Bits and pieces of gameplay information are slowly coming out of the cracks now. So far, the video I've seen of actually gameplay looks very MGS V with ladders instead of guns.
But what really made me post this topic today, was the revelation that Sam will have to relieve himself from time to time. Not doing so can impair his ability to perform tasks.
And on top of that, you will be able to direct his pee stream, with the game sometimes requiring you to piss on vegetation to help it grow.
There's lots of background story floating around the interwebz now, what Death Stranding actually means in the games context, the mix between the alive realm and dead realm, and a little about what that baby in a jar is actually for.
I'm calling this now - bat shit crazy and entertaining story with boring gameplay.
I'll see your suggestion and raise you 'Utter dogshit'.
Everything I learn about this game just makes me hate it even more. Pretentious, banal wankery disguised - with absolute, fawning, enthusiastic assistance from the press - as groundbreaking art. Kojima is just David Cage if he got away with it.
THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES.
Perhaps we should wait until it's out before we start hating it.
MGS5 was actually really good. It had the problem all open world games had with it becoming a series of treks across a map to tick things off a to-do list but you can't really hold that against it too much - even Breath of the Wild has that problem. The stealth action gameplay was excellent, there were moments where it was genuinely terrifying, the range of ways to approach tasks in the game were impressive.
This thing about having to stop for a piss sounds like a pathetic gimmick, something for all the reviewers to mention, and the baby in a jar looks like a cynical attempt to court controversy and get attention, similar to the worst aspect of MGS5 - the character Quiet, a virtually naked woman obviously shoe-horned in for the pervs and with a laughable in-game justification for her nakedness. To be fair, Bungie and 343 used the same trick with Cortana in Halo, and had a similarly weak justification. Basically Kojima knows how to generate column inches.
Having said all that, I don't want to dismiss a game before it's even out, and certainly not from the tiny amount of information we have on this so far.
Perhaps we should wait until it's out before we start hating it.
I fear you may have missed the entire point of 'the internet'. 
I tend to play things for at least 20 seconds before dismissing them.
I'm sure there's a wanking joke in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to think of it.
Having said all that, I don't want to dismiss a game before it's even out, and certainly not from the tiny amount of information we have on this so far.
In my defence, I'm not just dismissing it based on the tiny amount information we have on it so far; I'm dismissing it based on that and the enormous amount of information I already have on Kojima's entire back-catalogue.
I'm sure there are a lot of people - here and elsewhere - that will love it, just as they loved MGS and ZoE and all, but I've never played a Kojima game that didn't annoy me into quitting after at most about an hour. I just don't get it - or him.
This game is either gonna be fucking amazing or it's going to be mindbogglingly bad. There is no inbetween and I am 100% here for having it just rule everything. I 100% believe that Hideo Kojima is top 3 game designers and directors working today and MGS2 is one of the finest games ever created that was both hugely prophetic of our modern cultural landscape and was also the first properly post modern videogame.
The guy can do a lot of stuff that's bad and nasty but the amount of stuff that he gets right and the amount of stuff that he tries and the shere verve of it while he's trying it a sight to behold and something the industry would be poorer without.
Bit of a thread jump but whilst we are bitch about Hideo…
Im just playing the last few bits of MGS 5, and Jesus, the Quiet cut scenes are just terrible. The lechery is like that of a 13 year old boy who has never seen a woman before.
That is all his games to me. MGS 5 felt like a brilliant game, that was undone by someone's ego. Granted I am a Splinter Cell and Hitman fan, so primarily just want to get on with the gameplay, but even I could stand some fo the wackyiness of MGS5.
This new game looks well toss to me.
Read the review on Eurogamer and it sounds sort of awful in all the usual Kojima ways but – coupled with a few of the shots from that extended trailer earlier in the week – really made me want to play it.
It sounds absolutely dreadful, and completely mad. Albeit possibly in a good way.
All the actual gameplay I've seen looks a bit shit but the story stuff such as the guy who dies every 24minutes or whatever sounds really good to me.
This (long) bit in the Polygon review sold it to me more:
Spoiler - click to showThere’s one acre of land I keep having to cross for deliveries that’s absolutely swarming with BTs. Whenever I get snagged by accident, sticky tar appears around my feet. I once spent too much time in the muck, and was suddenly dragged 50 feet by a massive, tar-covered sea beast (again, because reasons) that seemed none too concerned about the much-needed sperm I was carrying.
The world around me transformed as tar sprang up everywhere, leaving just a few safe places to jump to. I had no idea what was happening or why, but suddenly I had to escape this thing, while trying to gather up my lost belongings amid the chaos. It was an outrageous visual spectacle, but not one I wanted to keep seeing, as it definitely made the task at hand considerably harder.
But I slowly make my way through, time after time, becoming a true ghost-dodging master. While I became adept at these sequences, I wouldn’t call them super fun to play. They feel more like a game of Marco Polo, but instead of asshole cousins around a pool, it’s tar-summoning monster whales.
