Now in chapter 9 and I’m still enjoying the game greatly. It’s all I’ve played since launch. Going to turn into a MULE at this point if I don’t take a break.
At the end of chapter 8...
Solved the Tar sea crossing first time and then the whales came. I really enjoyed that sequence. Also the second fight with mads was fun. Ended up strangling him the strand.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
edited November 2019
Chapter 4:
I thought the war from the (best) trailer was the past, but now I think it's an alternate timeline where the Stranding was weaponized.
Guess we'll see.
Ziplines are a gamechanger. I spent about 90 minutes setting up routes around Mount Knot, so I can now get from the distribution center in the top over to the distribution center in Lake Knot and most of the preppers in between. It saves so much time. It's difficult sometimes because other peoples ziplines don't show up until you connect the Prepper so all of a sudden your network needs moving a little to remove redundancy, but it's amazing to get over the mountains in about 3 minutes compared to 30.
Only on Chapter 4 but I am enjoying the heck out of this game. My partner is however greatly worried about me becoming a MULE, given that I work full time as a Porter and now come home only to play imaginary Porter.
I've spent most of my time helping complete other people's structures versus planting the foundations myself. Sometimes people put them down in less than efficient places but I like to think I'm helping make the scenic route.
Crossing to the port the first time without getting off my trike and kicking it into overdrive when I got noticed was heart pounding. I made it through but on every subsequent trip I have had to get off and deal with the BTs. I love trying to navigate the rocks by popping wheelies and hopping along though, reminds me of mountain biking videos one of my coworkers used to watch all the time.
Solid game, what I expected and wanted all rolled into one.
The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
-John Stuart Mill
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Ziplines are amazing and should cost more chiral bandwidth.
Y'all are crazy. I have basically the entire mountains set up as a webwork of zip line highways that enable location to location transport and my work has completely trivialized the delivery aspect of the game. I even have a line set up from mountain knot city straight across to the distro south of lake for shits and giggles.
I have like 24K bandwidth and the things have a base range of 300, 350 when upgraded to level 2. They're extremely powerful and if they were any cheaper one person could connect up the entire map, which seems kinda counter to the spirit of the game.
Ziplines are amazing and should cost more chiral bandwidth.
Y'all are crazy. I have basically the entire mountains set up as a webwork of zip line highways that enable location to location transport and my work has completely trivialized the delivery aspect of the game. I even have a line set up from mountain knot city straight across to the distro south of lake for shits and giggles.
I have like 24K bandwidth and the things have a base range of 300, 350 when upgraded to level 2. They're extremely powerful and if they were any cheaper one person could connect up the entire map, which seems kinda counter to the spirit of the game.
Going off that, as a slower player due to life obligations, I'm still early into Chapter 3 and am considering turning off online features to try to get rid of the community built structures on the map. They're completely trivializing the delivery gameplay for me. I know I could just not use them, but they're built where the paths are most naturally the best, and it also feels a bit immersion breaking to me because there's just so damn much of it now.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Ziplines are amazing and should cost more chiral bandwidth.
Y'all are crazy. I have basically the entire mountains set up as a webwork of zip line highways that enable location to location transport and my work has completely trivialized the delivery aspect of the game. I even have a line set up from mountain knot city straight across to the distro south of lake for shits and giggles.
I have like 24K bandwidth and the things have a base range of 300, 350 when upgraded to level 2. They're extremely powerful and if they were any cheaper one person could connect up the entire map, which seems kinda counter to the spirit of the game.
Going off that, as a slower player due to life obligations, I'm still early into Chapter 3 and am considering turning off online features to try to get rid of the community built structures on the map. They're completely trivializing the delivery gameplay for me. I know I could just not use them, but they're built where the paths are most naturally the best, and it also feels a bit immersion breaking to me because there's just so damn much of it now.
It's pretty great when you work together to get a structure completed, or build the roads. Don't overlook it.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Lol, took Viktor a ruined package:
What the fuck happened out there? You fall down a mountain or two?
