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

Sounds like the guy should have made a movie or website or social network app or something. Since the game aspect seems sort of ancillary to his themes and/or goals.

the main task of the game is literally connecting disconnected people

it's like a goddamn imBEACHment hearing in here

yeah, I give up

so, those of us actually playing this, how you doing? what episode are you on?

This does seem like the type of thing that a phone app would be ideal for. Check in on likes and such for those structures you laid down earlier.

Last night I wrecked some MULE sites and grabbed a ton of road materials. Almost single handedly putting together a Route 66 across this piece.

I’m at... episode 8 or 9? With like 40 some hours of play time. I really enjoy this game and can’t seem to put it down.

i'm on episode 6, i plead toddler

if you're around 8, would highly recommend doing all the standard orders and world-building you can for a while

there's a moment I'm at where you can't for a while :/

i think i'm still on like..... 2? only get an hour or so every night or so

confused by criticism of these janked-out 22nd century vehicles that they're clumsy or handle strangely. i mean... of course they handle strangely, they're from a society that's been totally destroyed where the only roads were 3-d printed 20 minutes ago

lol, that’s canon now

Haha fair point actually. If I could ever imagine how a 3D printed vehicle would handle it would absolutely be just like this.

Kojima may have outdone himself when it comes to dumping 80% of the exposition during the endgame and credits this time!

i liked this:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-11-15-together-alone-the-radical-promise-of-pathfinding-in-death-stranding

i'm still very early on but this is interesting to think about: "Death Stranding's drawback as a fable about the importance of reforging connections is that it never moves beyond that atmosphere of collective toil and deprivation."

i do sort of wish that there were a big narrative moment where your relationship with BRIDGES changes, that the carefully constructed material/building/recycling loops start to go haywire, that you override the weapons deactivations and discover just what the fuck is going on. it's a great game without that of course but it would have been pretty amazing.

afaict there’s only one truly bad person in the game! everything is very morally complex, or should I say... uncertain

finished. ruled

agreed

wish I’d done the pizza missions when they were available

i did the first one and received a very good email from the recipient later! i wonder what the subsequent ones were all about

check your messages, dude

or at least go to peter’s shelter

ya thats the email i mean. gonna drop by tonight.

last few hours of this game are like "oh you thought we were doing tarkovsky? psyche mf it's douglas sirk's evangelion"

Kojima hiding story twists behind other, more bizarre, story twists

There was one moment where I was actually stunned

I could’ve done with less exposition on top of exposition and then the exposition of that exposition. Kojima continues to be comically long winded. BUT... this was really great and I admire its fully dedicated swinging-for-the-fences-and-MEANING-IT heart. Felt entirely confident.

Also the game was just... really fun. Despite (or because of) its insistence on making you suffer through some of it, the core gameplay loop’s legitimately addictive and satisfying.

I’m gonna keep playing and collect some trophies I think. Still some zip line routes to complete.

Excited to see what else untethered Kojima will have coming in the future.

Can I just say how impressed I am that any of you folks can finish a game, any game, in just a few weeks?

I’ve only just started chapter three but i’m really enjoying this uniquely haunted stumbling simulator

it is super haunted

it’s all about shaky contact from the other side: of death, of the wire connecting you to the internet, of the “chiral network”. despite all this contact you are so, so alone.

I have a bunch of time off at the end of year, regularly procrastinate housework (and am suffering now) and have no kids and a lot of my social obligations exist but I can push them off a week or two

so, throwing fifty hours into a game in just over two weeks is probably not healthy but it was fun! I honestly only do this maybe once a year. don’t feel like you have to binge this sucker — it’s super fun in one to two hour increments and the plot is set up so that you can progress or do a number of tasks that fit in that amount of time

lol community
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-12-03-death-stranding-players-are-using-vehicles-for-griefing-and-kojima-productions-is-stepping-in

Just goes to show, if you make a game about connection and helping other people, someone is going to use that mechanic to be a dick. (see also: jump here, fake wall ahead, go left et al. in Dark Souls)

i just started chapter 3 and there's a holographic "watcher" from horizon zero dawn just hanging out on the outskirts of lake knot city?!?

is that the weird giraffe thing? there are a few giant holograms that weird me out but, hey, it’s a futuristic world with holograms

it's literally this: http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/horizonzerodawn/images/0/04/Watcher-Render.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/310?cb=20170228084356

huh would you look at that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAt2Oj8FPfo

Is that game any good? I guess it uses the same game engine.

nah it's like an ubisoft style big map boring tasks game imo, i played a few hours and never went back to it

maybe like those EA LOTR mordor games are a better comparison. overstuffed with not-that-fun stuffing

Horizon Zero Fun more like.

