f13.net

Oh man, this game.

Edit:

Try not to talk about story spoilers in here except for the things that were revealed before the game was launched. We can make a separate thread if we want to talk about the story itself.

There will be gameplay mechanics spoilers in here.

If you are new to the game and want to avoid most of the spoilers in here come back after you've gotten to Chapter 3 and the game has introduced most of the basic mechanics.

Two basic tips:

* Don't stay too long in Chapter 2. You can come back to the stuff you didn't finish there later.

* You can hold down L2 + R2 continuously to keep your balance over rough terrain

Edit: adjusted title with warning for PC newcomers

Playing it right now. It was made FOR me. It's between Euro Truck Simulator and a mountain hiking game and those are two of my favourite things. All sewn on a movie I would totally pay to watch. So far, I am loving it as much as I hoped if not more.

Could fall apart after hours and hours of hiking on the same mountains, sure. But the first three hours alone were enough to justify the entrance ticket for me.

I have to go do outside things this weekend but I suppose I'll pick up it next week.

Needs more of the Euro Truck/hiking stuff. The open world and basic navigation gameplay is fun.

The music is atrocious and unmutable. The story is tropey and childish and doesn't hold up to the cinematic quality of the world. Some cool concepts here and there, but framed in a poor amateurish attempt at moviemaking. I've already lost track of the amount of times in the first couple hours that I've called out the next trope or just laughed at the crudity of the imagery/writing.

Also, though I enjoy the basic gameplay, the whole BT creature stuff inserting itself seems to be more of an interruption of the enjoyment, rather than a gear shift (like exploration vs combat in Horizon:ZD).

I really want to like this more, it's well done from a few different angles. I knew to expect a lot of "cutscenes", but I didn't realize it was going to be more like cutscenes of gameplay every now and again in between the looooong stretches of student movies. Also, what's with everything being a giant fucking bummer?


Also also, if we're going to be talking about games being pretentious....

I disagree about some of the music. While it's not stuff I would listen to on its own I love how they incorporated certain songs (esp. the Low Roar and Silent Poets ones) while you are exploring new areas. Crossing over a ridge line and looking down into a valley for the first time (at least as you the player) and having a melancholy song kick in as you walk down the mountain is quite the experience. The EDM tracks, however, aren't my thing, and it is odd that there's no control over the different audio tracks like in most games (there's only a master volume setting).

Think of the regular BTs are just another traversal obstacle you need to overcome or bypass like rivers and cliffs and MULEs. Also as you progress through the story you get more tools for dealing with these obstacles.


It's a Kojima game -- that's a given.

Edit: Poets

The music is perfect. And even when it isn't, exactly like Trippy said it's wonderfully placed to underline some of the best part of the long journey to the next outpost.

I really don't get the negativity towards the cinematographic aspects. It's perfectly fine for me for a video game, and in some parts it would be totally OK in an actual sci-fi movie. For example, I really liked the opening sequence and the BIG one right after, when you go dispose of the corpse. What's the fuck not to like there? It's an amazing scene.
Alas, it's not Kubrick though and it shows in the mother scene. Remind me of what games don't feel like childish movies again when you think about it, between tropes, poor voice acting, and plot holes? All I can come up with on the spot (there are more, but not THAT many) are The Last of Us and Spec Ops: The Line and even those ones are full of cheese.

I foresee a new "Good writing/Bad writing" thread here, this time about cinema. I don't think Kojima can write good lines, and if he directed an actual movie it would probably be terrible. But I think he can write cool settings for weird nerd stories with over the top Japanese characters all chopped up in an American blender and splash them all over a video game. That's great entertainment for me.

Death Stranding pro tips:

Don't stay in Chapter 2 too long. Heard this one in passing and really happy. Fragile asks you to wrap things up before jumping on the boat, she just means current orders/deliveries. Since the first thing I got off the boat was a fast travel option...

Hang on to that bike. The first bike you get (not the prologue bike) is repairable but not recoverable. I lost mine in a stream and had a wicked long trek to make by foot. It's handy, but be careful with it near water so you have it for the early chapters.

Could this game be any more Euro Death Truck Stranding Simulator? Also, you and other players built that highway.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJMrC6TXYAAUZ_6?format=jpg&name=large)

I spent most of yesterday building bridges and support structures in the newbie area, and then optimizing a few climbing routes. Only because I was pushing ahead to unlock a few QoL things that I didn't stop playing the story entirely to focus on it.

On the other hand, I feel kinda bad for latecomers who will miss the worldbuilding parts and see the virgin game world.

You don't see player-made structures in unconnected regions. You do potentially get some benefit from player-made structures when heading towards a new region as the border is usually a ways out from the place you set out from but eventually you will need to cross "virgin" territory on your own until you make the next connection.

I am under the impression that the online engine will never put players into instances that are completely empty or entirely built, it feels instead like it knows how to drop players into instances that somehow reflect their playtime or progression. These instances are fluid and almost invisible, but especially thanks to that it feels like (the engine) can always move structures, not just players, between instances in order to keep a balance between what's in it and the progression level of players in it.

Lots of words to say that, on top of what Trippy said, I don't think new players will be placed into fully built instances in a few months. It will still try and pair groups of players based on their levels.