It's a good thing these autobots can sing, because they can't transport worth a damn. 100% damage. What the hell are they doing, bouncing on their heads?
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah, I don't get the bots at all. They don't seem to get you any likes even when they're successful, and I commonly have estimates of 99% package health at arrival usually turn out to have half the packages ruined. There seems to be absolutely zero benefit to using them.
Ziplines are amazing and should cost more chiral bandwidth.
Y'all are crazy. I have basically the entire mountains set up as a webwork of zip line highways that enable location to location transport and my work has completely trivialized the delivery aspect of the game. I even have a line set up from mountain knot city straight across to the distro south of lake for shits and giggles.
I have like 24K bandwidth and the things have a base range of 300, 350 when upgraded to level 2. They're extremely powerful and if they were any cheaper one person could connect up the entire map, which seems kinda counter to the spirit of the game.
The "spirit" of the game gets pretty dull in a hurry once the upgrades and gameplay changes stop coming. You are literally hoofing packages across an implausibly broken-up landscape at the hands of somebody who clearly has inner-ear damage; the "tutorial" section of the game pretty much covers the entire, completely gameplay experience, and the rest of the game just keeps running out the same stuff. By the time the ziplines showed up, the process of setting up a zipline network was immensely more interesting and useful than hauling people's stupid crap through the mud. I want to be able to hook up the whole map myself, because other players put ziplines in stupid places.
Gameplay-wise, the game feels to me like Kojima just went "let's take out most of the sneaking and action from MGS5V, then make the whole game about moving resources except now you have to move them YOURSELF and can't just have them picked up by air". It's more like the gameplay from the sub-gameplay of an actual game about something completely different. Seriously, there's like... three mission types: take this shit over there, go recover this shit from over there and bring it here, and go steal back this shit from those guys and bring it back here. Not particularly deep.
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
edited November 2019
The game still has sneaking. I've snuck in and out of MULE bases to retrieve packages completely unseen, hog-tying a few of them on my way out.
Sneaking around all of the BT's on the way to the Windmill, through the forest was pretty tense, too.
But now I have Grenades and multiple Bola Guns. No BT's or Mules (how is running them over with a truck non-lethal? ) will survive crossing my path now! :twisted:
I guess if you min-max any game you'll end up sucking the fun out of it, IMO. I don't have Zip-lines yet... We shall see.
The game still has sneaking. I've snuck in and out of MULE bases to retrieve packages completely unseen, hog-tying a few of them on my way out.
Sneaking around all of the BT's on the way to the Windmill, through the forest was pretty tense, too.
But now I have Grenades and multiple Bola Guns. No BT's or Mules (how is running them over with a truck non-lethal? ) will survive crossing my path now! :twisted:
I guess if you min-max any game you'll end up sucking the fun out of it, IMO. I don't have Zip-lines yet... We shall see.
I'd maybe consider what happens when you kill someone in this world.
I just got to chapter 3 and crossed the lake. I didn't really do much of the optional quests back there, and I kinda don't want to, really! The story of this wrecked world is really interesting to me, interesting enough that I'll slog through this bizarro jank game mechanics. I want to get to whatever counts as the ending as efficiently as I can, because this is full of ideas and I want those ideas, but I'd really like to minimize the amount of time I spend in combat or stealth. Yeah, the terrain navigation and plot are my favorite parts. The supernatural/ordinary stealth isn't particularly appealing, and the one forced BT fight I had to do wasn't great either. Gimme weird hills and ladders and ropes, but bodily fluid bombs and javelin chases bore and frustrate me.
The BT stealth is basically navigating a periodically-invisible minefield with a "please don't blow up" shield that makes colic baby sounds. The pinged package mechanic doesn't make sense to me yet. It just throws your stealth attempt in the garbage because there's nowhere to hide (so far). Can I avoid that somehow? The fast travel system just opened up, but I don't understand why that's in the game at all, especially since you can't take packages through it?
