Yeah the mountain is brutal. I sold off some of my older stuff to build these bases. Spend some time to get their levels up so you get some more bandwidth (I know, easier said than done).
It's not just bandwidth you need. Utilizing ziplines people have already made is essential, as is upgrading existing ones to increase their range so you need less of them. It requires careful placement and some of them involved me spending hours climbing to find the maximum height and range possible to then skip over a huge height and down the other side. I was able to get from the Weather Station to Mountain Knot in ....5 zipline, using 1 online zipline which took that journey down to a minute instead of 20. From there I could get to the Biologist, paleontologist, Hartman, the mountaineer, the first prepper, etc, etc without touching the ground.
And thank fuck for ziplines in skipping that forest on the first island to get to that one station. That forest is the worst part of the game.
It's not just bandwidth you need. Utilizing ziplines people have already made is essential, as is upgrading existing ones to increase their range so you need less of them. It requires careful placement and some of them involved me spending hours climbing to find the maximum height and range possible to then skip over a huge height and down the other side. I was able to get from the Weather Station to Mountain Knot in ....5 zipline, using 1 online zipline which took that journey down to a minute instead of 20. From there I could get to the Biologist, paleontologist, Hartman, the mountaineer, the first prepper, etc, etc without touching the ground.
And thank fuck for ziplines in skipping that forest on the first island to get to that one station. That forest is the worst part of the game.
That forest was the cause of most of my stress when playing this game.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Once I realized that building efficient zipline networks was the bulk of the enjoyment I was getting out of the game, that's about the point I decided to wrap things up. I realized I was doing a bunch of work in order to avoid a bunch of other work in the form of the tediously-detailed walking sim aspect. I think it was specifically the mountain area where I gave up on the game; I got to the point where I had a line over the mountains and I was pretty pleased with that, then I went "wait, why the fuck do I care about this? So I can just make five thousand more repetitive deliveries?"
That was a fair ways into the game, though, which is why I can at least say I don't feel like Death Stranding was just a ripoff for paying full price.
Eh that's true for just about any game. Why do people do raids in MMOs? To get loot that makes raiding easier. Why do you continue to kill demons in Diablo 3? To get loot to kill demons faster.
Having a good line across the mountains is something you should be happy about.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I decided to work on building up the road from the Craftsman up the mountain. Nice little gameplay loop of loading the truck with materials from bases and MULEs, and progressing a bit at a time. I’m past the Incinerator now.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Eh that's true for just about any game. Why do people do raids in MMOs? To get loot that makes raiding easier. Why do you continue to kill demons in Diablo 3? To get loot to kill demons faster.
Having a good line across the mountains is something you should be happy about.
The problem is that I need to find the purpose of the loop fun unto itself. For Death Stranding, I was doing a semi-tedious pathfinding task to avoid doing shitload of really tedious pathfinding that had no point to itself. It was never actually challenging in any way other than trying my patience, so the breaking point was when I was slowly trudging through the snow and realized I was bored to death trying to make something not boring.
Eh that's true for just about any game. Why do people do raids in MMOs? To get loot that makes raiding easier. Why do you continue to kill demons in Diablo 3? To get loot to kill demons faster.
Having a good line across the mountains is something you should be happy about.
The problem is that I need to find the purpose of the loop fun unto itself. For Death Stranding, I was doing a semi-tedious pathfinding task to avoid doing shitload of really tedious pathfinding that had no point to itself. It was never actually challenging in any way other than trying my patience, so the breaking point was when I was slowly trudging through the snow and realized I was bored to death trying to make something not boring.
That's fair. Except for me that was the fun part. Knowing that I was saving myself the pain of crossing it again and again. It's the same feedback that an MMO provides lol
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Mountain enemies
I ran across a couple new BT types. One is like a regular BT but like 3-4 times taller. I was too afraid to get close and try an umbilical cut, but 2-3 hematic grenades worked wonders.
The other one was up on the mountain west of the geologist and it was like...glowy? Instead of greyblue like most BTs this one was red and gold, and hematic grenades didn’t do shit. But It does have an umbilical cord!
And they both dropped a bunch of chiralium, maybe half as much as a squidwhale or a sphincterface lion
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I ran across a couple new BT types. One is like a regular BT but like 3-4 times taller. I was too afraid to get close and try an umbilical cut, but 2-3 hematic grenades worked wonders.