EDIT: tried to make a bit more sense.

Eh, so Dark Death Souls Stranding Craft? What?

Nevermind, don't tell me.

Got to the second region, noticed a road building doohickey. There were some extra materials around, so I put 200 metal into it...and got a ton of likes. So I went back and upgraded the road fully, which paved it down to where MULE territory started. I ran back and grabbed a couple PCCs and set up a watchtower, mailbox, and generator. I set the watchtower with a great view of the MULE region and had the generator warn porters audibly about the MULEs. Finally I put up sign support, with speed signs along the road and a MULE warning sign at the end.

I went from level 58 to level 165 when I turned in my next delivery, from the thousands of likes that deluged me.

And it was actually enjoyable, I started to work on the second road section using supplies I was raiding from the MULEs. Difficult to pull away and go to bed, which is always a good sign with a game. I did two actual plot missions (to the engineer and back to the city) in three hours of playing.

tl;dr I got twice as much experience from building one section of road than playing the first two chapters of the game

You nailed it. I am having a serious case of "just another turn(delivery)" syndrome from this game. Really hard to go to bed, as there is always something cool to do or see. Whether it's exploration (so much to see), story, building, or just side-questing for actually very good rewards, the game is immense, satisfying and compelling. And it helps that it is always adding gameplay elements. I am 40 hours in and I am still getting new tools that expand on the things that I can do and how I can do them.

Also, I am not ready to write about it coherently, but the building and cooperative part of the game is done so well. The zones where you are grow at a perfect pace, not too fast that it feels like you are cheating, not too slow that it feels it's all on your shoulders. Quests get easier due to the growing infrastructure, and there's a huge sense of achievement when you finish building a massive freeway that cuts into the entire zone you were struggling to advance through from north to south.

Damn, you're making me think about getting that game.

It's great. It also does a great job in making you feel like what you are doing helps other players as you keep getting these tiny reminders that someone else used your buildings or ropes, bridges, vehicles and whatnot. Today I spent three hours rebuilding the largest freeway all by myself and that allowed me (and possibly hundreds of other players) to do super huge deliveries by truck completely unhindered from the northernmost point of the map to the southernmost, over terrain that was very dungerous and hard to cross only a couple of days ago and could only be traversed on foot. In many ways, in this game you don't slay monsters, you slay hazardous terrain and conquer it until you can do your job like a pro.

It also has a huge Elite Dangerous feel, except with way more polish, way more story, way more sense, way more persistency, way more satisfaction.

EDIT: I just want to add that this is the easiest game Kojima ever made. It toally embraces its trucking simulation roots and even though it is supposed to have many different chalenges, on "normal" difficulty I have never died, never even gotten close to die, and never got stuck or had to grind a single thing. There are so many tools and so many ways to approach the next quest that you can always enjoy it at whatever pace you like and with whatever way/path/approach you like. It is so strange, but as a sandbox it succeeds in really giving you a world and let you play with it how you want. There are no timers (except for rare occasion, and they are very generous), and the multiplayer help is omnipresent. It still doesn't feel "too" easy because every quest is satisfying no matter how you complete it, but it is really a "feel good" game despite the dark theme. You don't feel like a super hero, after all you are just a delivery guy, but you feel good at your job and that's such a strange thing to say about a videogame.

I mean, a delivery guy who can ambush and assassinate a bunch of terrorists and steal their gear in their own truck, then fight off interdimensional beings.

But yeah. It's a crazy juxtaposition but it works.

FTFY.

That's cool, and I suspected it and used only rubber bullets for that reason. To be fair, they warn you about it a few times, and it makes perfect sense. I was wondering though if it's something worth going for in a second playthrough. Does it lead to a game over, or anything worth seeing story wise?

I'm taking it slow in DS as usual, so I don't have a nice pimp truck like Falc there. I've been hanging out in chapter 3 taking out MULEs and building roads and alternate foot paths.

I was waiting to take on the bigger MULE camp for a truck, until I got some more roads in, but they tried to ambush me when I was moving a bridge (some dummy dropped a bridge on the /inside/ of the MULE detection perimeter). So I made my best usage of the most raggedy ass rusty truck that was two ticks from destruction. Just bent metal and rust, throwing sparks. I knew it was two ticks because it lost another and was smoking and creaking...and I still got another half hour out of it. When I finally tool on the camp to steal the other truck, it was weird having a shiny new truck with things like lights and paint.

All I am gonna say is that this game is bewitching. I thought I finished it tonight but I was wrong. Which made me happy. I am 60+ hours in and I wish it never ended. Also, as you pointed out, the care they put into making metal look real and always perfectly show at a glance the durability level is delightful.

Sky, care to tell me your PSN name? I wouldn't be surprised if each other's stuff popped up in our games more often if we were friends, and that would be cool. I'd love to find your ladder instead of c00lD33kZ8812 from time to time. Mine is Falconeer97.

Yeah but is Death Stranding worth full price of admission? I was curious about it at first because it was bizzaro, but then I heard about the premise and saw some gameplay and I am still confused.

