Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

The music is definitely a highlight, rip to him.

I just got to where you meet Mama in person.

What a weird cutscene, tons of uncanny valley instances, made me really uncomfortable! They clearly tried to do some super subtle facial animations, but it really just comes off as looking creepy as strawberry float :lol:

her face was just randomly spasming all over the place.

Having said that I am really enjoying the game (sans the one note combat) maybe others had a different interpretation but it's really made me take note of how much we take for granted. Getting things from one place to another takes a collosal amount of energy but our entire society is held up by it.

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

Definitely made me think about that, yeah. It really nails those themes.

If you're finding the combat one note I'd really encourage you to experiment. You can breeze through just doing what's most efficient, but there are so many fun mechanics to mess with! Everything plays so well too. Throwing cargo at enemies for example is really satisfying in both input and impact. You can get really inventive and it usually works out as you imagine it should.

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

I've genuinely just been avoiding enemies because I don't see the point in even engaging them so far.

Any time I have they just run at me one at a time and I just down them with the bola gun :lol:

It feels like they wanted it to be like MGS5, but they just didn't have time to remake everything.

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

There are deliveries that will send you into camps. There are also often memory chips in camps, you get likes for clearing them out, friendly porters will travel through their territory while it is cleared out, and there are emails from nearby characters when you first clear them out.

Mostly though I just find it a lot of fun to mess with them :lol:

Yes the Bola gun makes it easy - rubber bullets are even more trivialising.

Are you playing the director's cut? That adds challenge missions taking down enemies with all the different weapons on little MGS4-like maps, they are good fun and give an actual directed in-game reason for trying out all the weapons at least.

Otherwise you should be about to hit some better combat anyway, for a couple of reasons I won't spoil!

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

I took Mama to a hot spring but all I got to see was her shoulders, FML.

Also this

twitter.com/VVildhart/status/1591026995059638272

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

Just had a weird bug saying my game was corrupted and I'd have to delete and download it again.

First time I thought it was a meta Kojima thing, but I quickly realised it wasn't :lol:

But annoying having to download 50 gigs again

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

Fade wrote:Also this

twitter.com/VVildhart/status/1591026995059638272

Hoverboarding is great fun but in my experience almost always disastrous!

So exactly the kind of thing it's worth spending more time doing 8-)

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

God the combat in this game is just so bad.

BT battles feel like I'm playing earth defense force or something. You lay tons of ammo into the bosses and they barely react.

It's cool how dynamic the battlefields can be but I feel like they would have benefitted from more scripted fights with less bullet sponge. The Higgs fight for example I quite enjoyed

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

I reckon it's one of the best controlling third person shooters ever made, maybe second only to MGSV. Too easy and lacking the enemy variety and level design of a dedicated shooter sure, but I could never call it bad!

Even with blood bullets guns are rubbish against BTs btw, you just want to spam hematic grenades for the most part. You'll get more of a reaction too, a grenade as they are charging usually staggers them.

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

I mean. That's a really bad take but I'll respect it :lol:

There's no cover system or peak which means you have to manually crouch behind cover, the enemies have awful AI, every encounter they just run straight at you. The Cliff levels exemplify this a lot. You just hide behind cover and wait for the enemies to slowly walk towards you out in the open.

So I'm basically at the end, just wrapping up epilogue stuff and I'd say I felt this was a 9/10 game till the last few hours, then an 8/10 game.

Mostly because of how the story pacing is handled, 90% of the revelations happen after the credits, and they are really drawn out, I figured out that Sam was the BB for example like 2 hours before the game wanted to explicitly tell me. Also didn't like how Higgs was the antagonist for 90% of the game and his back story is basically just "lol, dude's crazy"

Having said that really enjoyed the traversal and the lore as a whole, I just really hope they introduce some more complex physics in the sequel, the game really needs it. So stuff just feels oddly ridgid.

I like Sam as a character too, it's very refreshing playing a game where the main character isn't built around a power fantasy.

EDIT: I also somehow managed to go through the entire game without finding a single memory chip :lol:

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

Enemy AI is separate to how well the game controls, fwiw. I don't think a cover system is a prerequisite to playing well either.

Fade wrote:EDIT: I also somehow managed to go through the entire game without finding a single memory chip

Genuinely not sure how you managed that!

Did you not do much side stuff in general?

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

I think my biggest criticism of the game (which I loved as a whole), was that the clever "using the triggers to adjust the balance of your backpack" was made almost entirely redundant by the option to just hold down both all the time. It's been a while now, but I think there may have been some sort of meter that was adversely affected by this, but it was so minimal it never made me think twice about doing so.

Half the systems but with twice the consideration put into them and the balance they provide in the game world and it might have been one of the best games of all time for me. I loved the isolation, the quiet moments and the vistas so, so much. A very special game.

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

You move slower is the downside. Which isn't a big deal when S ranks are so easy to get, but I would stop gripping for balance just to satisfy my own impatience :lol:

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

OrangeRKN wrote:You move slower is the downside. Which isn't a big deal when S ranks are so easy to get, but I would stop gripping for balance just to satisfy my own impatience

Ah, I suppose theoretically that could have been impactful. But, as you say, it kind of wasn't.

