One little thing to watch out for with Ziplines. They're all well and good for zipping over BT areas ... until the ground turns to tar and sucks up your zipline.
0
Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
edited November 2019
I like Dunkey. He's a really talented comedian. But you can (obviously) tell Dunkey didn't like it from the way he purposefully and selectively shot and edited his footage to make the game look bad.
(He pretty much does this with every game he doesn't like.)
It's like playing a driving game in reverse, repeatedly crashing into the other cars and crash barriers and then claiming that everything about the game sucks.
The core gameplay is basically pathfinding, which is not something I expected to be so enjoyable. But there is just a steady stream of small and large decisions with potential consequences, so you always have to be aware and engaged. I got too cocky about speeding down hills, lost contact with the ground because of a rock, and plummeted down about forty feet of steep angle before hitting a flat area. That was my first death, and it was because I tripped. I loved it. You have to judge safe and unsafe routes, decide which angles you'll take around impassable or impractical terrain, make big decisions about committing to a ladder or anchor, etc. So it can vary from being chill or mild to being kind of intense, which provides some good pacing.
I do wish it were harder, and that the terrain and weather in chapter 6+ were the baseline, with more dangerous slopes and chasms and etc to deal with. I'd like more chances for failure.
(Edit: more timed missions with brutal limits would be good. Force people to take risks.)
What it's really making me want is more third-person action games to integrate this kind of supply/encumbrance/stamina system, as well as footing and balance. I want to do Soulslike dungeon crawls where I can't carry my entire inventory of hundreds of items in my magic pouch, but without it being a Fallout-style invisible bag of junk. The physicality of it is really enjoyable and I'd love to see it gain traction.
Evil Multifarious on
+2
Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Yeah, as someone who enjoys hiking in real life, this game (at times) gets closer to aspects of the real experience than any other game I can think of.
I can see why that is also a huge turn-off for some people.
Very High IQ - Death Stranding1:21 https://youtu.be/D2b_fC947BQ
This is pretty much the first thing I tried but I somehow managed to miss the ladders and fall inside and I never attempted it again
Also the game turned off the concept of hiking to me in real life instead because I would probably break all the bones in my body if I ever attempted
I found the game enjoyable and the individual performances great but I don't know that I can agree it had great worldbuilding or a good story. The absurd pacing putting all the story in the front and back 10% of the game kinda made it hard for anything to land.
I ate an engineer
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I like Dunkey. He's a really talented comedian. But you can (obviously) tell Dunkey didn't like it from the way he purposefully and selectively shot and edited his footage to make the game look bad.
(He pretty much does this with every game he doesn't like.)
It's like playing a driving game in reverse, repeatedly crashing into the other cars and crash barriers and then claiming that everything about the game sucks.
I don't even try to break the game and regularly hit every one of those bits he just did "to make the game look bad". The vehicle physics are straight terrible; a three-inch rock can bring the motorcycle to a dead stop repeatedly, until the game decided to suddenly let you launch past it at fifty miles an hour. It also slews back and forth wildly and has no control level between "max turn/max speed" and "dead stop/no turning", plus it has some sort of weird control lag. But it also has some sort of weird infinite traction, letting you climb anything if you just pop wheelies and jump. The truck is about as stable as a beer keg on top of a ladder, and said ladder extends even higher in water because... trucks don't want to get their pants wet or something?
Then you have everything else about the gameplay, which features an also-fucky walking/balance system. Step a three-foot rock and Sam dumps everything he owns on the ground. Step off the same rock again with the exact same load and Sam doesn't even stumble. Get a tall stack balanced and it instantly pitches over to the other side. There's no indication of when an unbalanced stack will actually cause you to fall. Becoming unbalanced is cancelled by several things (like ducking or pulling out a weapon). Stopping while unbalanced sometimes means you stop, and sometimes it means you're desperately trying to keep Sam flailing in a circle so he doesn't pitch himself off a cliff. And of course there's no balance indicator to give you actual feedback on why you're suddenly fighting with your cargo despite walking in a straight line.
Given that the gameplay is literally a couple variations of fetch quest where you walk a bunch of places, the controls and gameplay aren't nearly polished enough. They're janky and unreliable, firmly in the realm of a game with some halfway-interesting ideas but completely mediocre execution.