I'm CashWiley on PS.

edit: I think it's a good launch buy, no ragurts. It benefits from the amount of people playing right now, for sure. I can't imagine playing it offline, it would be much more difficult. Maybe a good idea for a second playthrough. I'm in no hurry, though. Suits my slow af playstyle nicely.

It is already in my Top 30 all time, no jokes. So clearly, I am biased. Worth any money. But like never before, YMMV. It is too weird for a consensus.

I'm at 63.5 hours played and am at about maybe 3/5ths to 2/3rds through the story (I'm in between Episode 7 and 8 currently doing non-story stuff). I'll likely be over 100 hours played by the time I finish the story and you can keep playing after that as well. So for me it's been well worth paying full price. The game has a ton of stuff to accomplish outside the story as well as endlessly generated delivery content so if you really enjoy the gameplay you could play this for hundreds of hour easily. There are people I'm playing with who are already over a hundred hours played given their stats compared to mine. Which is remarkable given the game has been out only 9 days (they've basically been playing it full-time since release).

Since it's a Sony published game and they aren't shy about putting their big games on sale relatively quickly you could also just wait if you aren't sure about the game. In 6 months or less it'll likely be at $40 when on sale and if it makes Greatest Hits status then it'll only be $20. On PC, though, you'll have wait longer for it to be less than list price.

I finally got to sit down with Death Stranding a bit and I'm liking it a lot. The only minor gripe I have right now is that the scanner seems to kinda randomly just not show BTs even if BB is pointing right at them.

BB's detection range is further than your scanner's BT "reveal" range. So if you know there's one in front of you just take it slow until the scanner can reveal it.

Edit: a couple of other things:

* Make sure the camera is pointed in the direction you want to scan, not Sam.

* The BTs fade in and out. So even if one is detected by the scanner you might not see it until it fades back in.

Where are you guys seeing your time played?

Go to Bridge Links and then you can view your profile.

Death Stranding is more awesome if you go in absolutely blind.

100% agree. I made a huge effort in staying away from all sorts of spoilers, including gameplay, and that's the best decision I could have made.

Death Stranding is all I am playing now and all I want to play. I thought building highways and play dystopian truck driver was the best thing ever, but that was only because I hadn't start connect mountain peaks with ziplines. This game is very addictive.

In other news, I can't add Sky because of privacy settings. Heh. Yegolev and Trippy, care to share your Climbing Anchors with me? I remember we had a psn names thread here on f13, but I can't find it now.

My PSN name is very easy to guess. I think we are connected there? Will check.

Also, I can no longer read this thread. I'm only just now to Port Knot. I'm learning way too much from the comments here.

Thanks! Looks like around 36 hours, which is pretty massive for me for just 10 days!

I guess I'll have to look at my privacy settings  :why_so_serious: First thing I usually do is lock all that shit down tighter than heck.

On PS4 I'm Okono88. I might have to change my privacy settings, though.

(https://i.imgur.com/TpCkcRp.jpg)

I'm hoping the PC version will have a more explicit "grouping" function than the PS4. Then we can get an f13 group going to build the ski resort I'm fantasizing about right now in the "Rockies".

You are the reason I knew Death Stranding was released since I saw your achievements popping up left and right.  :why_so_serious:

edit: autocorrect NOT

Trippy, I love that you made a point of NOT ever using vehicles. Your stats tell a story of a thousand Bridges boots burned, and that's just more evidence of how good this game is.

Yeah my Delivery Time Level/Rank is suffering, though. Not sure what benefits I'm missing out from having it that low. Also you can't Legend timed Premium orders purely on foot. So I'll have to use bikes if I want to Legend those.

We should probably do a thread or something  :drillf:

Following up about my tale of the rustbuckety and new shiny MULE trucks...it didn't take long for my new shiny to turn into another rustbucket...so I decided to use the last durability to build out the roads a bit more for easier bike travel. Made a bad attempt at fording a small river and got the truck stuck nicely between a couple rocks. I went back to get the original bucket (which was parked on a road somewhere), and at some point the new bucket despawned as an abandoned vehicle. Which was weird because the original bucket had been sitting on that road for days.

So I drove the original bucket into a deep river, I think it despawned instantly in the red-depth water (I couldn't see because I was swept into the side of the bridge, it was gone when I got out).

Now hoping new trucks spawn at that MULE camp. Just playing with the mechanics is a fun diversion. Lots of little 'I wonder if I can do this' things.

I'm the opposite of Trippy. I love the ground game, but I've been in a truck or on a bike almost nonstop for days now. I want to slow down a bit, but the area around Port Knot and the Craftsman/Engineer are a bit more bleak than interesting to traverse, and I've only just started moving again (only as far as the Weather Station).

I'd move all the posts into a new thread, but I find it hard to simply schedule a haircut these days. Maybe another mod will do it.

My PSN permissions are likely very open. I'm avoided there as well. Since not all the names and pictures match up, just write a convincing note and all is well.

I don't know anything about this game you are all talking about other than what you all are writing about here....and none of it makes any goddamn sense. 

That's the beauty of it. The least you know about every single aspect of it, the better.

As someone who grew up in a pizza town, it gave me great joy to get a pizza delivery mission where keeping the box horizontal was a mission priority. Good news everyone, in the apocalypse we've gotten delivery times down to around 2 minutes!