So I decide to make an investment. Instead of lugging another package, I load up Sam’s backpack with a ton of materials and hike out with a plan: I’m gonna build a goddamn highway right over these ghosts. This requires thousands of materials (earned from doing quests for various cities) and can be a huge resource sink, but it’s absolutely worth it. Once constructed, the road stretches right over the land where the BTs hang, neutralizing them entirely. An area that previously took me 10 minutes of careful stealth to cross now takes seconds.
Not only does my highway save me a ton of time, it also starts showing up in my friends’ games. They message me photos of them driving on my highway, thanking me for the investment. It’s enormously satisfying, even if it does ruin the natural splendor of this once-wild Scandinavian-esque landscape. The vistas in Death Stranding are astonishing, some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in a game, and it’s a shame to see them slowly cluttered with ugly ladders and roads. But hey, that’s progress.
There are more opportunities to build on, and civilize, this land as the game continues. By the end, the world is unrecognizable from the untouched wilderness you first set out to explore and connect. It’s now a delivery man’s paradise, with every nook and cranny designed to make each shipment slightly easier. You are, quite literally, optimizing the world. Jeff Bezos would be thrilled.
Interestingly, for a game that has a whole lot to say about politics, familial strife, and the nature of humanity, it never really comments on the potential downsides to this loss of natural beauty. Apparently it’s all great! I can’t really argue that, because thanks to progress, I now get to speed over those goddamn tar demons on my awesome highway.
One could say that the satisfaction I felt upon building the road would have been dulled if I had reached that point sooner (i.e., without the game’s drawn-out, sloggy intro). Without the suffering, I might not have appreciated the end of that suffering. In short, is Death Stranding just giving me a bad case of Stockholm syndrome? Does it matter?
Also: this twitter thread made me laugh.
I quite liked this take, as someone with little context outside the various headlines popping up since the embargo broke.
I quite liked this take, as someone with little context outside the various headlines popping up since the embargo broke.
I know people that ran out of enthusiasm for their job a good long time ago but they still do it.
I read the Eurogamer review.
I don't get it. Recommended, but the game isn't fun? Recommended, but the story is nonsense? Seriously, come on.
I was unlikely to bother with this before, but this kind of bullshit is just stupid. So many great games out there get zero coverage, while Kojima's latest bit of onanism gets praise for being a massive wankfest. Jesus wept.
It does kind of demonstrate the problems with games being so long. An ambitious, pretentious, auteur-driven movie might not be your thing but it'll only take a couple of hours to find that out. A challenging and unconventional novel might take a bit longer to work through but probably no more than a few days. Death Stranding though is 100 hours long, most of that is walking slowly backwards and forwards and it sounds like all the really out-there stuff is right at the very end. There's no way I'm going to play this.
What I'd like to know is a bit more about the Stranding thing.
Most of the reviews have commented on how your envoiroment starts of barren but then becomes more and more built up as other players contribute.
Who are these other players? Are they fixed throughout your playthrough? Or could you possibly start a game with half the world already built up?
Who are these other players? Are they fixed throughout your playthrough? Or could you possibly start a game with half the world already built up?
I read that you only see the additional infrastructure once you've connected the area to the network. wherever I read about it it seemed to suggest that it makes a point about human impact on the environment.
I don't get it. Recommended, but the game isn't fun? Recommended, but the story is nonsense? Seriously, come on.
Every review also suggests the first 10 hours are a slog and the last ten hours are a slog and the story doesn't really work. So hyped!
I'm never going to buy it on day 1 and there's a fair chance I'll never play it but I've found myself suckered into the hype.
I'm actually quite intrigued, in that it sounds quite interesting and atmospheric, but it'd definitely be a conditional purchase for me, in that I'd need to be in the right mood (with suitably tempered expectations), and it'd need to be/have been in a sale.
I mean, I find that running around weird sci-fi terrain doing menial bullshit can be pretty absorbing (hello, No Mans Sky!), so I certainly have some level of interest in it.
I'm actually quite intrigued, in that it sounds quite interesting and atmospheric, but it'd definitely be a conditional purchase for me, in that I'd need to be in the right mood (with suitably tempered expectations)
To be fair, that's my opinion with BDSM.
Anyone picking this up today? Be interested to know the Soc's thoughts.
Friend at work getting this today, want to know what she thinks before I take the plunge.
From the review it sounds like a slog, but the sort of slog a self-punishing idiot like me would stick with.
A friend on my team is getting it but he's a huge Kojima fan. I doubt I'll get much but gushing out of him.
Coming to this game for the first time. After all the meh reviews from reviewers and mates.
I love it.
If it hadn’t been over hyped and not promised to be something it hadn’t been, I suspect people would have taken to it more. But that’s Hideo for you.
I’ve found traversing the landscape in itself so rewarding, the BT encounters tense, and the story naturally baffling.
It’s is what it is, a series of fetch quests. But with the beautiful metal gear engine.
