See you on the beach - the thread for Hideo Kojima's DEATH STRANDING

my understanding is that the online components don't require playstation plus

(if that is the issue)

I'm perversely avoiding any actual reviews or gameplay videos atm because every anecdotal comment somehow confuses me further re: what this game even is/is about. Which I find fascinating.

it's possible some of the structures are put up by the NPC porters (your job) in the game, as a few appear, but I don't know that anyone reviewing or even playing the game has done it completely offline

the "likes" are what levels up one of your five metrics

i've gotten likes from NPC porters for shit i've left lying around

OL, there's a backstory that at the core establishes this post-apocalyptic world, what the precursor event was, and some of the basics that differentiate this world from our own. The story starts to answer a lot of the unknowns, but a lot of it is "we discovered this technology, it did amazing things, and something horrible happened" with some additional elements related to the fact knowledge was lost in the chaos and your NPC peers are discovering the history as you are.

fwiw the thread (strand?) title here is a reference that becomes clear not far into the game

finally a game that can breach the high watermark set by bioshock for creepiest cosplay

oh man there's gonna be a thousand norman reeduses at comicon
fat reedus, skinny reedus, buff reedus, black reedus, ups delivery uniform reedus, amazon delivery uniform reedus, DHL delivery uniform reedus, asia reedus, sexy reedus, mecha reedus, dog reedus...

I'm wondering what point in the game unlocks the Chvrches song!

The non-score musical parts so far are ok, but I feel like Kojima has found a band that's halfway between Imagine Dragons and Coldplay

I guess I should say vibe-wise, since there's not just one band

This is actually pretty fun and addictive. I don’t think the gameplay footage really sells it. There is a kind of tactile satisfaction in hauling yourself over the landscape that doesn’t really translate well to someone not holding the controller.

Not without its problems. The MULE and BT enemy encounters seem really simplistic and half-baked. I’m down with de-emphasizing combat, but I wish those systems were a little more sophisticated.

There are certain elements that seem to be deliberately irritating. Trudging through BT morass, mashing buttons as monster arms tear cargo off your back while a baby is crying in your face via the controller speaker is a good example. But that stuff is relatively minor/brief.

I've only had one BT battle encounter so far! And it was right at the beginning, before I really got the dynamic. If you're cautious and well-stocked with grenades or some of the later weapons, you can knock those suckers back to the afterlife.

I kind of want to trigger a battle because apparently if you take out one of the larger enemies that appear, they drop a ton of crystals

gameplay in the looks a bit like a walking version of spintires, would that be accurate?

THE HEART-SHAPED BUBBLE

the president's henchman is 'die hardman' who wears a leather suit, cravat and METAL SKULL MASK 24/7 i can't

i ended up just running the fuck away from the annoying BTs at the incinerator, suddenly found myself at the edge of a cliff, and somebody named igor had left.... a rope for me! at the edge! i liked the shit out of it and rappelled away, thanks igor.

thomas i think spintires is more frustrating and lets you screw yourself over. here a modicum of attention will keep you upright.

love this game. just got the "speed skeleton" and i am booking it across this rock strewn ghost-scape. also i am getting the rhythm of infiltrating BT areas so it's less of a drag. stupid MULEs not so much. i'll figure them out.

I’ve gotten pretty good at shooting MULES in the face with my bolo gun. Drops em.

Game really starts opening up in chapter 3. Trucking my stolen MULE mobile down the highway, wind in my hair. Feels good.

just got the BRIDGES truck, really adds to the UPS vibe. loading that motherfucker up with claimed metals and ceramics all the way to south knot city.

Tracer, Igor was the guy in the truck with the corpse at the very beginning!

Ahhhh!

I've been trying to put a certain feeling into words and I think this is how one says this these days.. This game has big Tomb Raider 1 energy

I have yet to see a single pyramid-shaped breast

Kojima is still insanely bad at female characters, but I'm just shaking my head and sighing when that issue pops up

This game has big Tomb Raider 1 energy

this, to me, is the highest praise, so consider my interest in eventually playing this officially heightened

oh. that makes me much more interested.

womb raider (because babies (not sure where i'm going with this))

womb raider is a mission in this game, kind of

also my nickname in college

sorry

my phone tells me my copy is on the way, presumably on foot over the scenic tundra of brooklyn

https://www.polygon.com/videos/2019/11/11/20959269/unraveled-kojima-name-generator-death-stranding

Since it was announced I've continued to misread the game's name as "Death Standing," and given so much of the gameplay appears to be about finding your footing while traversing rough terrain, "Death Standing" kind of works!'

it's a strand game though

i love that the president's name is bridget strand. some morally bankrupt new media grad student should write something about kojima character names, aristotle's discussion of names in poetics, the relevant bit of the rise of the novel, and compare and contrast with the work of shigeru miyamoto (whose games feature character with much more "realistic" names inasmuch as they jibe with the contemporary social milieu of their settings).

like, are all porters named porter? and all bridges members named bridges? that doesn't seem to be the case based on the people sam interacts with.

