what made me ragequit forever was when I had to descend into a large basin in the mountains. I left some ropes behind me as I descended, thinking I was being clever. Did what I had to do in the settlement, accepted a load of packages to take back with me, and then discovered all the ropes were at the tops of their respective cliffs for no apparent reason.
So you mean to tell me that even though I’d prepared, I have to go all the way around again anyway, carrying all this? Fuck off. I have way too many interesting games in my backlog to bother with this shite.
This is on sale on Epic Game Store for $30, like in the sale where we all had $10 coupons. I wish I’d bought it then, but I found out at the time that it literally wouldn’t run on my old CPU. I’ve since bought a new PC and want to check it out. I wish Epic would bring back the $10 coupon! :)
You and me both!
Well, Death Stranding is on sale in Steam this time. $24. Not as good as the Epic sale with the $10 coupon where I almost bought it, but almost there. Tempted.
Edit: And bought. My first real walking simulator!
OK, I’m going to give this a try. I’m looking at the options and there is a setting for shared content that defaults to everything. I’m someone who tends to like to do everything themselves, should I turn this off or does it ruin the game? The choices are “share everything”, or “don’t share strictures, signs and vehicles”.
There is something also to login automatically. Do I want that or will it then have other players interfere in my game in ways I may not want?
The game is much better IMO with the shared stuff turned on.
I don’t know which is better but I didn’t want any interference from others in my game and so I disabled all the multiplayer stuff. I had an absolute blast playing the game. It was slightly grindy building certain infrastructure but not too bad. So I’d say go ahead and disable it all :)
There is no interference. Sometimes other players’ dropped cargo will show up on the map, or if they’ve left some stuff behind for other people to deliver you might see it in the menu at waystations. Before you’ve connected a region to the network you won’t see any other players’ stuff, and their structures and vehicles will show up only occasionally. Signs are a different story, and I might like the option to disable player signs or with even more granularity just certain types of sign, but it’s really not too bad. It’s pretty damned unobtrusive in general, I think, and sometimes it’s really nice to happen on a player ladder just where you might need it but forgot or didn’t think to bring your own.
Maybe I’ll start with all online stuff off and turn it on piecemeal if it gets too tedious without it. Seems safest that way I guess. It seems easier to go that route then have it on and then turn it off later. Thanks for the input everyone.
With the $10 coupon, Epic is selling this for $13.99. Hard to pass that up, regardless of the pros and cons I’ve been reading about on this thread.
I haven’t read too much about the game, but I had a general idea from browsing some posts here. I knew it would be different. I knew I’d be making deliveries. I knew the story would be weird. I had no idea what I would think of it.
So far, I’m pretty early in, making a delivery to a solar farm. I’m enjoying it! I don’t really know why, but I am. I have no idea how long it will stick, or how more mechanics they will keep layering on. I’m hoping there will be a variety of landscapes. It’s a pretty game in its own kinda samey way. I’m playing offline so far.