PRO TIP: Do all the pizza quests.

There was never any doubt!  :drill:

I decided to go back and clean up some of the stuff I left in the eastern region. Told myself I'd hump it on foot, immediately jumped on the nearest bike  :why_so_serious: Cool to see my old bridges with 4 digit likes, funny how the game hooks into that feedback loop from social media so easily.

Pro-tip: When you like something, you can mash the like button for as long as the little timer is counting down on the NPC/Item's nameplate. I can get about 300-350 range rn.

After 75 hours, I finished the story last night. It never ends. Basically, when you trigger the end of the game a 1 hour and 30 minutes movie starts. Occasionally you have to touch the controller but you are by all means watching a 90 minutes movie.
It is ridiculous. I personally enjoy Kojima's cinema a lot, but there are lots of aspect of this ending "sequence" that even I could not appreciate.



 :oh_i_see:

With that said, I still enjoyed the cinematic aspects of Death Stranding very much, and while the story makes very little sense, being a weeabo and an anime lover doesn't make me clash with that. I mean, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure for example makes zero sense and yet it's fantastic. This is how I see the story of this game, your usual anime extravaganza, directed by a Japanese man and played by Western actors. Works for me.



With the story out of the way, I am back in the delivery/building loop. As Trippy pointed out you can enjoy the sandbox endlessly and I plan to do that for another 100 hours. So many roads that need to be rebuilt, so many achievements to unlock, so many places still to explore.

10/10.

Krusty Krab Pizza is the pizza for you and me....

I'm assuming this game requires a solid internet connection, of course. Which means it is not for me right now (hell, I had problems with Conan Exiles), but maybe next year if Starlink is actually a thing that works.

So my question -- I buy this game this time next year will the whole world be just one big empty parking lot, paved by players long gone? Is the world recycled every once in a while?

Cause this sounds like a game right up my alley, but I am going to have to wait to play it.

Not really. You can play offline completely if you want (though I wouldn't recommend it) and it's also fine if you are playing online and your connection to their servers goes up and down -- it doesn't interrupt your gameplay, you just get a notice that you've been disconnected. And most other player-generated stuff also won't blink in and out of existence when you do (signs may be one exception, those seem more dynamic).

Unknown at this point how that's going to work and what your world will look like if you are a newcomer joining the game "late". You could also wait for the PC version next summer and experience a true "everybody's starting fresh" world.

I think I am just not a Kojima person. The weirdness in his stuff annoys me; it doesn't seem Japanese as much as him personally.

Actually that's pretty encouraging. Do you encounter other players in the game, or just the things they have built? Also does lag have any effect on fighting mobs and such (I would think no, from what you've said)?

I probably will wait for PC release (and hope this is not another Red Dead Redemption) just because, but dang if this is not looking fun.

It's asynchronous "multiplayer" so no you never ever encounter other players. Only the things they build and traces of their passage, like signs or rock cairns. There is not gonna be any lag cause everything happens on your console locally. The multiplayer element is simply downloading location for some player buildings and vehicles in the background and uploading them to your PC. That's it. You could be on a 33.6k modem and the game would play exactly the same on your PS4.

Like Falconeer said everything runs on your local machine so a bad Internet connection doesn't affect your character's movement and the like (e.g. no rubber-banding and such). However it's possible a bad/slow connection may cause some delays when loading in some of the multi-player data.

Thanks guys, sounds like a solid deal. On the Christmas list it goes (not even going to wait on PC).

Wow... took the plunge because the holidays are coming and now's the time to eat a bad game cost and not feel it too badly. That said, this game is pretty enthralling. Definitely worth the price of admission.

Been awhile since I got sucked into a game, but strangely it is pretty easy to come and go. I tend to finish my play times in my private room, but if need be I like having the save options out in the world.

It is so weird how bewitching it is. Also, they struck a wonderful balance with the (perceived) difficulty, progress and satisfaction levels.

For me, I appreciate how they took simple delivery quests and emphasized the journey getting there. That's the focus more than the reward at the end. It is very interesting and I am really engrossed while I am playing it.

Not to even mention the eye candy on my PS4. The graphics are pretty striking given it is pouring out of an old ass original PS4.

So is there a way to directly add folks here as Strand Contacts or whatever in-game? I seem to only be able to "interact" with players whose structures I've interacted with - I cannot seem to interact with friends who are also playing.

Nope.

That was a disappointing find. Unlike some other games, where your friends tend to show up more often than randos in your world, this doesn't seem to be the case at all here.

Getting a little more of the downside of the 'player content' the last few days. I'm amazed it hasn't been worse, up until now it's been almost entirely helpful and positive. Now I'm seeing a lot more junk laying around, people leaving vehicles and junk in the roads is one of the worst griefy things. Last night I spent a half hour deconstructing bridges and structures made in nonsense locations (just a bridge in the middle of a plain kinda thing).

Not a deal-breaker, but it does knock back immersion a bit when you see 25 trucks sitting around, or a bridge spanning nothing.

The stuff in the roads part kinda pissed me off, tbh.