The other one was up on the mountain west of the geologist and it was like...glowy? Instead of greyblue like most BTs this one was red and gold, and hematic grenades didn’t do shit. But It does have an umbilical cord!
And they both dropped a bunch of chiralium, maybe half as much as a squidwhale or a sphincterface lion
I've come across the latter in the mountains also but not the former (though as previously mentioned I deliberately set up ziplines to avoid BT areas most of the time. If you ever see an online zip crossing from MIddle Knot over the bloody awful area to the Weather Station it might just be mine. I've collected every piece of information and not come across any explanation for these variants.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I both enjoyed and loathed ziplines over BT areas. The fun part was figuratively flipping the bird to those weirdo asshole ghosts as you fly by (just DON'T STOP AT TOWERS AND GLOAT, because they can totally attack you and pull you down and fuck up your day by temporarily making the tower disappear). The loathing part is the slo-mo "LOOK OUT FOR ENEMIES!" shit every fucking time you hit or leave a BT area. I swear it felt like I must have spent a third of the game trapped in that slo-mo, it's insane there's no way to turn it off.
I both enjoyed and loathed ziplines over BT areas. The fun part was figuratively flipping the bird to those weirdo asshole ghosts as you fly by (just DON'T STOP AT TOWERS AND GLOAT, because they can totally attack you and pull you down and fuck up your day by temporarily making the tower disappear). The loathing part is the slo-mo "LOOK OUT FOR ENEMIES!" shit every fucking time you hit or leave a BT area. I swear it felt like I must have spent a third of the game trapped in that slo-mo, it's insane there's no way to turn it off.
They did eventually add an option to turn that off. By eventually I mean I had like two trophies left to get.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
You can turn off the odradek animation but the pause remains.
I think it’s a loading hiccup. Sort of like when you’re going fast on a vehicle and there’s a little stutter to give the world time to remake itself
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I quit in chapter 8 or 9 but feel like I got my money's worth (well, my friend's money's worth who bought it for me for christmas) in my 50 or whatever hours of playtime. I found I (apparently unlike everyone else in the world) didn't really enjoy the ziplines. Mountain climbing in Death Stranding is really unpleasant, especially with big heavy packs of materials to build the ziplines, and then I didn't enjoy riding the ziplines as much as cruising around on roads in trucks or just walking. And I cared so little about the story that I was actually considering just skipping the cut-scenes, which I've never done in any game I've played.
I feel like there was an interesting story in there but told in a way that was actively detrimental to my enjoying it, where every single character is an cypher and people talk at great length without really saying much because they're just repeating the same things over and over again.
The gameplay was fine, I think. My dislike of ziplines not withstanding if I'd cared about seeing the rest of the story at all I think the gameplay was good enough to support it. I just found zipline installation and use less of a relaxing occupation than being a UPS man and there was nothing else there driving my engagement.
Oh yeah the other thing to know is that when riding on the road you don't lose battery ONLY when you're riding the middle of the road. That took me so long to figure out.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I wish i could upgrade my roads instead of having to periodically make a trip just for repairs
Also I’m getting tired of the “this ladder or climbing rope you put down 70 hours ago is starting to degrade” messages
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
The last few sections of the mountain road are insanely expensive
But oh so worth it.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Boy I’m sure glad the last two hours are basically a series of interactive cutscenes because if the last thing i did before credits rolled was a series of tedious combat sequences I’d have been pretty mad
The giant was not particularly difficult except for everything else it throws at you, the Higgs fight was pretty clever until it became two dudes standing toe to toe punching each other, and the whale fight was bullshit.
Is there a way to keep the last package for Fragile from being 99% ruined? I hadn’t gotten even halfway before the extreme timefall downpour had destroyed the container, and the rest of the trip took it all the way down to 1% intact.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Boy I’m sure glad the last two hours are basically a series of interactive cutscenes because if the last thing i did before credits rolled was a series of tedious combat sequences I’d have been pretty mad
The giant was not particularly difficult except for everything else it throws at you, the Higgs fight was pretty clever until it became two dudes standing toe to toe punching each other, and the whale fight was bullshit.
