Death Stranding

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Aria Genisi
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Re: Death Stranding

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Sun Nov 24, 2019 3:20 pm

ToastGhost wrote:
Sun Nov 24, 2019 8:24 am
Have fun! If not for yourself than for me. :v:
I thought you were excited to get it and play it yourself?
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Re: Death Stranding

Post by ToastGhost (?) » Sun Nov 24, 2019 4:35 pm

I was! But then I also lost a television and PS4 controller to my little brother moving out. I'll play it soon though. :-P
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Re: Death Stranding

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Sun Nov 24, 2019 7:24 pm

ahhhhhhh i gotcha
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Re: Death Stranding

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Wed Dec 25, 2019 1:01 am

I have recently started my playthrough of Death Stranding now that I've beaten both Pokemon Shield and Shovel Knight: King of Cards. Honestly? I'm loving this game so far.

From the very start, it's this very chill, and yet melancholic hiking simulator of a sad Norman Reedus doing his job as a porter in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. To him, the world sucks, America is gone, and while he'll continue to help and make deliveries, he's got no interest in being a part of people trying to fix things as there's no point to that. After the couple of cutscenes and opening jobs to set up the state of the world and what you'll be doing in the game, Norman Reedus agrees to help BRIDGES and the United Cities of America to help reconnect the country again as part of his journey to eventually reach the Pacific and rescue his sister who is being held captive by terrorists, apparently.

The actual plot so far, is pretty straightforward and while there's some questions I've got for what's going to happen next, it's honestly the least important part. To me, the real draw of the game is this very methodical and intricate game about traveling across america while carting around ridiculous amounts of cargo to deliver to people. You're basically a post-apocalyptic postal worker, creating your own path across each region, dealing with the ghosts (BTs), the Timefall (rain that rapidly ages whatever it touches but also turns into normal water after it lands), the terrain itself (hills, rivers, gorges, rocks, etc), and sometimes even a few actual human enemies (mostly MULES so far, who are basically gangs of postal worker bandits who steal cargo from porters so they can deliver the cargo for the rush of doing so. Except instead of delivering the cargo to the intended destination, they deliver the cargo to themselves). And I mean literally creating your own path. You create structures to help facilitate your deliveries, and as you keep going over the same paths, you end up leaving literal footpaths to mark where you have been.

And if you're online (which just requires an internet connection. No PS+ subscription required!), you can see the structures and markers that other players have left behind in addition to your own and those of the NPCs. You can give likes to these things, and you can help contribute resources to these structures and infrastructure, and other players can do the same to your own structures. If you happen to lose cargo that you had, then there's a chance for other players to be able to come across it or find them delivered in postboxes and other lockers for them to deliver for you. And you can do the same. Even though you're still ultimately stuck with doing jobs in the game yourself and not every possible structure will show up in your game at once, the whole experience feels very collaborative and really positive.

The deliveries themselves are also just really chill and can be interesting, trying to plot out how you want to deal with your trip given where you're trying to go, and then what you'll be carrying. Sometimes, it's just an easy hike up and down a hill and across a couple of paths and absolutely nothing of consequence actually happens but it's just a relaxing time to try out some new tool you recently got. Sometimes, you're given a few extra requirements and so you decide to take an alternate path and it doesn't quite end how you thought it would.


So, example: in the first region, one of the story orders is for you to deliver a crate of cargo that cannot be submerged in water and must be delivered within 30 minutes. the longer, safer path has you going by a MULE camp, as well as by a couple of rivers. I could have fixed up the reverse trike motorcycle nearby to just speed past both and not have to worry about water at all. But instead, I saw on my map, that there was a shortcut, cutting across the mountains, past the incinerator facility, and then taking the path next to it to my destination. So, being a genius, I decided that this was the best choice.
I reach the incinerator facility, and oops, it's raining. That's a bad sign. If it starts raining harder, then I'm likely to run into ghosts. Then my scanner activates. There's BTs here. And as it turns out, there isn't just a few of these. There's *lots* of them. This was a bad idea. But I've snuck past these things before successfully. This shouldn't be a problem. Shit. One of the BTs notices that I'm there. I start to run, but when they notice you, they start trying to slow you down and drag you down to the ground. Fuck! I got caught! I'm dragged a bit, and I expect that I'm just dead. They caught me, they're dragging me down, and I'm dead. Instead, after dragging me a bit, the scenery around me changes a bit. The ground is covered in a sea of tar with chunks of terrain and rocks floating on the top, and I'm being attacked by a massive tar sea creature of some sort. Grabbing what important cargo I could, I immediately start setting out to running away. What the fuck is this thing? Can I get away?! AAAAAAA! Panic! BB is getting really stressed out and upset by this, and his crying can be heard coming from my controller's speaker. It's this intense panic to get away before it's too late.
Quickly, I manage to escape that area. The rain stops. The scanner deactivates, with no remaining BTs in range. In my rush to get out of the area, I nearly start to tumble off the cliff, but I catch myself right at the edge. I stop and try to calm down BB, rocking the pod back and forth to soothe him. Once he's calm, it's time to start climbing down the cliff path, and try to get myself winding down after that intense sequence and not fuck up with this last river. Just as I start climbing down, the game decided to start playing a music track: Easy Way Out by Low Roar.