We'll get back there someday.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
About the MULE pings
you do get the ability to negate them sometime in Chapter 3. I can't recall if it was a story mission that unlocked it, though. After that, you just do a terrain scan after the MULEs try and find you, and it cancels out.
Oh brilliant
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
@AlphaRomero Oh I know. I don't think you can kill Mules, AFAIK. Only knock them unconscious, no matter what you do.
I just got to chapter 3 and crossed the lake. I didn't really do much of the optional quests back there, and I kinda don't want to, really! The story of this wrecked world is really interesting to me, interesting enough that I'll slog through this bizarro jank game mechanics. I want to get to whatever counts as the ending as efficiently as I can, because this is full of ideas and I want those ideas, but I'd really like to minimize the amount of time I spend in combat or stealth. Yeah, the terrain navigation and plot are my favorite parts. The supernatural/ordinary stealth isn't particularly appealing, and the one forced BT fight I had to do wasn't great either. Gimme weird hills and ladders and ropes, but bodily fluid bombs and javelin chases bore and frustrate me.
The BT stealth is basically navigating a periodically-invisible minefield with a "please don't blow up" shield that makes colic baby sounds. The pinged package mechanic doesn't make sense to me yet. It just throws your stealth attempt in the garbage because there's nowhere to hide (so far). Can I avoid that somehow? The fast travel system just opened up, but I don't understand why that's in the game at all, especially since you can't take packages through it?
It's needed to get back to the original region at the least. In some cases you could use it to get to another side of the map quicker if you don't have cargo. I've only used it three times.
Ziplines are amazing and should cost more chiral bandwidth.
Y'all are crazy. I have basically the entire mountains set up as a webwork of zip line highways that enable location to location transport and my work has completely trivialized the delivery aspect of the game. I even have a line set up from mountain knot city straight across to the distro south of lake for shits and giggles.
I have like 24K bandwidth and the things have a base range of 300, 350 when upgraded to level 2. They're extremely powerful and if they were any cheaper one person could connect up the entire map, which seems kinda counter to the spirit of the game.
Going off that, as a slower player due to life obligations, I'm still early into Chapter 3 and am considering turning off online features to try to get rid of the community built structures on the map. They're completely trivializing the delivery gameplay for me. I know I could just not use them, but they're built where the paths are most naturally the best, and it also feels a bit immersion breaking to me because there's just so damn much of it now.
It's pretty great when you work together to get a structure completed, or build the roads. Don't overlook it.
They also play into what I think is the intended gameplay loop - the first trip out to a bunker/site has no structures and takes time and planning. For each remaining trip, you have more "help" from structures and a greater ability to get cargo from the world, assignments, and the "Shared" locker. You should be building up to one or two big trip with a truck/floating carriers where you'll fill up multiple stars in a single run. Once you get to five stars, you are done with that particular location.
That's still a pretty hefty amount of time for each location, if you are trying to max out the new gear/abilities and get the stars. The growing number of player structures helps a lot in making that a reasonable amount of grinding.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah, you definitely aren't meant to be slogging through the same footbound route every time you go to the same place. Every time after that, the route should be improved by your structures and online structures. The core premise of the game is connecting people through shared effort, not keeping them stuck walking around.
That's why every area is pristine until you get it on the chiral network, so you figure it out on foot once and then everything after that is faster.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
The existing/online ziplines seem just about useless, they're all either too far from each other or blocked by obstacles.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
The existing/online ziplines seem just about useless, they're all either too far from each other or blocked by obstacles.
That's because you only see one or two of a particular player's ziplines, which IMO is a fun mechanic because then you have to make connecting ones on your own. Otherwise it wouldn't be very fun if you get the network online and there's already zipline networks. You can set up contracts with players that have set up ziplines to have a greater chance of more of their ziplines loading in, but I prefer just using existing player ziplines as additions to my own. I know I put a lot in areas which are just midway points and not meant to be jump on/off points
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Speculation, Chapter 6:
I'm guessing Mads was part of the BB experiments, and when things went south and they killed him, he caused the void out and now he's trapped on the other side, which he turned into the WW1-beach.