AFAIK, you can hide from TimeFall under bridges. https://www.reddit.com/r/DeathStranding/comments/du957t/you_can_wait_out_timefall_under_bridges/

It sounds like your world is “messier” than mine, I have the same “bridges to nowhere” problem but I just ignore them. My roads have been clear of vehicles though I have had to clear a few distribution center ramps and elevators of vehicles but I don’t think of that as deliberate and more people not realizing where their vehicles show up in other people’s worlds. I fortunately haven’t encountered people blocking hard to reach locations with vehicles either like I’ve seen on Reddit. The package thing in the road I do encounter but I’m not sure that’s a player thing or a game spawning things only in certain locations thing.

The only outright griefy thing I’ve encountered so far is a bridge that goes over a BT spawn location which will aggro the BT if you walk over it. But I don’t know if the player was trying to helpful with the bridge (the bridge isn’t over a river but the terrain is rugged) or was deliberately trying to get other people attacked. I also encountered a climbing rope wrapped around a tree making it useless without a lot of work but I figured the owner must have done that themselves rather than another player doing it to the rope before it showed up in my world.

But why not just build a timefall shelter, then?

As far as blocking places, I hope my old truck despawned properly and didn't propagate to anyone's world...it was stuck in the entrance to the Cosplayer. Oops!

That’s more a reason for you to not dismantle them from your world than a reason why it was built in the first place.

Yeah that’s one of the places that gets blocked by vehicles. Apparently grenades can fix that issue.

Oh I agree with you... that's a whole lotta resources to drop on a shelter to get outta the rain and you also don't get the repair function. The only thing I'd guess is the bridge lasts longer?

As The Binary One says, I just find it weird because the timefall shelter only requires the PCC. Now a huge deal, but gets a little blighty with a bunch of bridges on a plain without ravines.

Grenades...smh I forgot, since I don't use them at all (in ch 4 currently).

Decided to do a timed run from south knot city to the timefall farm, then realized there's no vehicle-friendly path. Noticed a 'here' sign on the map, so I went over 'there' and found that you could navigate the fallen bridge at the southern end of the central map. Little thing, but I love worldbuilding like that. I need to get out and just explore more.

That run screams for a couple ziplines.

To be fair, eventually ziplines can "ruin" the game for you as they are addictive and trivialize everything, so I mostly use them now cause I have explored everything. But even in the earliest phases, a couple of well placed ziplines are very satisfying and don't do too much damage.

I've been driving a truck around a lot lately (long story) and have also noticed things like that -- like large boulders that are spaced just far enough apart that you can fit a truck through. I.e. places you would think you couldn't take a truck to/through you actually can (without resorting to abusing the vehicle physics) because a designer carefully laid out a route for you.

Of course later in the day yesterday after I wrote this I ended up getting blocked by a vehicle at the Cosplayer :awesome_for_real:

The entrance was totally clear when I got there but by the time I finished completing my orders, when I turned around, there was a truck blocking the entrance. Fortunately I was able to jump over the front driver's side wheel to get out.

There's a patch coming mid-December that will allow you to dismiss vehicles so that'll be handy.

https://twitter.com/KojiPro2015_EN/status/1199704601471127552/photo/1

Doing a lot with the bike right now, including going up and down craggy rock faces... not sure if that qualifies as exploiting.

Spent the last two days building the road system from Port to South. I have no idea why or how I did it, but finished it last night. I regret nothing. On Episode 5 with Andie McDowell's kid.  :drillf:

Given the game gives the bikes an explicit Jump function to get over obstacles and makes it so if your wheelie-ing you are more stable over rugged terrain I would say no.

Melancholy night. Finally got to chapter 6 and SNOW and MOUNTAINS  :heart:

But


Depending on where they saved my progress last, I may just try to go the long way 'round. Instead of heading back to the mountain knot, I'll hump over to the weather station and just take the road on the long, mind-numbing drive across the entire map.

Also, bikes handle like pigs. At this point I usually sacrifice speed to not, you know, fly off the road when I randomly can't make a corner on the bike. Trux r gud.

Still, it's a fun visceral gameplay loop most of the time, and the fact that I'm in chapter 6 and still having new elements open up is pretty cool.

Some tips for dealing with BTs.

You can throw a hemantic grenade on the ground in front of the approaching “tar hands” to stop them from reaching you. If you are caught up in the tar, in between trying to shake them off the game will periodically let you throw a grenade if you have one equipped (you kind of have to spam L2 while also spamming Square).Throw it at your feet and you’ll be able to (slowly) walk out of there without worrying about being dragged down.

Killing a “boss” will clear the area of BTs until you leave it and come back. If there’s postbox in a BT area you can dump off the cargo you don’t want damaged and then go in there and fight the boss. Don’t stray too far from the box though as the game does treat cargo in a postbox private locker like it does cargo in vehicle where if you get too far away you will lose the cargo.

BT spawn areas that are close to facilities are good places to practice fighting BTs and bosses since you have a convenient place to reequip and possibly rest. I spent a lot of time around the Wind Farm farming bosses for Chiral crystals to build out the roads in my world. Somebody also built a Safehouse next to the facility in mine so I could periodically rest and take a shower.