EDIT: And I do agree about enjoying the pathfinding bit about the game, and how it's nicely visceral on top of having to be careful about your weight and loadout. However, pretty much all the movement mechanics for this game feel to me like they should just be the base mechanics for an actual full game, not itself the core gameplay for just shuffling packages around a landscape swiped from the movie Oblivion.
I found the game enjoyable and the individual performances great but I don't know that I can agree it had great worldbuilding or a good story. The absurd pacing putting all the story in the front and back 10% of the game kinda made it hard for anything to land.
I would say world building was pretty good, story was just okay.
That world is fascinating once you get into it, but the story never really delves into the stuff I was most interested in.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Well that just can't be right, Kojima was very explicit in saying that people outside America are more receptive of his transcendent pretentious bullshit.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a NO!" would beg to disagree.
edit: Everyone is entitled to voice their own views and opinions, but I am really tired of all the negativity man, just gonna go listen to the music in the game and chill
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The game has a pretty sweet soundtrack, which is nice.
+3
Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
I just want to locate and watch those high-concept theory videos that people made anticipating this game and see how far of the mark those expectations were.
Like, I don’t think there was even a hint of this package delivery stuff the first couple years of speculation, and all the balance and climbing systems are very impressive sounding. The shared building stuff, also cool. All of it never even a glimmer in the eye of most if not all of the theory videos.
I just want to locate and watch those high-concept theory videos that people made anticipating this game and see how far of the mark those expectations were.
Like, I don’t think there was even a hint of this package delivery stuff the first couple years of speculation, and all the balance and climbing systems are very impressive sounding. The shared building stuff, also cool. All of it never even a glimmer in the eye of most if not all of the theory videos.
There were a lot of pie in the sky predictions.
Trailer 1, E3 2016, was Norman Reedus on the beach with an invisible baby.
Trailer 2, TGA 2016, was Guillermo del Toro with a baby, WW1 skeletons, and Mads Mikkelsen.
Trailer 3, TGA 2017, was the voidout trailer.
Trailer 4, E3 2018, was the first one that showed actual gameplay and made it pretty obvious that there was a huge focus on just general traversal. I think Kojima might have talked about it in interviews the previous year, but once this trailer was out he started being very clear about what exactly the game was. There were definitely still people that didn't believe him, though, and up until release you still had people suspecting a MGS2 switcheroo.
But yeah, the two years between E3 2016-2018 had very little information and a whole bunch of confused speculation. And then there's the NeverBeGameOver crowd, of course, that was desperately trying to conspiracy theory their way into Death Stranding actually being MGSV Chapter 3.
Took my 20 minutes to figure out how to put material in a bridge
It’s a pretty good attempt at a hiking simulator but I can’t shake the feeling that going outside and actually hiking would be more rewarding
I am very impressed by how realistic the traversal is. You can pretty much always tell whether you can cross stuff by looking at it and saying ‘I could/couldn’t get over that’
My other hot take (and I only just got to port knot city)
It feels like the whole game is trying to recreate that feeling you got in breath of the wild when you crested a hill but breath of the wild had that and was also about a quarter as frustrating?
The mountain traversal is less solid. There are a few times I've stepped off a small rock only to careen down the mountain like it was a straight drop, plow into what must be 16 inches of cushioning snow and die. And one of these was right direct from the First Prepper to collect cargo at a Mule camp below so it's clearly a viable path.
The mountain traversal is less solid. There are a few times I've stepped off a small rock only to careen down the mountain like it was a straight drop, plow into what must be 16 inches of cushioning snow and die. And one of these was right direct from the First Prepper to collect cargo at a Mule camp below so it's clearly a viable path.
As a drive by note, I feel like that's a thing I have done while walking, minus the "death" part of things, of course. "This is a totally normal and safe path, so I shall AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHsplat" has been a part of my life, and the lives of many of my friends, for many years.
Same with "yeah, that puddle is totally shallow enough to wade through!"
