Yes, BoTW rewards your curiosity every single second you play and still retains all of the melancholy and mystery Kojima is going for with Death Stranding.
man I wanna try what ever version of BOTW yall got.
5 Likes
This goes into a wider âsome of you and me didnât experience the same gameâ thing but itâs pretty amusing and interesting, the talking heads gang didnât have time to ask me to do anything specific at the tar belt, I figured it out before they did and they were flabbergasted the Great Deliverer had upped his game yet again. Sam, my Sam, is like that, a loveable daredevil ready to risk his life despite a gruff exterior.
3 Likes
I had not played this for a week or so, but I picked it up again last night and played so late that any amount of sleeping in just wasnât going to make up for it.
This session, after making a few deliveries, I decided to simply go exploring in a direction that I had not yet been told to go. I had no idea (and still have no idea) how large the map is.
The first thing I encountered was a BT-heavy area. I brought along a variety of grenades, and by experimenting confirmed my suspicion that the blood-based ones are the only ones worth carrying around. Though some of the others triggered interesting behavior. I found a ruined flatbed truck surrounded by a dense crystal patch. I also encountered an infant BT, which made an impression.
I had brought along a bike, but I was moving pretty slowly due to the BTs and unknown terrain. Eventually, the battery died and I continued on foot. After a while, I came across a MULE camp with a vehicle to steal. Either to get back to safety or to continue onward. I had two full bola guns, but these MULEs surprised me by having real guns and I found myself in danger. If they hadnât had a lot of blood bags lying around in the camp, I donât think I would have survived. I used up every bola I had, but I got the truck and decided to press forward. Oddly, the camp had nothing of value at all. The postboxes were empty.
I drove the truck until its battery died in an area with a lot of shallow lakes. There were more MULEs on patrol, but I avoided them because I was low on supplies and I assumed they would also have nothing worth taking. I came across several new buildings, but no one would talk to me at any of them, let alone join the network. At one of these, I had the thought that this game sure wasnât rewarding open-world exploration.
At some point I found another bike, and was taking it through my third BT patch (the second had been a graveyard) when I got careless, ran into a rock, and couldnât turn around or get off and equip a grenade quickly enough so I touched a BT for the second time ever. I managed to escape the tar pit phase but the entire area was suddenly covered with running water and I found myself pursued by a large cat-like creature. I hit it with a grenade or two but it kept coming and so I just ran. I thought I was going to die for sure, but a bright white figure emerged from the water and, after tossing out some random equipment, grabbed the creature by the tail and allowed me to get away. I retraced my steps and picked up all of my packages among the dead fish.
At this point, I had gone much too far to start backtracking, so despite having no climbing equipment or access to anything left by other players, I resolved to cross a mountain range that was separating me from the closest familiar place, the weather station. This was my first time hiking through snow, and in the snow I passed near some ruined skyscrapers surrounded by BTs.
I eventually made it back to network coverage. Despite this being a tediously long post already, I left out several other things that I could have mentioned. On reflection, I realized that I had been wrong about the game not rewarding exploration. My journey had yielded almost no formal progress other than maybe two or three âlikesâ from BB, but it was exactly the kind of experience that I look for in video games.
Edit: Oh, and I also discovered something very useful last night by accident. When something triggers a little animation, such as recycling or whatever, you can hit Options to pause and then skip the animation.
14 Likes
Youâve exhausted pretty much every possible scenario/enemy type the game provides. In this sense, the game absolutely does not reward exploration, which ties in thematically but doesnât make for an interesting/stimulating/worthwhile experience.
The only reason this game is getting a pass at the moment is because it perfectly mirrors the sort of cultural rot/resignation weâre all feeling and the sense of fatigue from our current circumstances. It is therapeutic to walk around and witness the desolation of Death Strandingâs world but itâs a poison pill and just activates our subconscious death wish. I guess mileage may vary on that but it quickly wore out its welcome with me.
7 Likes
Conversely I found every time I encountered a structure someone built, or built a structure for someone else, the sensation of not being alone in that brief moment was really powerful to me.
If you just explore on your own without making connections and making improvements to the world, this doesnât happen.
I think youâre missing out on a lot of game that way.
10 Likes
Not even just structures, sometimes even signs were a very rewarding sight. The âhang onâ signs near summits and suchlikes, of course, but for me there was that one time where I was lost in a snow storm and about to run out of power when I happened upon a âbuild zip-line hereâ sign. I had a level 2 PCC so I did, which connected me to a number of neighbouring lines that allowed me to escape the storm in time.