I guess, with some exceptions, you can just run away from boss fights? I took down a creature summoned by a certain bad guy last night and later read a guide saying I could have just hopped my way out of there

I'd probably have a lot more of my blood if I had

In any case, I'm now in the middle of Episode 6

I'm in episode 5, episode 4 was the only real misstep so far, I really hated it--but it was very short.

hi i'm a guy with a metal skull mask named Die Hard Man, i'll be introducing you to your dying mother who is the president of the United States, please don't agitate her to the point of death aaaaaaaaaand okay you already have

I guess if you look at the figurines in your private room, you can replay the "detour" from episode 4.

I'm wondering if there will be any landscapes in the game that you can't revisit. I get the impression that everything's always open

Guys I realise this is really basic but it keeps raining on me and damaging my stuff. I have the ability to make post boxes, but they don't allow me to complete/entrust deliveries - is this something that gets unlocked later? For now I'm tromping around getting rained on and freaking out.

There also seems like way more lost cargo than I can reasonably get back to the Knot Cities but the completist in me sort of hates to leave them lying around.

You'll get a variety of options to help with package damage:
- Find an overhang or cave and take a nap
- Unlock the ability to make Timefall shelters you can sit under until it stops raining
- Weather station that adds a map layer with forecasts up to a half hour (I think) that let you plot routes around storms
- Drive a truck that's enclosed, keeping all your cargo dry
- Run around blasting cargo repair spray at your back

I haven't been delivering hardly any lost cargo because in heavily trafficked areas it's everywhere

I kind of gave up on caring about perfect, undamaged cargo deliveries after getting the DELIVERY ROBOT. I'm guessing I need to upgrade it, but the ability to have small tasks done by a couple robots is nice, even if they get B/C grades

I'm also weirded out by the fact the way the cargo bot walks seems like of sexy, like it struts and swings its robot hips?

trace you are gonna have to make peace with not picking everything up, just look for stuff that's going your way.

i always give myself a good spritz of container repair spray before making a delivery. S rank after devastating S rank over here.

the delivery bot's little shoes fucking ruin me every time

dispatching it on deliveries and shaking my head in shame as it cheerily bounds up the ramp

"the delivery bot's little shoes fucking ruin me every time"

lol same

thing is there's container damage and then there's item damage, right? do you get docked points for container damage?

i was confused by the repair spray stuff at first as it didn't seem to be fixing up my damaged items. was overlooking the fact that it's called CONTAINER repair spray.

Chuck_Tatum, the terrible things you read were by little babies. Of course yes get going with it.

oh no! is it one of those

i mean, it seems harmless enough, so I guess it makes sense that babies will hate it

partially I'm just blown away by the graphics - I've been playing on luna, which I guess is on a good-ish graphics mode - it's pretty striking after seven years of only playing a switch, and before that I hadn't really played games since the 90s

It's gorgeous. My friend bought me a big coffee table book of the Art Of Death Stranding and while it was a lovely gift, and the book is interesting, i was a bit disappointed to find there wasn't more of the landscapes. Lots of detailed drawings of the various weapons and suits and vehicles though. But for me, the main character of DS1 is the terrain. You get to know it well after a while, and it starts becoming a friend in a way. I'd be interested in seeing how the developers made the decisions they made when it came to all that

I'm curious to kmow what use people make of beach transponders and hot springs, seeing as you can't use them to transport cargo, and you may as well use the DHV Magellan most of the time. They seem a bit pointless?