Biggest complaint- it’s totally unbearable to me how long the process of dropping off your main order, dropping off your side order, recycling, resting, picking up new orders takes
Fuck your immersion Kojima just put that shit in a menu
Complaint two- BTs have gone from terrifying to kinda just a nuisance. Once you understand how they work and have some tools they aren’t really a threat. Hoping this gets some new complications soon (don’t tell me if it does or not )
Hours of horrendous, meandering, repetitive conclusion to a game I had mostly enjoyed
Weird, I feel the opposite! It's a 10/10 for me. But I can totally understand why it might be a 5/10 for you. It really does seem to come down to personal taste whether you'll like it or not. I have friends who loved it. I also have friends who hated it.
Complaint two- BTs have gone from terrifying to kinda just a nuisance. Once you understand how they work and have some tools they aren’t really a threat. Hoping this gets some new complications soon (don’t tell me if it does or not )
For a long time I didn't understand that the BT weapons could be used against the invisible ones standing around like a minefield. I thought those things were for tarland battles only. And since I don't like the idea of killing the BTs (I also suspect there's a Bioshock/Dishonored "why were you so violent" thing at the end) so I still treated them as pure stealth, even save scumming a few times to avoid fights. But now the game gave me a one-button anti-kill option, which combined with a level 2 bola gun means I can just walk regular speed through most BT zones now.
It's an interesting mechanic, but I don't know if it really accomplished what he wanted it to. The tarland battles are a pain on top of all the damage it does to your cargo. Insult to injury isn't a great mechanic, but I guess it fits with all the other player-hostile decisions in this deeply weird game.
I never used the anti BT weapons except the cuff because it was never clear what the actual effect was. Bola restrains them temporarily yeah but I fired the assault gun at them and after 50 shots it was still alive and when I stopped it just came and got me.
Is it just me or is the bridges truck way worse than the mule truck
Maybe. It carries 10 times as much stuff though.
+1
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited November 2019
Hematic grenades are where all the BT-killing power is at. 2-3 stacks of those will get you through pretty much any BT area, as they one-shot basically any BT within the blast cloud and you can snag multiple BTs with one grenade.
I agree that the anti-BT guns seem thoroughly pointless. Why am I going to bother burning up ammunition when I can just huck a single grenade and move on without skipping a beat? Especially with how worthless the anti-BT guns are.
The cuff seems completely pointless to me as well because why would I ever take a chance on how fucky the BT visuals are and not being able to be sure which way they're facing? Much much easier and safer to just lob a grenade from fifty feet away.
EDIT: I also have zero fucking clue what the Type 0/1/2 grenades do, because I didn't see any point whatsoever in experimenting with them when hematic grenades one-shot BTs. Maximum safety means minimal BTs and hematic grenades make all BTs gone, so why bother with anything else?
Hematic grenades are where all the BT-killing power is at. 2-3 stacks of those will get you through pretty much any BT area, as they one-shot basically any BT within the blast cloud and you can snag multiple BTs with one grenade.
I agree that the anti-BT guns seem thoroughly pointless. Why am I going to bother burning up ammunition when I can just huck a single grenade and move on without skipping a beat? Especially with how worthless the anti-BT guns are.
The cuff seems completely pointless to me as well because why would I ever take a chance on how fucky the BT visuals are and not being able to be sure which way they're facing? Much much easier and safer to just lob a grenade from fifty feet away.
EDIT: I also have zero fucking clue what the Type 0/1/2 grenades do, because I didn't see any point whatsoever in experimenting with them when hematic grenades one-shot BTs. Maximum safety means minimal BTs and hematic grenades make all BTs gone, so why bother with anything else?
I never had am issue sneaking up on a bt, I think it's more sound than sight.
The lack of any kind of issue scarcity does make the other grenades pointless. I used them once and a BT moved slightly away. Why would I use that when I don't know where it would go and it won't speed up the process.
The hermatic grenades I also rarely used outside of boss fights because it was difficult to tell where it's actually land. The reticule would be beneath the BT and then the grenades would fly off far into the distance.
It's one of those ideas that needed reining in. If you want me to use the shower you've programmed then I'll do that because I'm covered in tar and blood.
I felt like the EX grenades were there just to provide an alternative if you completely ran out of materials to make hematics? I never used a single one. Maybe they're just a silly poop joke.