Boss killing tip:

Yes the turning radius on those things is terrible when you are going fast.

Thanks for the tips. I've been kicking BT ass all up and down the pike (I did my heavy chiral farming north of the Craftsman), but without the BB it's a pain in the ass. I have on idea why this particular boss beat me the first time, I had him at half health and was dodging his charge and womp womp dead boom. The second time I never got a boss, the hands pulled me down and game over. The hands the first time, I was in deep snow and didn't have the rough terrain skeleton yet. The second time, I dunno. I did forget about using grenades on them, because I haven't had to since chapter 2. The whole scenario just kind of bummed me out because it seemed to act differently those couple of times I mentioned.

Also, I'm playing on Easy, so a lvl 3 assault rifle is usually enough for most things, though I wish I could switch modes to single/triple. I've never liked full auto. I'm using the non-lethal one, so I can have a single slot for BTs/MULEs.

I almost never shower in the game because I find that amusing.

Here is my experience, which I report simply because it seem to outline how differently the game can be played.

1) I have never ever shot a single bullet of anything to a BT. I always thought they would alert all of them and I wouldn't want to fuck it up. Hematic Grenades, for sure. Plenty of those.

2)  Never had a voidout. I honestly didn't even know they were in the game until Strazos asked about them in Discord..

3) I have been caught by BTs only three times over the entire 15 chapters and 80 hours of the game. This could be due to me being over-cautious, but I honestly started thinking pretty soon that while they were cool and totally scary, they were never even remotely a threat. Just there to set the mood. In short, super easy to avoid them (with the BB of course) and most of the times also very possible to avoid their areas. And don't get me started about boss battles, I don't even know if they can be failed. I am not a good gamer at anything in particular, and I played this at Normal difficulty. Stuff just barks at you, but never ever bites. Finally, BTs really become absolutely trivial when you unlock a certain "method" at some point halfway through the game.

4) I don't remember what I did when I was without the BB, but I have no particular memory of that being a challenge which leads me to think that I was able to somehow ignore them and stay away from them. How? I am not sure, I can't remember, but there has to be a way cause that's what I did. I probably went super wide somewhere and maybe placed a couple of crucial ziplines? Which again makes the game even cooler.

5) Finallty, the best weapon against MULEs is a box. Any box. Just smash ANY box in their faces and that's not only a one-shot kill, but it also feels incredibly satisfying with that slow motion animation.

The guns are fun and look cool. I loved the bola, and the anti-BT gun is more effective; but I also like the versatility of the non-lethal gun (fires rubber bullets and anti-bt rounds).

The problem isn't really fighting the BTs, per se. Just the awkward setup without the BB and weird insta-deaths.

So I am currently playing and remember entering my real month and day in the birthday thing at the set up of the game. Interesting part is every interaction or when calling out in the world gets replies of happy birthday. That's pretty cool.

Just to follow up on my dumb story for the benefit of f13ers reading this in the future:

That first walk up the mountain (at least for me) from Mountain Knot City to the Roboticist, knee deep in snow, surrounded by BTs and with all my packages slowly being corroded was legendary. It'll be one of my favourite gaming memories for a long time.

I was already in love with it, and then the mountains bumped up my appreciation of the game another 20%.

lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRqxgbuJ_DA

They kind of do and they kind of don't. Mostly don't in my experience. I used to carry around a shotgun with me regularly to finish off wounded BTs instead of using another grenade on them (don't carry one around as much right now after some equipment upgrades) and only once when shooting one that was close to another one would I say that the second one knew where I was just from firing the gun. I.e. its hands went straight for me after firing the shot rather than just searching around like nearby ones normally do when you aggro a single BT. However I've also fired off rounds from relatively close range that completely missed the target and the intended target didn't even start hunting for the me.

If you are careful and stop moving between scans you can avoid being detected since the scanner can reveal them before they can detect you. That's how I did it. Plus I took the more direct but harder to traverse route which has fewer BTs in between.

The "map" button in most PS4 games is the touchpad. This gets me in the most BT trouble.

Yes. Also I'm often late pulling my gun because I go to the GTA/RDR left shoulder button.

I rushed chapter 5 to ditch that whole 'navigate BT areas without the BB' nonsense, which bums me out because climbing those pristine pre-chiral network areas was maybe the best part of the game thus far.

So I'm in chapter 6 now, heh.

“I’M SAM!”

What messes me up with the controls is that they are multi-function / context sensitive. E.g. I’m constantly punching things because the Square button is mapped to some many things. I also like having a carrier around with me which means that if I’m in some frantic combat I end up with cargo in both my hands rather than shooting / throwing if the carrier ends up in front of me. And for a game about Liking things it’s surprisingly difficult to do so. You have to be facing exactly the right way at exactly the correct distance to Like something, and then you literally have to spam the Like button rather than just being able to hold it down.

I don't use the carrier, but fighting MULEs and sometimes even BTs (random cargo on the ground), I get a lot of cargo pickup instead of aim/shoot. And I punch my truck constantly. Constantly.

Another awkward one is scanning/zooming while driving or L2/R2 stabilizing the load, though that's more of a normal awkwardness since I like my index fingers on the triggers and the shoulder button hop (switching my index for middle without letting off the trigger) is something I encounter fairly regularly.