Similar question with ziplines.. I mean basically... if I can't take my truck I don't wanna go

At least you can park your truck near a zip line and scooter up the mountain to make a delivery. I loved ziplines in the first game. Only really just started using them now

Oh, has everyone delivered the pizza chef's misanga whoch you can retrieve from the nearby enemy camp? It's worth doing

you must absolutely do all the pizza chef missions if you like combat

the beach transponders are great in the late game where you're wanting to do specific deliveries. just hop on over there. the hot springs? didn't unlock those until after I'd completed the main game

ziplines are completely essential if you delve into timed deliveries or need to do a lot of mountain stuff. the ability to chain them off the monorail towers makes them even better

the other transponder/magellan thing that's useful is bulk material transport. park the magellan at the closest location to a mine, teleport as close to the mine as you can, and send all the materials you can to the magellan's location. then you hop around the map in the magellan and build/repair all your stuff

yes i’ve been using the magellan as a dumping ground for excess so far but not yet leveraging it like that. at the moment it has a pretty low cap on what i can store there

you can do some really silly things with the coffin board for quick deliveries, btw. especially if you want to get to/from the Mechanic. it goes pretty fast on water and if you're at, say, Heartman's lab, you can zipline down to the water (I do not recommend coffin boarding all the way down from his hill, too treacherous) and then just surf all the way around to the other side

it's probably one of the most game scale-breaking things if you take the landscape as the whole of Australia, because your little rocket surfboard can navigate around the entire continent

I didn't know you could chsin the zips off the monorail. This game throws so much at you.

I've been off sick today and I spent all day doing little side deliveries and road builds. It was very mindful and therapeutic, but honestly I don't feel like I achieved all that much in the 6 or 7 hours I just played

Mind you, i think these games are best played at ones own pace. You can, if you wish, race through the whole thing and complete the main game, then go back and do the hoovering up.

But I like to kind of work my way outward, get to know a plot of land really well, build roads and zips, do a few extra deliveries for the props and extra equipment.

It means i can play the game in tandem with other games and it's fine. I'm not always in the mood for this one, but when I am (like today) it hits the spot.

Thinking about it, is there a single supporting character in this game who isn't low key super annoying? Don't say Dollman. Dollman is the colleague who comments on what you brought in for lunch and asks if he can "have a smell of it"

That said, anyone else make them sing the "Ba-bam ba-bam bam-bam" song every time they go in the hot spring without fail? Makes me rofl every time, but mostly because it's really out of character when Sam breaks his RBF and has fun

Last night, as the ladt thing I did, I risked life and limb trying to find a hot spring near the Eastern Observatory (or whatever it's called) because the sensor kept signalling me to climb up a huge mountain. I feel down so many times BB went into par-octo-xysms until I realised the spring was on the other side of the mountain

(Apologies for the typos, I really need a new phone and to get better at proofreading myself when typing on the fly)

I love Dollman. The guy who does the voice acting is fantastic!

Maybe it's time you had a shower...

it's really out of character when Sam breaks his RBF and has fun

there was that one time he tried playing the "shoe game" even though his boot was completely laced up so there's no way it would have worked, which he apparently didn't know, because he doesn't understand how boots work

Have we mentioned the very tiny hint of a smile he gives whenever he receives a new tchotchke for his backpack

"does anybody remember laughter??"

If you want a big dose of good-mood Sam, finish a VR training session

ah i need to do that. the game keeps telling me i need to do it.

Sometimes I think i like these games not despite their flaws, but because of their flaws.

One of these flaws are the large BT fights. These are either extremely easy or stupidly difficult. And it has less to do with skill than luck more than anything else.

The speed of a lot of these bosses does not match the speed of the game. Like much of the encounters in this thing, it is near impossible to stop yourself getting injured.

The tar slowing Sam down and sometimes making him walk in funny directions, coupled with the clunkiness of the weapons menu system makes me feel like it's the game itself that is fighting against me rather than the bosses.

Sam will be in the middle of getting ganked by three lion BTs, and instead of picking up the weapon on the ground and firing it, he'll just start do-si-do-ing round it like he's out for his morning exercise.

I also often don't know how to stop these fights from happening. There's me trying to speak into the disused Ghost Mech Factory, now overrun by BTs. I could use a grenade or a cannon. But instead I decide to do it the old fashioned way and clear them out by hand using the boomerang.

After meticulously socking what felt like at least a dozen BTs, one of them decides it's had enough of it. I try to run, but Sam, for some reason, decides he's just going to pace along gently.

Before I know it there's an entire lake of tar around me and I'm being pulled into it. I can't escape - the tar guys are everywhere and they pull me in.

Makes me wonder if this was meant to happen - perhaps the last BT is meant to get you and trigger the Lion fight, but I wasn't prepared for it. I had a single grenade gun and my boomerang. I could not defeat those BTs.