Posts
Will your best friend betray you by dunking you down a mountain or into the embrace of a bunch of BTs
Don't trust anyone except yourself
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
(He pretty much does this with every game he doesn't like.)
It's like playing a driving game in reverse, repeatedly crashing into the other cars and crash barriers and then claiming that everything about the game sucks.
I do wish it were harder, and that the terrain and weather in chapter 6+ were the baseline, with more dangerous slopes and chasms and etc to deal with. I'd like more chances for failure.
(Edit: more timed missions with brutal limits would be good. Force people to take risks.)
What it's really making me want is more third-person action games to integrate this kind of supply/encumbrance/stamina system, as well as footing and balance. I want to do Soulslike dungeon crawls where I can't carry my entire inventory of hundreds of items in my magic pouch, but without it being a Fallout-style invisible bag of junk. The physicality of it is really enjoyable and I'd love to see it gain traction.
I can see why that is also a huge turn-off for some people.
This is pretty much the first thing I tried but I somehow managed to miss the ladders and fall inside and I never attempted it again
Also the game turned off the concept of hiking to me in real life instead because I would probably break all the bones in my body if I ever attempted
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
I don't even try to break the game and regularly hit every one of those bits he just did "to make the game look bad". The vehicle physics are straight terrible; a three-inch rock can bring the motorcycle to a dead stop repeatedly, until the game decided to suddenly let you launch past it at fifty miles an hour. It also slews back and forth wildly and has no control level between "max turn/max speed" and "dead stop/no turning", plus it has some sort of weird control lag. But it also has some sort of weird infinite traction, letting you climb anything if you just pop wheelies and jump. The truck is about as stable as a beer keg on top of a ladder, and said ladder extends even higher in water because... trucks don't want to get their pants wet or something?
Then you have everything else about the gameplay, which features an also-fucky walking/balance system. Step a three-foot rock and Sam dumps everything he owns on the ground. Step off the same rock again with the exact same load and Sam doesn't even stumble. Get a tall stack balanced and it instantly pitches over to the other side. There's no indication of when an unbalanced stack will actually cause you to fall. Becoming unbalanced is cancelled by several things (like ducking or pulling out a weapon). Stopping while unbalanced sometimes means you stop, and sometimes it means you're desperately trying to keep Sam flailing in a circle so he doesn't pitch himself off a cliff. And of course there's no balance indicator to give you actual feedback on why you're suddenly fighting with your cargo despite walking in a straight line.
Given that the gameplay is literally a couple variations of fetch quest where you walk a bunch of places, the controls and gameplay aren't nearly polished enough. They're janky and unreliable, firmly in the realm of a game with some halfway-interesting ideas but completely mediocre execution.
EDIT: And I do agree about enjoying the pathfinding bit about the game, and how it's nicely visceral on top of having to be careful about your weight and loadout. However, pretty much all the movement mechanics for this game feel to me like they should just be the base mechanics for an actual full game, not itself the core gameplay for just shuffling packages around a landscape swiped from the movie Oblivion.
This will be interesting
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
I would say world building was pretty good, story was just okay.
That world is fascinating once you get into it, but the story never really delves into the stuff I was most interested in.
SniperGuyGaming on PSN / SniperGuy710 on Xbone Live
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
"On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a NO!" would beg to disagree.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Like, I don’t think there was even a hint of this package delivery stuff the first couple years of speculation, and all the balance and climbing systems are very impressive sounding. The shared building stuff, also cool. All of it never even a glimmer in the eye of most if not all of the theory videos.
There were a lot of pie in the sky predictions.
Jul 25, 2018
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Trailer 1, E3 2016, was Norman Reedus on the beach with an invisible baby.
Trailer 2, TGA 2016, was Guillermo del Toro with a baby, WW1 skeletons, and Mads Mikkelsen.
Trailer 3, TGA 2017, was the voidout trailer.
Trailer 4, E3 2018, was the first one that showed actual gameplay and made it pretty obvious that there was a huge focus on just general traversal. I think Kojima might have talked about it in interviews the previous year, but once this trailer was out he started being very clear about what exactly the game was. There were definitely still people that didn't believe him, though, and up until release you still had people suspecting a MGS2 switcheroo.