Finally finished the story. I was trying to 5 star all the locations before finishing, which is why it was taking me so long, but one of them is "stuck" and I can't get it advance. Hopefully the patch this month will fix that and I can get that achievement.

I finished the story and then tried to five star everything. I am only a few stars left. Which one is stuck and how?

What do you think of the story and the ending?

I've been trying to get most of the gear that I use unlocked, currently trying to work the Roboticist. Ironically, as soon as I started working toward the lvl 3 all-terrain skeleton, I found one in a BT zone, on the ground. So I've made use of that to develop and improve the ziplines around the mountain knot region. Just finished a nice little set that connects it up with the central lake/weather station region, just need to finish up the spur to the incinerator area.

Basically spent the whole weekend dicking around in the snow. Awesome. For me, stuff like that is 100% of the game.

I think I'll make another story push after that. I'm still in episode 8.

This has been me. First I was all about building the roads out. Once I got those to a point where the story took me further, I went back and 5 starred the starting zone and have been 5 starring each prepper and installation as I have been going. Picking up loose cargo for those I need the rep with just to get a sticker on my pants. Haven't come across any I haven't been able to progress (save for the pizza fuck which I am leaving till the end).

My game is not dropping any Lost Cargo for one of the hidden preppers so I can't get them past the "4/5ths" star state right now. I.e. I found the location, did one of their terminal missions to retrieve something for them to get them to the 4/5ths state (actually did that mission twice to see if the 2nd time would unstick), got some email from them, but now I can't finish that star to get them on the network cause I can't find any Lost Cargo for them. I may try cleaning up the entire snow mountain area at some point to see if I can get some cargo to spawn but that takes a lot of work. I did try cleaning out some of the more "drop-heavy" areas to force those areas to respawn cargo but that didn't help.

Overwrought, confusing, and nonsensical. In other words a typical Kojima story :awesome_for_real:

I'm still trying to get him to 2 star to open up his chiral network  :why_so_serious:

Pizza guy is story progression gated. I.e. after each of his missions you have progress the story a certain amount (it varies) and then rest before he'll contact you again for the next one.

Patch dropped so I played some more. Still can't get Lost Cargo to drop for one of the hidden preppers but that's actually not necessary -- the stuff I had read was inaccurate / incomplete in terms of completing star levels -- so I've made some progress and should be able to finish up 5-star-ing everything in another day or two.

Spoilers on how to deal with the "stubborn" hidden preppers:

Edit: patch lets you dismantle vehicles and also makes your cargo stack semi-transparent when in BT territory so you can see which way your scanner is pointing and you don't need to switch camera shoulders.

I've been taking a bit of a break but I've suspected the same thing, since I haven't had issues with the First Prepper. He gets a lot of deliveries because he's right off my mountain region zip line network. Setting that up was a heck of a lot of fun, and I'm kind of bummed that I got cut off by lack of chiral bandwidth. Worse because my network uses as many public zip lines as possible to save on my usage of the bandwidth (meaning lots of suboptimal routes, but it would still cost more to do them all myself).

That's one of the benefits of 5-star-ing everything is you gets lots of bandwidth to build stuff with.

Yeah I've got some of that zig-zagging going on in the snow mountains in my world as well. I do have enough spare network points to fix some of that stuff up but I'm currently saving them to connect up the "lowlands" after finishing off my stars.

But the game is also smart about what stuff from other players it puts in your world. In mine, while I do have Zip Lines from other people, almost all of them were disconnected from each other -- there were only a handful of connected of pairs that spawned into my world. At first I was kind of annoyed by that but after connecting up the snow mountains I realized it was doing that intentionally -- i.e. even though the game puts in a lot of stuff from other players with the Zip Lines it wants you to do most of that work yourself. The same with the roads. In my world, only a few road segments were not completely built or finished by me. Most segments did have other people contributing to them (in some cases quite a lot of resources) but I had to finish them off. And the game gives you repeatable quests to help you do that, like the one in Port Knot City which gives you a ton of Ceramics (9x320) from a super simple quest.

Agreed, I'm constantly surprised by little things like that. It's to the point where if I see a complete dead-end zip line placement I'm apt to think I'm missing something. Most of the time, I just need to find a clever placement to bridge some gaps. But my favorite lines are the ones where I install all of it, getting them put up in a perfect spot to connect up several lines and have them all on nice outcrops or peaks...mmm...

I guess I should have looked into cell tower placement as a career.

Yeah the PC version is going to be crazy. I should be able to give myself unlimited resources to build the "perfect world".

I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking that  :ye_gods:

Ski resort in Death Stranding

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

He totally stole my completely original idea :why_so_serious:

I'm finally playing on PC.

When I had to take a certain person to Mountain Knot City, I decided 'f-it, I'm walking up from the Weather Station". That felt very cool. That made me want to build a network of zip-lines through the mountains. As of yesterday, I have made it possible to go from the Craftsman to South Knot City via zip line, with every destination in-between reachable except the Film Director and the Cosplay person. Everybody else you can zipline pretty much from their front door to anywhere else. This has been great fun. I load up with stuff that's just under my weight limit, stagger to a zip line and then I don't come down again until I'm pretty much at the destination. Takes a lot less time than it would on an all-road trip with a bike, usually.