Ziplines are difficult but rewarding. It's hard because you need to ideally have them high up so you can span the most distance with the fewest, then have one that goes as close to each camp as possible. The Heartman area is probably the most difficult because the terrain is so vertical. I've managed to connect the geologist to the Exo biologist to the paleontologist to Heartman pretty seamlessly incorporating the odd online zipline but getting from Heartman back to Mount Knot is proving more difficult because Mount Knot is so difficult to raise likes with to increase bandwidth. They're so freaking handy in those mountain areas though especially with the cold constantly zapping Sam's strength.
Also today I thought I'd power through to the ending.
Only now there's ANOTHER ending to get through.
I think Higgs is probably one of Kojima's best villains since Foxhound, an interesting look and personality.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Setting up ziplines is a puzzle I enjoy. While I want them cheaper so I can set up my own zipline network, I like the planning of picking good spots for them to use minimal towers for maximum coverage.
On the flipside, I get so annoyed when a random player structure is spawned into my game and blocks my ziplines. People put structures in really fucking stupid locations, like bridges in open fields or watchtowers in valleys.
OMG it just won't end. I'm actually turning on it now. (After Chapter 11)
There's a boss battle with a giant
BT back in the original region and one swipe knocks the cargo I have to deliver down to 10% and one more hit, bam. One attempt the bike I was on got absorbed so Sam fell off and the cargo was damaged. Frustrating.
I turned off online and the game feels more personal now. Started back up in Chapter 3 and feels really good to just plot my own path in the game. Plus a lot of the online features kind of spoil things that you "should" do which takes the fun out of trial and error.
"Get the hell out of me" - [ex]girlfriend
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I turned off online and the game feels more personal now. Started back up in Chapter 3 and feels really good to just plot my own path in the game. Plus a lot of the online features kind of spoil things that you "should" do which takes the fun out of trial and error.
I've actually been wondering if Kojima has a semi-hidden message in the game in the form of "people, clean up your crap!"
Because you've got these pretty, sprawling, empty landscapes at the start, then you connect them to the network and they quickly turn into a multi-colored mass of stupidly-placed bridges, mailboxes nobody will ever use, dropped gear nobody will ever transport, old ladders, ropes in pointless spots, discarded vehicles, and endless, endless numbers of redundant player signs from people trying to farm likes. I kinda want there to be something like a street-sweeper vehicle that you can drive around and just hoover up all the ugly shit en masse.
Actually, that would be a neat sort of snarky NG+ mode. You save the world or whatever (I dunno, haven't beaten the game yet), and then you unlock the "Now go clean it up!" mode where you have to go get rid of all the garbage left strewn throughout the world.
It completely blows my mind that Kojima is considered an auteur by some people. He really is one of the most amateur storytellers in gaming. Just hours and hours of nonsensical exposition and awful scripting desperately trying to explain all the weird shit he’s crammed into his game in place of actual relatable / workable ideas and characters. Plot ‘twists’ that have been obvious for several hours. ‘Rule of cool’ over-riding everything. No editorial focus. Don’t get me started on how he treats female characters.
His art director on the other hand is freaking amazing.
Finished it. 63 hours. I think 4 of that was the end cutscenes.
The prologue island is a slog, and I can totally see it turning people off.
The middle island is better, it's where you spend the bulk of the game and things improve as you progress. But as you move on a lot of it feels like permanent Snake in the microwave hallway. Just slow and crawling. Ziplines make it better but by the point you get them you're pretty much in the end game.
Except you're not, because now make your way in the other direction. Once I returned to the original island I started to get annoyed. I had to transport fragile cargo to Capital Knot, but I can't generate any new materials and every structure I've built is deliberately removed and there is an unskippable boss fight. And the boss fight isn't particularly hard, it's just frustrating because you have to carry a tonne of weapons and blood packs and you get knocked over and have to interrupt this world ending beast to go sort your cargo out and keep balancing Sam out in the interim. If you've got enough blood packs and weapons you just keep emptying into the big whale and its over. I'd have preferred if they'd just done microwave hallway but with timefall and it was just a challenge to make it to Fragile instead. Plus you're delivering a Cryptobite, I carry them on my person all the time, why do I need this huge, fragile box on my back?