Is there a way to keep the last package for Fragile from being 99% ruined? I hadn’t gotten even halfway before the extreme timefall downpour had destroyed the container, and the rest of the trip took it all the way down to 1% intact.
I can't see any way for you to keep it from 1%. I'm sure there's some insane speedrunner out there who can do it but in general no, and it doesn't matter anyway.
"No more BTs, no voidouts, no bullshit. Just a good old fashioned boss fight. Stick versus rope. Gun versus strand. One more ending before the end... one last game over."
You know what? I'm changing my avatar for the first time in like a decade.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I can't say I was real impressed with having a luggage fight with the villain. Nothing says top-notch fight design like making the clunky, awkward throwing system you only use for like one single mission into the cornerstone of the finale.
I kept expecting the fight to actually turn into something and was pretty surprised and disappointed when it stayed the same the whole through.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I can't say I was real impressed with having a luggage fight with the villain. Nothing says top-notch fight design like making the clunky, awkward throwing system you only use for like one single mission into the cornerstone of the finale.
I kept expecting the fight to actually turn into something and was pretty surprised and disappointed when it stayed the same the whole through.
It took me about 5 minutes of tossing cases at him to realize the game wanted me to use the “strand” tool so i quickly taught myself to do the melee parry that i had not used in the roughly 115 hours previous.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I can't say I was real impressed with having a luggage fight with the villain. Nothing says top-notch fight design like making the clunky, awkward throwing system you only use for like one single mission into the cornerstone of the finale.
I kept expecting the fight to actually turn into something and was pretty surprised and disappointed when it stayed the same the whole through.
It took me about 5 minutes of tossing cases at him to realize the game wanted me to use the “strand” tool so i quickly taught myself to do the melee parry that i had not used in the roughly 115 hours previous.
I had to use the strand against the mules early on before non lethal weapons became available so I at least had experience at it.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
That early in the game i was still afraid of Mules so i panicked and ended up punching one a dew times until they fell over. When i realized i could do that it became my preferred method.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
So I picked this up for the first time on Steam. I’m not sure I like, get the core loop? Is it best for me to pick up lost cargo whenever I see it, or stay focused on the task at hand? Is it bad for me to deliver cargo to places other than the intended destination? What are likes even for? I’m not getting a good sense of how much I should just be sticking to the missions versus picking things up for the sake of it.
So I picked this up for the first time on Steam. I’m not sure I like, get the core loop? Is it best for me to pick up lost cargo whenever I see it, or stay focused on the task at hand? Is it bad for me to deliver cargo to places other than the intended destination? What are likes even for? I’m not getting a good sense of how much I should just be sticking to the missions versus picking things up for the sake of it.
Likes aren't for anything. They're like real likes that way. There is a stat that goes up based on making people happy. Once you start building roads and shit that other people use it will vastly outgrow your other stats.
Delivering stuff not to the correct destination is pointless, so far as I could tell, unless the other option is to just abandon it.
Early in the game you should probably focus on continuing the story. If you can deliver a lost package along the way or to where you're going anyway then go for it. Delivering stuff levels up how much the recipients like you and you get upgrades at each star level, so delivering enough packages gets you better gear access.
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Delivering stuff to the wrong location basically means you're handing it off and somebody else will deliver it; you will still get likes, but reduced likes. So there's really no point to it, just get used to looking at available deliveries, looking where you have to go for whatever reason, and picking up deliveries that are along that route. Lost cargo will say where it's supposed to go before you pick it up, and sometimes you can make some nice bonus loyalty by snagging a pile of lost crap and taking it to a place you were going anyway.
Like Hamilton said, likes themselves mean absolutely nothing, it's just the usual esoteric Kojima commentary shit. But there are a number of unlocks that come from making repeat deliveries to the same locations, from better equipment to more "power" to build structures.
As far as the core loop, there's not much to it. Pick stuff up, hoof it the destination. Optional missions eventually reward you with unlocks, story missions unlock more story stuff. There's a looooong middle stretch where there's very little story at all, the game is hugely lopsided in that almost all the story is packed at the front and end; the core story itself is probably no more than maybe... 15-20 hours of game? And a lot of that is still a buttload of running around.