I do not understand why people build ziplines that are just by themselves--it's weird. I've been able to use some of those to extend my network, but a couple are just in really bad places so I had to make one that could actually connect that's only 30 m or so from the one that's hidden behind obstacles. It can't be that I'm seeing the ghost of a network that has decayed--the game hasn't been out on PC that long.

The game itself is the usual from him--stuff I like very much and stuff that makes me go completely WTF. I occasionally take a break from zipline building to take down a group of MULEs (why aren't the shooting ones scared of a voidout? they're not the guy who actually wants to blow shit up, or so it seems) and sometimes to fight BTs. I find BTs annoying--I do like that you can use the bola gun and cut their cords, but that usually gets the tar-hands on me--it's a bit like having to rush to kick a MULE who has been bola'd. It's not the usual combat, I'll give it that. You have to have a lot of ammo/gear on you to take out a BT boss--it's not a thing you want to stumble into, it's got to be your purpose.

I decided to teleport back to Capital Knot City just to do a couple of runs and earn some more stars so I had more chiral bandwidth and you know, the runs between locations in the beginning are WAY tougher than the mountains/lake runs. That's not just because people don't build paths, roads, bridges as extensively in that area. The Wind Farm is a fucking PITA to get to in any vehicle or on foot and the run to the lake from the mid-map is also a super big PITA--you essentially have to drive right through two BT areas where there's no ability to swerve or avoid going right into tar hands, so you just have to get out and kill them. It's a curious decision--I guess they're introducing the basics in a way that makes you have to deal with it so you're ready for later. But the first area is really just not very fun in comparison to the mid-game.

I suppose I'll go see Heartman soon, but I'm honestly not all that jazzed by the thought of advancing the story. I really dislike the combat Beach sequences.

I don't have proof of this but I'm pretty sure the game does this intentionally. It will of course add player added stuff into your world but not *too* much player made stuff cause it wants to allow you to mostly dictate how things will be setup in your world. It's more obvious to see with the way road construction works. You'll see other players add resources to road segments over time and some segments will even be completed by other players for you but you won't see a large stretch of road that's completely built by other players -- the game wants you to do that part. The same with ziplines. The game will scatter about ziplines, usually disconnected from each other from other players into your world but it wants to you do all the major connections.

Ah, that makes sense. Kind of too bad--I was pleased with myself for building the entire network when it seemed like no one else was doing it that comprehensively. In some places it does feel like someone's made a little mini-network, though.

It's possible the mini-network was from a player or players you have stronger ties with (been smashing the Like button on). That also affects what shows up in your world.

I've decided I would be vastly more scared of BTs if it wasn't for the pseudo-scientific garbage that Kojima does in world-building. Like, if this was just "the worlds of death and life are now intermingled and the dead are angry", the story elements of the game would be better and I would be happy being a weird combination of the Ghostbusters and an Amazon delivery man who occasionally has to listen to Jeff Bezos in his freaking fucking mountain office tell me about his sex life and his theories of ghosts or whatever. I'm really not looking forward to wherever the inevitable train wreck of the storyline crashes. Kojima is like Tim Burton--someone needs to take storytelling responsibilities away from him and make him a kind of complicated art director/world creator/characterization man only and exclusively.

I have to really agree. The entire story is just lost on me and entirely got in the way of the game. It’s like four hours of dooms and chiral whatever malarkey was going on just to get to some game.

I just didn’t get it.

I'm also kind of done with games that force me to be a fucking idiot or not ask story-relevant questions when the story is force-feeding me reasons to not keep going. I get that Sam Porter Bridges is meant to be a man of few words and deeply repressed and all that, but about halfway through the game he's got plenty of reasons to go on strike and refuse to reconnect America or whatever until he gets some clear answers from the people in charge.

There's also shit that just doesn't make much sense, as per Kojima. Like, the terrorist MULEs shoot at you with the intention of killing you. Are they suicidally trying to cause a voidout in the middle of their own camp? Why not just hold a lottery and have Joe MULE commit suicide? Kind of fucks up the cargo holding if you blow your hoard of cargo up every time a porter comes through the camp, you know? It would have made more sense to stick with a world where nobody except a total nihilist would ever ever want to kill another person except by knocking them out and taking them to an incinerator.

Anyway, the game was fun. Kojima has fun ideas for game systems and a good sense of how to build something that keeps you engaged.

He's trying to reunite with Amelie. Reconnecting things is just a means to that end.

A regular person doesn't necessarily go nuclear immediately when they die (Sam's "dying" is special but the MULEs probably don't know that). So they presumably believe they would have time to either incinerate the body somehow or move it somewhere else.

So even if a dude gets killed by gunfire in your camp, I would think the terrorist MULEs wouldn't be able to get the body all the way to the incinerators, and they don't seem to want to blow up the communities that keep generating all that lovely cargo, so it means a long damn trip to a barren place. It would almost have made sense if you found an informal corpse disposal site somewhere. I guess the two big tar lakes are sort of that.