Twist wise, I knew early on that Sam would be Cliff's son, the timelines didn't mesh at all for it to be our BB because Cliff was procuring items easily, he was out in the rain, etc etc. Plus some of these scenes repeated and I didn't know if I could skip them or not in case it was gonna show something different now. It was cathartic when it was revealed because, ya know, 63 hours fucking later.
Amelie and Bridget are literally portrayed by the same person so that twist is already out. This is where it gets hard to follow. So Bridget died temporarily when she was 20, and went to the beach but returned without her soul who became Amelie. Bridget/Amelie was always destined to usher in the extinction, but Bridget fought it by trying to reunite the UCA and Amelie deliberately recruited Sam to stop her because she can't stop it herself. To that end she brought Cliff back from the afterlife to meet his son, and empowered Higgs to force Sam to complete the UCA. Amelie can go to beaches but she has no body to return to in the real world so she's stuck in limbo. So she was making Sam into the person he needed to be to stop her by making him reconnect with the world. But even right up to the end I don't know what Sam's relationship is with Amelie. Fragile keeps saying he loves her, but she's been 20 since he was born, and he had someone he loved and had a child with who died. So does he love Amelie as his step sister or love her as something else? It's never clarified.
It's an interesting game, I mean I've played it a long time, and it was an experience but looking back I don't know if I can say that it was a positive one, albeit it was engaging. I'm glad it is closed off because I don't think you could ever justify something this long again. It's like MGS4 in that regard, he was getting everything in so there didn't have to be another.
Also if they have definitive proof of life after death I don't know why they fight the extinction. Live on a broken world or move on and be with loved ones?
AlphaRomero on
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
It completely blows my mind that Kojima is considered an auteur by some people. He really is one of the most amateur storytellers in gaming. Just hours and hours of nonsensical exposition and awful scripting desperately trying to explain all the weird shit he’s crammed into his game in place of actual relatable / workable ideas and characters. Plot ‘twists’ that have been obvious for several hours. ‘Rule of cool’ over-riding everything. No editorial focus. Don’t get me started on how he treats female characters.
His art director on the other hand is freaking amazing.
I think this has some of the stronger, more nuanced characters he's done in a while, though I'm wondering how much of it is really him and not someone who worked closely with him. Kojima knows about as much English as my cat, so he had to have had a co-writer to help him make it as fluid as it is in English.
And he's butted heads with localization staff in the past(read up on how he treated Agness Kaku during MGS2, who famously had to work from a text only script with little to no help from the JP branch), so I wouldn't put taking all the credit past him.
Being called an auteur isn't a statement of quality, it's a statement of "this one person has a lot of creative control over this thing and thus they're pretty distinctly theirs". Compare and contrast with many other triple-A games where it's more distinctly a product of a studio as a whole rather than one specific person.
Like, Tommy Wiseu is a film auteur and that's definitely not because he's good at his job. Quite the opposite, really.
I definitely think Kojima tries to take credit for a whole lot of stuff he probably didn't do much with, though. "A Hideo Kojima Game" and whatnot.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
It completely blows my mind that Kojima is considered an auteur by some people. He really is one of the most amateur storytellers in gaming. Just hours and hours of nonsensical exposition and awful scripting desperately trying to explain all the weird shit he’s crammed into his game in place of actual relatable / workable ideas and characters. Plot ‘twists’ that have been obvious for several hours. ‘Rule of cool’ over-riding everything. No editorial focus. Don’t get me started on how he treats female characters.
His art director on the other hand is freaking amazing.