(I haven’t played it, but that’s how a friend described it)

i haven't played it but it looked like it had more "real" action gameplay than like the assassins creed contextual action stuff, is that the case

I’ve definitely worn out on that Ubi template so when I heard that was the set-up I avoided it from there.

combat is more like the mordor games so while not "fun" exactly it's not just press square to wrist blade lorenzo de medici

It's well made but extremely unoriginal and I'm positively allergic to the 'techno-native' aesthetic they've got going on. Viking dudes wearing bones in their beards talking into a teal HUD. Yeah I simply cannot wait to craft another set of shock arrows and then have a stilted over-the-shoulder conversation with somebody named Lek who will never appear again.

Death Stranding both incredibly close to the world of Horizon - fallen/destroyed world with some half-operational vestiges of extremely advanced technology dotting the landscape - and a million miles away from it aesthetically - HZD the aforementioned techno-primitive bullshit but incredibly lush and fruitful landscape; DS austere and pulled back, no animals, few plants, everything just blasted away apart from a suspiciously unblemished system of faceless distribution centres and everybody wearing a kind of modern, c20 plebian luggage handler gear.

Played this for like 3 hours straight last night - a marathon session by my standards - and really got into its rhythms. Absolutely love it. Starting to build some roads next to Lake Knot city even though I don't have anything to drive with.

Has anybody used Strand Contracts? I'm like a 'master handler' now (lmao at the absurdly over-engineered task completion and level-up views) so I can do them but I'm..... shy

By the way I'm a lot less afraid of MULES now. I just karate chop 'em if they see me. I assume this will get harder.

Oh and... once I 'dismantle' a ladder or whatever... is it just gone? I'm not clear on what happens to it

I've tagged a handful of people with high numbers in the list with strand contacts but I haven't dug in to see if there's a big difference

Dismantling gets rid of things, yes. It's basically an erase button.

MULEs get harder after a plot point where you traverse a certain area where they've "gone feral" or something similar. After that point, you run into many more with actual guns :(

They have really good eyesight. Much harder to sneak up on than soldiers in MGS imo

I haven't played at all this week, but an fyi for anyone who is toward the end game and is curious about how effective weapons are:

do NOT throw a real grenade (as opposed to a stun grenade) anywhere near a MULE vehicle. I mean, unless you enjoy taking an entire truck of corpses to an incinerator. additionally, there are no game achievements for killing or delivering to the incinerator. the game absolutely does not want you to kill anyone!

bola gun + curbstomping fools is my new crack.

god, i thought i was going to have to do all the paving myself! it feels really neat when you come back after an order and there's a whole new stretch of freeway opened up. spooky, but neat.

has anyone else found themselves walking around irl and having a sudden moment of physical identification with reedus? hoiking your backpack up on your shoulders, for instance. or the rain starting to fall and putting your hood up. it's the mark of a great work of art (and uh, hours upon hours of imbibing it) that it makes you feel like you're in that world even when you're not. great movies can do that. the feeling of the movie lingers for awhile after you leave the cinema. when i was playing a lot of gran turismo i looked at cars differently, i saw things in them i had never seen before.

this game gets at something i've been thinking about more every time i go back to visit my family in tennessee. most of us are completely divorced from the details of our landscape. for most of human history, a trip somewhere involved intimate knowledge of plateaus, rocks and rills, gaps and passes, etc. but in the USA at least the car and the interstate system has just obliterated that connection with the land. in this game you start by learning every rock and detail of your world. eventually - blessedly - you gain the ability to dispense with those details. it's bittersweet.

good post - you're absolutely right about how good this game is at linking your avatar with his environment, and how solid and real it can feel

on videogame spaces feeling like you're in that world, i sometimes calm my brain at bedtime by mentally navigating around the streets of liberty city from gta3, which i still know like the back of my hand despite the fact that i haven't played it in probably 15 years at this point, but it's absolutely a real place in my mind that i spent probably a hundred hours in back in 2001

haha wow. that's amazing. i used to be able to do that with tomb raider levels to an extent.

I do that with dark souls.

oh yeah, i can definitely do it with dark souls too

counterstrike maps for me