8 Likes
Iâve been thinking of how similar this game is to Shadow of the Colossus, and how SotC benefits from boss battles that shift pacing emotionally and have the player conserving stamina and thinking about traversal in short-term. Maybe a future Hiking Game⢠can reintroduce that without resorting to combat.
3 Likes
man i am sorry if you spent money on this though selfishly iâm glad because that was a really great post, i will try and venpal you at least some money for this post why does this read like i am a nigerian scammer
also gosh iâll be damned if i kinda donât wanna just wipe my MGSV save file and start playing that game again and
i feel like i am constantly on a line of loving this game and rolling my eyes so far into the back of my head that they wonât come out
2 Likes
I want to state for the record that I think Fallout 3 is a bad game. That Death Stranding is definitely a âbetterâ game than Fallout 3. That I envy all the people who enjoyed Death Stranding. But its rhythm never clicked with me and it also didnât have enough really dumb shit for me to laugh at/get angry about. Fallout 3 had so much dumb shit. That game had numbers going up and heads you could explode and maybe the worst ending Iâve ever seen aside from MGS4. It made me laugh so much.
Someone please spoil Death Strandingâs ending for me. Does the baby live? Does Norman Reedus breastfeed at any point. Do you ever see Guillermoâs butt. Does Norman open a package delivered by another courier and find another Sam inside? I could see that happening. Why not.
3 Likes
Sure. Not just the ending, gonna talk about a couple plot beats from Fragile on and a small handful of mechanically interesting things and the pizza sidequest specifically, so long, long thorough ending spoilers galore:
Dunno how far you went into the Fragile chapter but the package twist is basically you get a trapped nuke package from some guy youâll guess is Higgs (it is actually labeled as a portable thermonuclear device in your inventory. Later you find some notes by Higgs about how usually nobody reads the labels and maybe the plan wouldâve worked if he had been more careful) and have to deliver it to Fragile, which will tell you how to get rid of it (chuck it in the southern tar lake, from which nothing ever comes back out). This begins Fragileâs rehabilitation in the eyes of the people, although she also asks to be the one who will eventually deliver the killing blow to Higgs.
Mama is even more unsettling than Fragile. She was caught in a terrorist attack while in the final phases of pregnancy and delivered a dead baby, who became a BT whoâs been haunting her ever since and that she treats as an actual baby. Thereâs an adult-shaped BT thatâs trying to take her away, also since BTs canât get too far from where they came into being Mamaâs also stuck there. Itâs a problem because her twin sister, Lockne, is in charge of the mountain city and convinced Mamaâs abandoned her to serve Bridges and thus blocks further connections to the chiral network. Eventually Mama gives you an upgrade to cut BT cords to release them, which you immediately have to use to release her baby into the afterlife, where sheâs embraced by the stalking BT. Thatâs of course because that BT has been Mama all along, and the human youâve been talking to is just her earthly body kept alive by her daughter. You deliver said dying body to Mamaâs twin to rekindle their connection, quite literally because the twin basically becomes haunted by Mama and behaves as a super creepy fusion of them both.
Near chapter 6 or 7, in the mountains you get separated from BB who has to be recalibrated to the baseline, away from Sam, at which point you learn that Samâs actually grown quite attached to BB and projecting hard, giving BB the name of Samâs actual unborn child, Lou, who died in the voidout caused by his wifeâs death. Because Sam survived (the real reason being of course that he canât die) he was accused of engineering the voidout and thatâs when he fled. The idle chatter button will get Sam to try to talk to the absent BB, and once you get BB back at the end of the chapter (after a second scuffle with the war veteran, whose name is revealed to be Cliff, in WWII this time) all in-game prompts change from BB to Lou.
As an aside, Samâs wife was his former shrink (in charge of treating his whatchamacallit, the human contact disorder he has), who was convinced the Beach was all hogwash, he had been brainwashed by the cult she felt Bridges really is and created an imaginary friend in the form of his unseen sister. She came around on all that when he killed himself in front of her and came back to life immediately.
You donât see Del Toroâs butt but he takes a clothed shower with you, just because thatâs the one place where he can disable the mics and doesnât trust Die-Hardman. At that point theyâve realized heâs hiding something so they keep finding schemes to escape detection. Deadmanâs secret, by the way, is that heâs not just some guy who progressively replaced his body with bits of corpses, he was a Frankensteinâs monster from the get go so he is convinced he has no soul and cannot access the Beach. Anyway, after that you go visit Heartman who dies and revives every 24 minutes through a defibrillator to search for his dead family. He explains that there have been recurring inevitable extinction events throughout prehistory and the Death Stranding is the beginning of the latest one. Those events are driven by Extinction Entities, individuals who are in charge of triggering them.
