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

cut some BT umbilicals yesterday and.... feels good man.

i'm now at the tar lake and apparently trucking around the outer edge of.... everything i've connected so far. which is weird, because i thought i was going across the united states??

not enough has been said about how great this game looks. the tactility of the snow. and how the game teases the mountains even at the very early stages of the game, and how you ease up into them, a few incursions here or there, but you know it's inevitable. some of the weather you end up encountering is just tremendous.

I was introduced recently to the concept of “rubbersheeting” which is the distortion of one map layer, like satellite imagery, to align with another, like a gps grid

It’d be an interesting practice to map the DS map on to ours because, even taking into account the in-game map it shows when you add someone to grid, the scale is insanely weird. Basically Kojima & co. had continental locations and cities and routes that reference small pieces that they put across the US

ha it is basically a little peninsula, maybe 5 square miles max? which gets represented in the game as the entire united states.

i beat higgs. what a fucked up boss fight. the final stage of bludgeoning each other senseless was definitely kind of....... homoerotic. oh and can i say beating higgs' giant extinction event beast wasn't really hard but it was SO SATISFYING.

don't ever want this game to end obv.

i fuckin lost it when it turned into EA's xbox-era classic fight night

yes!!

get prepared for EVEN MORE EXPOSITION from here on out!

that’s not what i want. I just want to build roads, man.

you get some more Mads, though, as a treat

any amount of mads - even homeopathic levels of mads - is a treat

I can’t remember if you’re to the point where you’re kind of locked into finishing the plot now. Pretty close, if not already. But worry not, you can still build roads and deliver nice underwear to people when the plot wraps!

xp there’s a reason the otherwise ridiculous game awards gave him best motion captured role

Have still never gotten a single trophy better than bronze. !!

Total play time - 69:34:11

lol wait a minute it’s still going

did anyone find out whether constructions degrade outside playing time? i haven’t picked this up for a while.

I don’t know but I’ve started a few zipline networks now and it’s ridiculously satisfying. Hope they don’t just die.

lol there’s some amazing behaviour going on. From a Reddit thread:


With the truck I keep hitting the order limit trying to be too efficient. I'm running my own sorting facilities piling up goods in private lockers to be shipped on together.

Things i have never done:

- a “premium” delivery
- used the sticky gun
- used any lethal weapon (at least not on purpose)
- fabricated a truck
- cancelled an order
- redeployed cargo
- manually saved a game
- changed the difficulty
- used an EX grenade to any effect at all. Seriously they don’t do anything as far as i can tell???

premium deliveries are easy, select them by default and you'll meet the requirements almost everytime

omg oh well.

oh and i never used the otter hat!! i should try it out on the waterfall :)

conan o'brien's v disappointed in me i imagine

you can equip both the otter and the cap at the same time, otter only kicks in when needed

pro tip: resting by sitting down saves the game without having to jump into the menus

switching the game to hard mode and then doing some premium deliveries (even easy ones) gives you achievements and, I believe, helps you rank up locations faster. the latter point may be wrong as I started really bulking up on cargo around the same time

premium deliveries also worth it because time means nothing for the majority of normal deliveries so doing them quickly gives you nothing

what's the deal with the pee mushrooms, is that a reference I don't get or just something funny?

Don’t they eventually grow into cryptobiotes? Or did i just make that up?

I got into a habit of peeing on other people’s mushrooms for some reason. /weirdo

keep on keepin' on!

i like rebuilding roads. it's so satisfying to zoom from place to place on the highway.

I severely underrated how fun the bikes are for too long. Sure, trucks are great for lots of cargo. Speeding your way across the landscape on the bike? Now we're talking

the bikes can go pretty much anywhere as well. even up the matterhorn or whatever it is.

the exposition got insane. there was just hours of it. i started skipping it. so now i have no idea what the story was supposed to have been. i liked it better when it was sort of unexplained tbh so i guess this is my way of preserving the mystery :) i still think there is phenomenal scope for the story to go forward. sam and mama leading a resistance against bridges and the UCA.

love to do the patient 75 degree vertical angle zig zag up a craggy slope for 90 seconds only to fuck up at the end and plummet to a cargo scattered embarrassment. i know that sounds sarcastic but i really did love it

see i did that once on foot and then put the game down permanently. i think it takes a type.

it gets easier with the all-terrain exoskeleton and powered gloves

there was one delivery where... damn did I screw it up. pretty sure frostbite was involved

i wonder if there should be an 'extra hard' difficulty setting. needing to stealth the fuck out of mule camps for instance. or having to do speed runs. or getting a C grade for any damage at all. (for all the difference that makes, lol. when i had to deliver to cryptobiotes to fragile i destroyed 99% of the cargo and still the story advanced and i didn't see any actual downside)

Did yall see this yet? https://kotaku.com/hiking-gets-even-harder-in-death-stranding-when-the-con-1841429693

oh my god. i love it.

fwiw there's another soundtrack on streaming now of more music from the game

I get the impression the prior two (original score and Timefall) were material Sony had the license for and the new one, which is 3/4 tracks by Low Roar, are Kojima's picks

I wanna get this game so much but it is very expensive atm

If you can wait some months the price will drop quite a bit. I'm personally going to wait till it reaches $20 before I consider buying it.

I was thinking about the plot on the way back from lunch and, although contrived in a very Kojima-esque way, it's kind of an amazing rumination on loss and the different ways people cope

otoh, it's a little overwrought because -- as I said before -- nearly everyone integral to the plot has a bleak backstory

big kojima profile in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/magazine/hideo-kojima-death-stranding-video-game.html

i have not played this game in a while

After the endgame the loneliness became a little too intense for me tbpfh

what did you think of the end/coda, Tracer? hopefully didn’t skip all the story!

i think i figured out that I’m my own BB? i didn’t understand wtf was going on tbrr

Kojima wept

i didn’t like that the game made me treat BB - i mean, ‘Lou’ - in a way that i totally didn’t want to just in order to advance the story and finish. but i liked the uncanny bit where reedus winds up in the past, in the hospital, interacting with past events. super weird. can’t even remember now what happened with deadman. die hardman’s the new president of jack shit, so that’s exciting for him.

deadman keeps on keep in’ on

if anyone is not here for SPOILERS set bookmark after my post now


it was kind of touching, and despite it being heavily telegraphed I was kind of surprised by the “current BB is not flashback BB” twist. that was my character! I was loved, and not by creepy extinction president! Mads is my dads.

tbh I want Mads to be my dad though

oh i just assumed that from the beginning!

I was too busy dumping my packages in a creek to ponder it