The remainder of this journey was entirely unthreatening and consisted of me just walking across the river using a ladder, and then just hiking down the path to my destination while listening to this song. I'm not sure on why it played it. Maybe it's supposed to play in the last stretch of this mission? That's probably the case.

And that was honestly my favorite moment in this game so far. There's been a lot of fun experiences playing this game (a similar sort of thing happens on the way to Port Knot City, where you cross a mountain path that's full of BTs in the Timefall, but after you get past it, you see your destination right down the hill, Asylum for the Feeling starts playing and it's this really wonderful bit of relief and joy as you got past the last of it, and now you proceed to tumble down the hill like a clown without trying to crash into any rocks or anything.), but this sequence of me deciding to be clever and hike through the mountains, and instead having it bite me in the ass is always going to stick with me as just absolutely amazing.

I don't think I'll be finishing this game by the end of the year, but even then, I think it's safe to say that it's one of my personal favorites of this year.
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Re: Death Stranding

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Wed Jan 01, 2020 3:43 pm

last night in death stranding, I decided to take some time to build a zipline in the mountains, since it's one of the new toys I unlocked here in chapter 5.

Basically, the big problem atm is that there's Mountain Knot City right in the middle of a bunch of mountains. If I want to get there from the rest of the region in the east, I pretty much have to start from the east, go north and then west, around the mountains that's in the middle until I hit the river valley nothwest of the city, then I go south into the river valley until I reach the actual river leading to the mountains, and follow it until I reach the road that branches off of the riverbed, up the hill until I reach Mountain Knot, situated smack dab in the middle of a big ol mountain range.

To make things more annoying, there's a few of prepper shelters in the mountains as well. There's not a good, easy setup here. And I have yet to actually get Mountain Knot connected to the network in the story, so right now my two options to get there are: 1) take a very long route around the mountains, or 2) take the shorter, but more annoying route through the mountains, which are steep, covered in snow, have lots of timefall snow storms (which i can't help but feel are way worse for degrading cargo than the rain), and have a nice big area that's just straight up haunted. And I'm not going to take the long route, so instead, lets make the mountains less annoying by building a zipline. I already got started the day before by making a zipline shortcut from the Roboticist's shelter to the Weather Station. So the rest was just trying to extend the zipline across BT territory so I get better access to an annoying delivery location in the mountains, the Doctor's shelter.

Crossing BT territory and setting up zip line pylons was no big deal, but the actual pain came from setting up pylons near the doctor's shelter, which had a lot of annoying angles to deal with and awful cliffs that I kept trying to climb like a mountain goat and instead kept falling off of and eating shit. Damaged a lot of stuff I was carrying, and had to stop a bunch to soothe BB when he'd get stressed out from all the falling and would start crying.

I finished it in the end though, and I'm really proud of that, even though there's one or two pylons I could get rid of to optimize things

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Re: Death Stranding

Post by Aria Genisi (?) » Tue Jan 07, 2020 12:29 am

I beat the game! And I loved it!



TBH, as I was getting closer to getting the game, I was basically expecting something more akin to a Final Fantasy 15 situation: a game that's legitimately fun and interesting, but it's also rather flawed in ways that can really get in the way of the game actually being great. Instead of that, the game is actually just genuinely great?

It's a slow-paced, methodical and actually a bit intricate game about the perils of actually hiking through the open world wilderness of a post-apocalyptic America, trying to deliver packages to cities and homes and hook them up to the nationwide internet. It's an online enabled game where you and other players build various structures and place various ladders and ropes, as well as contribute to rebuilding roads and sharing supplies to better support each other for traveling across the open world. It's Hideo Kojima's curated narrative about Norman Reedus going from a brooding loner who doesn't give a shit about anyone or anything other than continuing to live to see the next sunrise, to someone who's willing to help connect everyone again, so that everyone can come together to better survive and try to make something better in this new, post-Death Stranding world.

It's got some flaws. kojima is not subtle as he wants to be in his writing and tends to repeat some points at times to make sure that you get them. Fighting the ghost monsters sometimes feels like a pain as they seem a bit bullet sponge-y. Stealth feels like an actual pain vs human enemies. The whole game is actually pretty self-indulgent at times on Kojima's part, and the actual gameplay is something that not everyone is going to be into.

But having played it from start to finish? It's quite honestly one of my favorite games of 2019. I didn't expect to really enjoy it quite as much as I did, but I'm glad I took the plunge. I really enjoyed this a lot, warts and all.

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