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

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

WHERE ARE ALL THE GODDAMN CERAMICS

i would make long truck trips along the highways i'd already built appropriating ceramics at every stop. then when you reach the end of the road you can load up the next paver, drive back to the beginning and do it all over again.

game of the century

if any of those ziplines were set up by "precisiongrind" I would recommend throwing him a few dozen likes

I didn't realize until near the end that you can give structures more than one like at a time. the really useful things are worth it

mysteriously music by the band Low Roar made it onto my phone after playing

not that I'd go outdoors and stand on the edge of a bluff and cue up a song, or anything

i'm not that many hours in but completely against expectations am really enjoying it. so tactile!

i like the shit out of pretty much everything i use apart from signs.

same but i made an exception for the no-peeing sign at the springs

The zip lines in the mountains for me were sparse enough and rightly placed enough to bounce off of them with my own additions.

Haven’t picked this up since X-Mas, I wonder if the building deterioration is based on game time or real time?

This is still easily my favorite game of the year. Wanna get back in.

i want skis so bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJMElfDItc&feature=emb_title

can't see that YouTube, but you can kinda snowboard on those floating carriers

lol yes that's exactly what this guy did. he created a "ski resort" with rails and jumps for floating carriers. try this:

https://youtu.be/mnJMElfDItc

that ski slope is excellent!

God I would love a proper skiing minigame though. FUCK