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

I've decided to put DS down for a while and go back to zip lining the map and completing the extra deliveries another day. that said, there's a DS shaped hole in my life now which I'm having trouble filling. Other, perfectly good, games seem facilities, Hollywood-ised and sophomoric by comparison.
I don't want to get all 'You have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick & Morty' here. It is a game in which you piss grenades after all, but is there anything else on PS4 which comes close to the level of depth; games for grown-up if you will, which prize pacing and patience over pell mell shoot/slash thrills?

I’m on the second WW2 shoot em up level, have tried and failed about ten times so far. Mads is one nimble fucker. Game slightly insulting when it tells me I can adjust the difficulty if I need to - but f that.

i found those really difficult. make sure you’re using the blood rounds rather than normal bullets. i was never able to use the grenades effectively - it was all about the guns.

they are definitely among the tougher and more stressful parts of the game. they come so unexpectedly and it's a completely different style of game play that it's intensely jarring, truly horrific in places. make sure to scan regularly and pick up ammo. each one took me several goes

haha yeah and otm about the patronising way it tells you to adjust your difficulty

Passed it, now back to carrying bombs over mountains. All good brah

you got to the (spoilers) heinous mountain bit?

I miss this game :(

Maybe not enough to start fresh again just yet, but it was an arduous journey that I think fondly back on. I made it.

The rest of my life is basically just killing time before the inauguration, is how I look at it

hah. yeah i finished the game, five starred the first map and zip wired the place, got to the second map and started that but wow this game is at once a slog, a memorable 'arduous journey', a strange meditation on the meaning of everything and also an arcane duty. it has come to symbolise my life under lockdown and I could happily sink a hundred more hours into it. it's sad and hilarious and I love it. I hope it encourages game designers to continue to experiment in similar ways and make challenging games; not challenging as in 'this is really hard' Dark Souls type stuff, but conceptually challenging. the fact a lot of gamers were put off due to the lack of obvious shoot em up action says a lot about the way of the world, and in some ways a more tactful, passive, cerebral approach to entertainment feels like a way out of that

it's sad and hilarious and I love it.

if video games are going to continue to be seen as a progressive art-form, like cinema, then hopefully we can see a snowball. looks like DS has paved the way. I feel rather spoilt that this is the second modern video game I've played all the way through in my life and that there's nothing else that comes close to it

gamers were put off put off due to the lack of obvious shoot em up action

I do like how they were labeled 'nightmares' in the game. in no way were they a glorification of war/violence which is something I dislike about a lot of games

otm

I defeated the giant and beat up gold mask face pretty good, which kicked off a massive cut scene which I left the room for...when I came back some time later, Mads was back, still looking for BB...then Amelie pushed me and I'm back in my private room...this game still isn't over???

Hahaha no.

that’s the mid-game boss. how short did you think this thing was? :)

WHAT

yeah, you need to add canada to the uca now

Funny

Back in the jungle with Mads—sigh

i hadn't played in a while and decided to play on my bday and was gifted with the Mads birthday winky easter egg scene and cake.

Anyone watch the Winding Refn short? Found it on a data chip somewhere. But I can’t figure out how to watch it. Though my cufflink thing?

Yes or in a private room, I think? You can get to it by looking at the map?

i mean the map in the room

that's a thought. I've only found one of those data chips so far

Ugh not going to continue. Fighting mads for a third time just gonna happen.

Just NOT

Back to gta? Ugh

turn the difficulty way down!

it doesn't really matter, and I think the third one was the one I found easiest? if it's the one I am thinking of, I took out everyone but him with stealth

yeah the third one is the easiest and the last time. you're quite close to completing

I think a lot of people are taking the senseless player punishment of this game and somehow reading that as pleasure or innovation. It is neither

what do you mean by player punishment?

I think a lot of people are taking the senseless player punishment of this game and somehow reading that as pleasure or innovation. It is neither

there’s actually very little punishment meted out! either to the character or to the player.

I know the “oh no, he falls a lot and it’s hard” thing gets a lot of coverage but even playing the main storyline quests without doing side tasks gets you sufficient gear to do the work relatively easily, and the internet content basically hands you bunker homes, road segments/ziplines, and gear.

It’s only as punishing as you want to make it

Sorry guys I was taking out some aggression on this game last night. I lowered the damn difficulty and dispatched Mads for the final time (?). Now trudging on across the map again with those hot air balloons full of black pus.

it really is crazy how much this game anticipates coronavirus.

it was really strange picking this up and starting to play it a week before lockdown

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

Started this last night, there was a point where I just wanted to save and quit but I had to get through 40 minutes of cut scenes before I could access the menu again.

👍

Went back to this after a year away. I was a bit rusty at first. There's so much lore and little control-aspects you get wrapped up in when you first start, it's hard to remember everything.
That said, one thing I remembered immediately was the landscape, the map. I know it's a cliché to say this but the Terrain really feels like a character in this game. You learn to use it, to negotiate it, to tame it, until you feel like you know each area like ab old friend.
I've spent the last couple of nights sinking time into getting more stars on my trousers and looking for memory chips (which are very hard to find).

What a great game this is. I’ll never revisit it but will recommend

Anyone still playing this? I'm close to platinuming the thing, along with listening to the DS audiobook (which is fairly entertaining in a way). Just need to do like a million more specific styles of delivery on hard mode without messing everything up. For a game that's fairly easy, that's not an easy challenge considering you often have to do a speed run with a lot of cargo to a place you haven't been in a while, so all the ziplines need fixing. Generally find I have to do the journey with plenty of chiral crystals and no luggage, then go back and do it again via the zips and with the luggage. It takes an awful lot of planning and foresight

I've just started it..

dl i genuinely admire the grind. i want you to keep reporting back.

Arguably the game really comes into its own once the story's out the way and it becomes more like a strategy city building game

So the rarest kinds of missions that you have to do in order to get the platinum are the time-based missions.

Nevertheless you have to do 20 of them in about a quarter of the alloted time limit on hard mode.

A strong zip line network is essential, but often it turns out that quite a few of the zip lines I set up earlier in the game have since been destroyed by timefall.

Now that wouldn't be a terrible issue until I get to a dead end: I can see the next zip line post, but it's dead. And inevitably, I'm bang in the middle of either a MULE camp or a BT area.

The only thing I can do is to sneak or fight my way to the dead zip line - which is usually in a really high-up place, hard to get to place - and fix it.

But then I get there, and I realise I don't have enough chiral crystals to fix the damn thing, and now I'm stuck up a horrible rocky cliff miles away from where I came from and even further away from where I'm going.

Chiral crystals are hard to come by. You can pick them off the ground and also drop off points will give you a few.

So obviously the best way to get loads of crystals is to get into fights with big BTs, which is very counterintuitive for me because I find the BT fights extremely stressful. I haven't really worked out a strategy for them other than run, jump, shoot, repeat. But it's a great way of farming enough crystals for me to rebuild these zip networks.

All that effort just to complete a single mission for which I'll probably never need that zip network again.