I haven't finished the game yet but as whacky as the story is, this has been the most well-paced and sensible story in a Kojima game that I've seen in, I dunno, twenty years? I have yet to look at a cutscene and wonder if Kojima thinks his awful writing is good or if his awful writing is good and then he sucks at getting it over to the English version where it ends up making zero fucking sense. But that pacing also comes down a lot to how I'm playing the game, since I can just flip between the story and gameplay when I want less of one or the other. But I'm definitely enjoying the characters so far, and it's clear that Kojima handles things much much better when he has only a few characters to focus on.
That being said, Kojima is wannabe moviemaker who makes games, except he's too terrible at moviemaking and too stuck on himself to actually make movies. He could never edit his stories down enough to fit in the timeframe of a film, despite them usually being 95% overblown nonsense. Then he just tries to cover up his inadequacy as a writer by making everything so convoluted and senseless that anybody can justify seeing anything they want in the story.
And yeah, he REALLY thinks he writes subtle and amazing stuff when he actually telegraphs story cues from miles off.
I’m currently watching a 9 hour supercut of all the cutscenes. Really should have waited for my usual sources to make a proper “movie” version, that shows hints of the combat/stealth/etc, but it’s an interesting way to not quite experience the game.
I’ll say this much, this way of viewing it is basically “Mo-cap: the movie” and also “we animated just, fucking, so many tears.” Like, everyone cries. It’s odd when more than a couple of scenes go by without someone shedding tears.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Yeah, Sam cries every time he uses the Q-pid at a terminal. Maybe he just really loves levitating for a bit?
Posts
Because normally it they go to your personal locker but as far as I can tell the safe houses don't have a personal locker anywhere.
I believe they do. Up top a podium will pop up from the safe house you can use. Unless there's no personal locker in that?
Ohhh that could be it. I never thought to look around up top.
Thanks!
At the end of chapter 8...
Guess we'll see.
I've spent most of my time helping complete other people's structures versus planting the foundations myself. Sometimes people put them down in less than efficient places but I like to think I'm helping make the scenic route.
Crossing to the port the first time without getting off my trike and kicking it into overdrive when I got noticed was heart pounding. I made it through but on every subsequent trip I have had to get off and deal with the BTs. I love trying to navigate the rocks by popping wheelies and hopping along though, reminds me of mountain biking videos one of my coworkers used to watch all the time.
Solid game, what I expected and wanted all rolled into one.
-John Stuart Mill
Then I found out that there are two preppers in chapter 2 that I can unlock and get stars with.
This is consuming my life, fuck the Wind Farm, wakanda forever
Y'all are crazy. I have basically the entire mountains set up as a webwork of zip line highways that enable location to location transport and my work has completely trivialized the delivery aspect of the game. I even have a line set up from mountain knot city straight across to the distro south of lake for shits and giggles.
I have like 24K bandwidth and the things have a base range of 300, 350 when upgraded to level 2. They're extremely powerful and if they were any cheaper one person could connect up the entire map, which seems kinda counter to the spirit of the game.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Going off that, as a slower player due to life obligations, I'm still early into Chapter 3 and am considering turning off online features to try to get rid of the community built structures on the map. They're completely trivializing the delivery gameplay for me. I know I could just not use them, but they're built where the paths are most naturally the best, and it also feels a bit immersion breaking to me because there's just so damn much of it now.
It's pretty great when you work together to get a structure completed, or build the roads. Don't overlook it.
It's a good thing these autobots can sing, because they can't transport worth a damn. 100% damage. What the hell are they doing, bouncing on their heads?
The "spirit" of the game gets pretty dull in a hurry once the upgrades and gameplay changes stop coming. You are literally hoofing packages across an implausibly broken-up landscape at the hands of somebody who clearly has inner-ear damage; the "tutorial" section of the game pretty much covers the entire, completely gameplay experience, and the rest of the game just keeps running out the same stuff. By the time the ziplines showed up, the process of setting up a zipline network was immensely more interesting and useful than hauling people's stupid crap through the mud. I want to be able to hook up the whole map myself, because other players put ziplines in stupid places.