Posts
And thank fuck for ziplines in skipping that forest on the first island to get to that one station. That forest is the worst part of the game.
That forest was the cause of most of my stress when playing this game.
That was a fair ways into the game, though, which is why I can at least say I don't feel like Death Stranding was just a ripoff for paying full price.
Having a good line across the mountains is something you should be happy about.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
The problem is that I need to find the purpose of the loop fun unto itself. For Death Stranding, I was doing a semi-tedious pathfinding task to avoid doing shitload of really tedious pathfinding that had no point to itself. It was never actually challenging in any way other than trying my patience, so the breaking point was when I was slowly trudging through the snow and realized I was bored to death trying to make something not boring.
That's fair. Except for me that was the fun part. Knowing that I was saving myself the pain of crossing it again and again. It's the same feedback that an MMO provides lol
The other one was up on the mountain west of the geologist and it was like...glowy? Instead of greyblue like most BTs this one was red and gold, and hematic grenades didn’t do shit. But It does have an umbilical cord!
And they both dropped a bunch of chiralium, maybe half as much as a squidwhale or a sphincterface lion
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I love it
I've come across the latter in the mountains also but not the former (though as previously mentioned I deliberately set up ziplines to avoid BT areas most of the time. If you ever see an online zip crossing from MIddle Knot over the bloody awful area to the Weather Station it might just be mine. I've collected every piece of information and not come across any explanation for these variants.
They did eventually add an option to turn that off. By eventually I mean I had like two trophies left to get.
I think it’s a loading hiccup. Sort of like when you’re going fast on a vehicle and there’s a little stutter to give the world time to remake itself
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I feel like there was an interesting story in there but told in a way that was actively detrimental to my enjoying it, where every single character is an cypher and people talk at great length without really saying much because they're just repeating the same things over and over again.
The gameplay was fine, I think. My dislike of ziplines not withstanding if I'd cared about seeing the rest of the story at all I think the gameplay was good enough to support it. I just found zipline installation and use less of a relaxing occupation than being a UPS man and there was nothing else there driving my engagement.
Also I’m getting tired of the “this ladder or climbing rope you put down 70 hours ago is starting to degrade” messages
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Yeah that was irksome because I am always worried it's something that I use. But the messages are easy to ignore at least.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
But oh so worth it.
Is there a way to keep the last package for Fragile from being 99% ruined? I hadn’t gotten even halfway before the extreme timefall downpour had destroyed the container, and the rest of the trip took it all the way down to 1% intact.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I can't see any way for you to keep it from 1%. I'm sure there's some insane speedrunner out there who can do it but in general no, and it doesn't matter anyway.
But yeah the end cutscene and post credits were so long that I stopped midway through and came back to it the next day lol
He was a great villain.
You know what? I'm changing my avatar for the first time in like a decade.
I kept expecting the fight to actually turn into something and was pretty surprised and disappointed when it stayed the same the whole through.
It took me about 5 minutes of tossing cases at him to realize the game wanted me to use the “strand” tool so i quickly taught myself to do the melee parry that i had not used in the roughly 115 hours previous.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I had to use the strand against the mules early on before non lethal weapons became available so I at least had experience at it.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Accurate.
Likes aren't for anything. They're like real likes that way. There is a stat that goes up based on making people happy. Once you start building roads and shit that other people use it will vastly outgrow your other stats.
Delivering stuff not to the correct destination is pointless, so far as I could tell, unless the other option is to just abandon it.
Early in the game you should probably focus on continuing the story. If you can deliver a lost package along the way or to where you're going anyway then go for it. Delivering stuff levels up how much the recipients like you and you get upgrades at each star level, so delivering enough packages gets you better gear access.
Like Hamilton said, likes themselves mean absolutely nothing, it's just the usual esoteric Kojima commentary shit. But there are a number of unlocks that come from making repeat deliveries to the same locations, from better equipment to more "power" to build structures.
As far as the core loop, there's not much to it. Pick stuff up, hoof it the destination. Optional missions eventually reward you with unlocks, story missions unlock more story stuff. There's a looooong middle stretch where there's very little story at all, the game is hugely lopsided in that almost all the story is packed at the front and end; the core story itself is probably no more than maybe... 15-20 hours of game? And a lot of that is still a buttload of running around.