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

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

I also do this with Dark Souls regularly, and even though I've played DS3 more than any other game at this point, it's always the original DS world that I run through in my head.

truth be told, the reason i occasionally replay the game is to rememorize the maps

40 at Best Buy, time to splurge y/n?

Definitely a game I feel weird recommending to anyone but... yes imo

i actually feel like the gameplay, odd as it is, is super satisfying. and the fit and finish of everything is just bananas

again, it never clicked for me and i'd recommend avoiding.

I was looking at the rarity of some of the trophies. The one you get for sending out your first delivery bot, which is an unavoidable part of the game and happens not too many hours in, is marked as “rare”. So a lot of people playing and bailing.

The negative takes on this thing are a little weird to me. It’s different and at the outset is pointedly a struggle, but idk it was fun and good immediately imo and only got better.

I don’t see it as anymore challenging or difficult to get into than like Minecraft or whatever.

it is definitely the most haunted-ass game i’ve ever played. you know how you can yell into the void? i do it accidentally when spamming the “like” button, especially if i’m blowing past something on a trike. “hellooo!!” “is anybody there?!?!?” “i’m SAM!!” and one time i swear to god somebody answered back. i looked through my “emails” and apparently this is a thing. it wasn’t clear if the person who answers back is another real player (maybe)?

Yeah, you get a lot of answers to your hollering into the void. I think it happens, or is more likely to happen, when a player built structure is nearby.

yeah, sometimes the other couriers make noise (I think) but if you’re near a landmark that belongs to another character, the other Sam yells back at you

there are a bunch of near-endgame trophies that are not at all rare so I’m assuming people are getting gear possibilities and just not using them

there’s a couple trophies for trading with other porters but I think I screwed it up by only taking and not giving, whoops

i tried to give yesterday but couldn’t figure out how! i put something in my hand but then was like uhhh. maybe i have to put it on the ground?

this is $35 on amazon right now. i'm tempted even though i have no idea when i would play it

I took a look at my backlog again and that's my feeling too, so I'm probably going to wait till this hits $20.

for me it's not so much backlog as it is i can't play any violent/dark games until my kids go to sleep

There's very little violence

Though you do carry your dead mother on your back to an incinerator pretty early on

also bloody toenails if the preview footage was representative

just hold it in your hand for a while, they'll eventually take it. if they don't, put it down and step back, they should pick it up. (they won't if it's gear, it has to be, like, lost cargo) (in my experience) (I'm not sure)

i love that this game has an air of almost Super Mario Bros 3 level "friends telling each other how to get the warp whistle" energy, like, there are just things you can't write on the internet easily. you almost have to give any tip for this game autobiographically, which is gorgeous. i finished this game after putting a little over a hundred hours in (but apparently 30 of those were idle hours, because i am a big fan of putting the controller down and walking away for a long time i guess?), and laying down a goddamn zipline system to end all zipline systems. everything was on the network, i could get from any point to any other point in 8 minutes or less guarangoddamnteed.

I'm sad knowing that my perfected ziplines are going to be dead after having not logged in for a couple weeks. Time to put on that all-terrain exoskeleton and get back to work!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMGmjm3WkAEauFz?format=jpg&name=900x900

now i need a BT saying "hey now"

wow I'm dying a lot in these trenches! just got the 'you can change the difficulty level in settings' tip - fuck off

eeughh BT baby :/

i have now officially made sam look as obnoxious as possible. purple baseball cap and bright green wayfarers.

damn Tracer, what difficulty are you at? seems bad. very chill game, just protect BB and throw blood at guys!!

ah i was using the lethal weapons the whole time! yeah bb didn’t like that part at all

Hint: lethal weapons do work on the monsters, but only if fired through blood. So if you have a blood cloud from a grenade or they’re splashed with it (I think) you can shoot through it.

This game has colonised my brain.

I've just made it into the mountains, to the Doctor and the Mountaineer. Someone had already set up zip lines EXACTLY where I needed them, and even stationed a cycle at the last zip stop?! I have to say I was thrilled. God zip lines are great. But am i really that lucky? Did everyone get that easy of a ride? I'm pretty sure they're online zip lines so weren't put there by the game??

The feeling of getting enough materials into an autopaver is ineffably delicious