Gameplay-wise, the game feels to me like Kojima just went "let's take out most of the sneaking and action from MGS5V, then make the whole game about moving resources except now you have to move them YOURSELF and can't just have them picked up by air". It's more like the gameplay from the sub-gameplay of an actual game about something completely different. Seriously, there's like... three mission types: take this shit over there, go recover this shit from over there and bring it here, and go steal back this shit from those guys and bring it back here. Not particularly deep.
Sneaking around all of the BT's on the way to the Windmill, through the forest was pretty tense, too.
But now I have Grenades and multiple Bola Guns. No BT's or Mules (how is running them over with a truck non-lethal?
I guess if you min-max any game you'll end up sucking the fun out of it, IMO. I don't have Zip-lines yet... We shall see.
I'd maybe consider what happens when you kill someone in this world.
The BT stealth is basically navigating a periodically-invisible minefield with a "please don't blow up" shield that makes colic baby sounds. The pinged package mechanic doesn't make sense to me yet. It just throws your stealth attempt in the garbage because there's nowhere to hide (so far). Can I avoid that somehow? The fast travel system just opened up, but I don't understand why that's in the game at all, especially since you can't take packages through it?
It's needed to get back to the original region at the least. In some cases you could use it to get to another side of the map quicker if you don't have cargo. I've only used it three times.
I had to haul one to the incinerator after I ran him over :bigfrown:
They also play into what I think is the intended gameplay loop - the first trip out to a bunker/site has no structures and takes time and planning. For each remaining trip, you have more "help" from structures and a greater ability to get cargo from the world, assignments, and the "Shared" locker. You should be building up to one or two big trip with a truck/floating carriers where you'll fill up multiple stars in a single run. Once you get to five stars, you are done with that particular location.
That's still a pretty hefty amount of time for each location, if you are trying to max out the new gear/abilities and get the stars. The growing number of player structures helps a lot in making that a reasonable amount of grinding.
That's why every area is pristine until you get it on the chiral network, so you figure it out on foot once and then everything after that is faster.
That's because you only see one or two of a particular player's ziplines, which IMO is a fun mechanic because then you have to make connecting ones on your own. Otherwise it wouldn't be very fun if you get the network online and there's already zipline networks. You can set up contracts with players that have set up ziplines to have a greater chance of more of their ziplines loading in, but I prefer just using existing player ziplines as additions to my own. I know I put a lot in areas which are just midway points and not meant to be jump on/off points
Also today I thought I'd power through to the ending.
I think Higgs is probably one of Kojima's best villains since Foxhound, an interesting look and personality.
On the flipside, I get so annoyed when a random player structure is spawned into my game and blocks my ziplines. People put structures in really fucking stupid locations, like bridges in open fields or watchtowers in valleys.
There's a boss battle with a giant
I've actually been wondering if Kojima has a semi-hidden message in the game in the form of "people, clean up your crap!"
Because you've got these pretty, sprawling, empty landscapes at the start, then you connect them to the network and they quickly turn into a multi-colored mass of stupidly-placed bridges, mailboxes nobody will ever use, dropped gear nobody will ever transport, old ladders, ropes in pointless spots, discarded vehicles, and endless, endless numbers of redundant player signs from people trying to farm likes. I kinda want there to be something like a street-sweeper vehicle that you can drive around and just hoover up all the ugly shit en masse.
Actually, that would be a neat sort of snarky NG+ mode. You save the world or whatever (I dunno, haven't beaten the game yet), and then you unlock the "Now go clean it up!" mode where you have to go get rid of all the garbage left strewn throughout the world.
His art director on the other hand is freaking amazing.
Steam: adamjnet
The middle island is better, it's where you spend the bulk of the game and things improve as you progress. But as you move on a lot of it feels like permanent Snake in the microwave hallway. Just slow and crawling. Ziplines make it better but by the point you get them you're pretty much in the end game.