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

And once you started setting up roads and zip lines the walking balance was almost completely redundant anyway

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

OrangeRKN wrote:Enemy AI is separate to how well the game controls, fwiw. I don't think a cover system is a prerequisite to playing well either.

Fade wrote:EDIT: I also somehow managed to go through the entire game without finding a single memory chip

Genuinely not sure how you managed that!

Did you not do much side stuff in general?

But the game doesn't control well. Swapping weapons is cumbersome, you have to manually uncrouch if you want to shoot over cover, sliding is a canned animation rather than momentum based like in Horizon. I'm struggling to see how it controls well. It controls like a shooter from 2004.

Well the game never tells you about them and a lot of misc cargo is just random stuff like meds or or machinery, so I probably saw one at some point but the game never flagged them as something special so I never bothered licking them up. And no I didn't really do any side stuff, since it's obviously easier to go back and do side missions once you have better equipment.

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:
OrangeRKN wrote:You move slower is the downside. Which isn't a big deal when S ranks are so easy to get, but I would stop gripping for balance just to satisfy my own impatience

Ah, I suppose theoretically that could have been impactful. But, as you say, it kind of wasn't.

It's probably a hard balancing act as they don't want to make traversal a chore. I didn't mind it to be honest. Holding triggers down the entire time is kind of uncomfortable and slows you down. Plus you still lose balance if you carry a lot of stuff

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

Fade wrote:
OrangeRKN wrote:Enemy AI is separate to how well the game controls, fwiw. I don't think a cover system is a prerequisite to playing well either.

Fade wrote:EDIT: I also somehow managed to go through the entire game without finding a single memory chip

Genuinely not sure how you managed that!

Did you not do much side stuff in general?

But the game doesn't control well. Swapping weapons is cumbersome, you have to manually uncrouch if you want to shoot over cover, sliding is a canned animation rather than momentum based like in Horizon. I'm struggling to see how it controls well. It controls like a shooter from 2004.

Well the game never tells you about them and a lot of misc cargo is just random stuff like meds or or machinery, so I probably saw one at some point but the game never flagged them as something special so I never bothered licking them up. And no I didn't really do any side stuff, since it's obviously easier to go back and do side missions once you have better equipment.
kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:
OrangeRKN wrote:You move slower is the downside. Which isn't a big deal when S ranks are so easy to get, but I would stop gripping for balance just to satisfy my own impatience

Ah, I suppose theoretically that could have been impactful. But, as you say, it kind of wasn't.

It's probably a hard balancing act as they don't want to make traversal a chore. I didn't mind it to be honest. Holding triggers down the entire time is kind of uncomfortable and slows you down. Plus you still lose balance if you carry a lot of stuff

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

Use the sticky gun to grab some cargo out of a Mule's hand, catch it midair, then throw it back to KO them, and tell me the gamefeel isn't incredibly satisfying! I think a large part of why the game is too easy is because it controls so well, it means you can take down enemies with ease. I never found switching weapons cumbersome (rather the opposite), I don't see a problem with pressing a button to uncrouch, and there is plenty of momentum in traversal - so I doubt we're going to find common ground on how the game feels to play!

Fade wrote:Well the game never tells you about them and a lot of misc cargo is just random stuff like meds or or machinery, so I probably saw one at some point but the game never flagged them as something special so I never bothered licking them up. And no I didn't really do any side stuff, since it's obviously easier to go back and do side missions once you have better equipment.

The memory chips have their own icon, you would have noticed it. Quite a lot of equipment is unlocked and/or upgraded through side quests too (or given as rewards for things that can't be printed). I definitely think it's more worthwhile to do side content as you go so you get those things while it's worth having them and to use as you go on (or just because it's the otter hood and of course you want to have a hood that looks like an otter as soon as possible!).

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

I mean I can use the harpoon gun in Fortnite to do basically the same thing. Doesn't mean Fortnite controls well (though it does) It's great those things didn't impact your enjoyment. But they are objectively cumbersome. The fact you can't drop multiple guns/blood packs at the same time, the fact you have to pick up new guns and drop old ones. The aforementioned awkwardness around cover. They just make the game feel clunky especially during the war sections.

Nah it's easy because the enemies just run straight at you and you can shoot them one at a time like lemmings. Or you can just running knee them and knock them down in one go.

I took down an entire group of Higgs' armed guards using only my knee towards the end of the game :lol:

PostRe: Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

The flow of it feels really good - iirc you hold L2 to aim, tap R2 to shoot, release and then press and hold a shoulder button at the right time to catch, then press square to swing and release the shoulder button at the right moment to throw the cargo forwards. I think that's a really fun string of input and it feels slick!

Fade wrote:The fact you can't drop multiple guns/blood packs at the same time

You absolutely can offload multiple pieces of cargo at the same time.

I don't think it's clunky at all - weighty and deliberate, sure, that's part of the gamefeel as doing these feels like effort, but the input is really polished and contextual.

Death Stranding | PS4 / PC (02/06/2020)

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