But yeah, the two years between E3 2016-2018 had very little information and a whole bunch of confused speculation. And then there's the NeverBeGameOver crowd, of course, that was desperately trying to conspiracy theory their way into Death Stranding actually being MGSV Chapter 3.
Music is good
Took my 20 minutes to figure out how to put material in a bridge
It’s a pretty good attempt at a hiking simulator but I can’t shake the feeling that going outside and actually hiking would be more rewarding
I am very impressed by how realistic the traversal is. You can pretty much always tell whether you can cross stuff by looking at it and saying ‘I could/couldn’t get over that’
https://medium.com/@alascii
It feels like the whole game is trying to recreate that feeling you got in breath of the wild when you crested a hill but breath of the wild had that and was also about a quarter as frustrating?
https://medium.com/@alascii
As a drive by note, I feel like that's a thing I have done while walking, minus the "death" part of things, of course. "This is a totally normal and safe path, so I shall AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHsplat" has been a part of my life, and the lives of many of my friends, for many years.
Same with "yeah, that puddle is totally shallow enough to wade through!"
https://medium.com/@alascii
what ever will we do with Kojima
https://medium.com/@alascii
It's probably my game of the year.
I just have to be in the right mood to play it.
I was three quarters of the way there when I got stuck in a river and start hearing the dreaded ‘this vehicle is taking repeated damage’ noise
Now me and 1000s of units of ruined metal are floating downstream
https://medium.com/@alascii
Biggest complaint- it’s totally unbearable to me how long the process of dropping off your main order, dropping off your side order, recycling, resting, picking up new orders takes
Fuck your immersion Kojima just put that shit in a menu
Complaint two- BTs have gone from terrifying to kinda just a nuisance. Once you understand how they work and have some tools they aren’t really a threat. Hoping this gets some new complications soon (don’t tell me if it does or not )
https://medium.com/@alascii
I'd like to be extinct now, please
Hours of horrendous, meandering, repetitive conclusion to a game I had mostly enjoyed
Weird, I feel the opposite! It's a 10/10 for me. But I can totally understand why it might be a 5/10 for you. It really does seem to come down to personal taste whether you'll like it or not. I have friends who loved it. I also have friends who hated it.
https://medium.com/@alascii
For a long time I didn't understand that the BT weapons could be used against the invisible ones standing around like a minefield. I thought those things were for tarland battles only. And since I don't like the idea of killing the BTs (I also suspect there's a Bioshock/Dishonored "why were you so violent" thing at the end) so I still treated them as pure stealth, even save scumming a few times to avoid fights. But now the game gave me a one-button anti-kill option, which combined with a level 2 bola gun means I can just walk regular speed through most BT zones now.
It's an interesting mechanic, but I don't know if it really accomplished what he wanted it to. The tarland battles are a pain on top of all the damage it does to your cargo. Insult to injury isn't a great mechanic, but I guess it fits with all the other player-hostile decisions in this deeply weird game.
Maybe. It carries 10 times as much stuff though.
I agree that the anti-BT guns seem thoroughly pointless. Why am I going to bother burning up ammunition when I can just huck a single grenade and move on without skipping a beat? Especially with how worthless the anti-BT guns are.
The cuff seems completely pointless to me as well because why would I ever take a chance on how fucky the BT visuals are and not being able to be sure which way they're facing? Much much easier and safer to just lob a grenade from fifty feet away.
EDIT: I also have zero fucking clue what the Type 0/1/2 grenades do, because I didn't see any point whatsoever in experimenting with them when hematic grenades one-shot BTs. Maximum safety means minimal BTs and hematic grenades make all BTs gone, so why bother with anything else?
I never had am issue sneaking up on a bt, I think it's more sound than sight.
The lack of any kind of issue scarcity does make the other grenades pointless. I used them once and a BT moved slightly away. Why would I use that when I don't know where it would go and it won't speed up the process.
The hermatic grenades I also rarely used outside of boss fights because it was difficult to tell where it's actually land. The reticule would be beneath the BT and then the grenades would fly off far into the distance.
It's one of those ideas that needed reining in. If you want me to use the shower you've programmed then I'll do that because I'm covered in tar and blood.