Except you're not, because now make your way in the other direction. Once I returned to the original island I started to get annoyed. I had to transport fragile cargo to Capital Knot, but I can't generate any new materials and every structure I've built is deliberately removed and there is an unskippable boss fight. And the boss fight isn't particularly hard, it's just frustrating because you have to carry a tonne of weapons and blood packs and you get knocked over and have to interrupt this world ending beast to go sort your cargo out and keep balancing Sam out in the interim. If you've got enough blood packs and weapons you just keep emptying into the big whale and its over. I'd have preferred if they'd just done microwave hallway but with timefall and it was just a challenge to make it to Fragile instead. Plus you're delivering a Cryptobite, I carry them on my person all the time, why do I need this huge, fragile box on my back?
Twist wise, I knew early on that Sam would be Cliff's son, the timelines didn't mesh at all for it to be our BB because Cliff was procuring items easily, he was out in the rain, etc etc. Plus some of these scenes repeated and I didn't know if I could skip them or not in case it was gonna show something different now. It was cathartic when it was revealed because, ya know, 63 hours fucking later.
Amelie and Bridget are literally portrayed by the same person so that twist is already out. This is where it gets hard to follow. So Bridget died temporarily when she was 20, and went to the beach but returned without her soul who became Amelie. Bridget/Amelie was always destined to usher in the extinction, but Bridget fought it by trying to reunite the UCA and Amelie deliberately recruited Sam to stop her because she can't stop it herself. To that end she brought Cliff back from the afterlife to meet his son, and empowered Higgs to force Sam to complete the UCA. Amelie can go to beaches but she has no body to return to in the real world so she's stuck in limbo. So she was making Sam into the person he needed to be to stop her by making him reconnect with the world. But even right up to the end I don't know what Sam's relationship is with Amelie. Fragile keeps saying he loves her, but she's been 20 since he was born, and he had someone he loved and had a child with who died. So does he love Amelie as his step sister or love her as something else? It's never clarified.
It's an interesting game, I mean I've played it a long time, and it was an experience but looking back I don't know if I can say that it was a positive one, albeit it was engaging. I'm glad it is closed off because I don't think you could ever justify something this long again. It's like MGS4 in that regard, he was getting everything in so there didn't have to be another.
Also if they have definitive proof of life after death I don't know why they fight the extinction. Live on a broken world or move on and be with loved ones?
I think this has some of the stronger, more nuanced characters he's done in a while, though I'm wondering how much of it is really him and not someone who worked closely with him. Kojima knows about as much English as my cat, so he had to have had a co-writer to help him make it as fluid as it is in English.
And he's butted heads with localization staff in the past(read up on how he treated Agness Kaku during MGS2, who famously had to work from a text only script with little to no help from the JP branch), so I wouldn't put taking all the credit past him.
Like, Tommy Wiseu is a film auteur and that's definitely not because he's good at his job. Quite the opposite, really.
I definitely think Kojima tries to take credit for a whole lot of stuff he probably didn't do much with, though. "A Hideo Kojima Game" and whatnot.
I haven't finished the game yet but as whacky as the story is, this has been the most well-paced and sensible story in a Kojima game that I've seen in, I dunno, twenty years? I have yet to look at a cutscene and wonder if Kojima thinks his awful writing is good or if his awful writing is good and then he sucks at getting it over to the English version where it ends up making zero fucking sense. But that pacing also comes down a lot to how I'm playing the game, since I can just flip between the story and gameplay when I want less of one or the other. But I'm definitely enjoying the characters so far, and it's clear that Kojima handles things much much better when he has only a few characters to focus on.
That being said, Kojima is wannabe moviemaker who makes games, except he's too terrible at moviemaking and too stuck on himself to actually make movies. He could never edit his stories down enough to fit in the timeframe of a film, despite them usually being 95% overblown nonsense. Then he just tries to cover up his inadequacy as a writer by making everything so convoluted and senseless that anybody can justify seeing anything they want in the story.
And yeah, he REALLY thinks he writes subtle and amazing stuff when he actually telegraphs story cues from miles off.
I’ll say this much, this way of viewing it is basically “Mo-cap: the movie” and also “we animated just, fucking, so many tears.” Like, everyone cries. It’s odd when more than a couple of scenes go by without someone shedding tears.