You reconnect the final chiral node of the main zone (It emerging, cross-shaped, from the fog is actually a pretty impressive sight no matter how tacky you feel the symbolism may be) and then you have to cross the tar belt, a sea no ship can travel on, to reach the final city. The game will start piling on reasonably discreet clues and I imagine that if you donât get it itâll move on to explicit prompts by the talking heads gang, but the trick to cross the sea is to trigger a full BT attack so that you can use the city ruins that come out of the tar to get across the belt to a distribution center north of edge Knot.
Beyond that is what the game acknowledges as the point of no return, although thatâs still a solid five hours of ending, depending on how good you are with some fights and, well, one other thing.
The path to the final node is a ruined rainy city filled with chittering jellyfish BTs, very spooky. You reconnect the final node by inserting a chiral network core, which looks suspiciously like a BB pod, but then! What a twist! Higgs counted on you connecting the whole network all along! Heâll use it to broadcast the influence of your sister Amelie, the reluctant Extinction Entity, to the whole world. First you have to fight giant monster Higgsmelie (gotta shoot the Higgs weak point but not the Amelie weak point) in the real world. Then you move to the Beach for the requisite mano a mano kojimasoft bossfight. Itâs actually kinda funny because in the first phases Higgs is armed to the teeth while you have nothing and derides you for merely being a porter, so of course the best approach is to grab one of the packages lying around and chuck it at his head to create an opening to beat him up. We havenât talked much about it but I love how Samâs animations convey that he has no formal fighting training. Anyway, this eventually devolve into manly tar wrestling and Higgs is beaten. Fragile arrives to the Beach and takes Higgs away, although itâs eventually revealed she didnât kill him in the end, she walked away and he committed suicide.
Sam reunites with Amelie with what I can only assume is a deliberately tacky scene of them happily running along the beach. She tells him to wait just for a bit as she has something to do but he follows discreetly and instead sees his mother Bridget confront a freshly arrived Die-Hardman, who wants to kill her with a gun filled with anti-BT bullets he brought. Cliff also arrives and Die-Hardman bursts into tears, at which point Amelie throws Sam back into the real world
The world is being devastated by chiral storms disrupting the network and accelerating structure aging. The whole scooby gang, save you, is back in the capital and pieces together that Amelie doesnât really exist (Samâs wife was right!), sheâs just a projection of Bridget, the actual extinction entity whoâs been manipulating both Higgs and Die-Hardman and even Cliff to set up the right conditions to destroy the world. Samâs the only one who can reach her Beach, but he has to travel back through the whole country to join them because Fragile can only pull off one more transfer. This is actually pretty cool mechanically, because you canât order any more stuff so you have to come back, amid a permanent storm and rabid BTs (the big ones now spawn directly when you enter the BT radius, no need for underlings to grab you) using only what you had in store at the different centers and what other players have left around.
I had roads and zip lines galore but it mustâve been quite harder for people who sped through the game. So of course this was gonna go quite smooth-What a twiiiiist! Higgs has been the pizza guy all along! This is something I loved. Depending on how much you explored and linked you may have come across the pizza delivery questline, timed deliveries with increasingly ludicrous requirements (package must remain horizontal, very fragile, canât be carried on a vehicle or zipline but still have to cross the whole map) for an unseen trickster of a client. If you did them all then right in the middle of this phase, when all the reveals are piled up, you get that one, the absurdest reveal of all, and if you wanna do it immediately you have to make time in the middle of the end of the world and expospeak-central to go deliver a final pizza fresh from the oven. This grants you access to Higgâs hideout, full with corkboards and mindmaps and written research about badass Bane one-liners (and empty pizza packages), revealing him as exactly the tryhard edgelord he may have come across as during the whole game.
Anyway, you get a final confrontation with Cliff in Vietnam, which is much more of a stealth fight than the others, and Sam eventually lets him hold the BB pod while they both hum BBâs lullaby. Cliff hugs Sam and disappears, happy to have finally been able to hold his son in his arms again. By that point the BB flashbacks have expanded to include pretty much the whole backstory: Cliff disagreed with the BB project, turning human babies into network cores, and so he killed his comatose wife and tried to flee with his BB, he was caught and when the reluctant chief of security (who was one of Cliffâs ex-soldiers and also you obviously can guess him to be Die-Hardman by virtue of being black and a main character, plus he has a pretty distinctive voice) failed to kill him, Bridget did, with the very gun Die-Hardman later brought to the beach.
After going through the first map now infested by BT jellyfishes and a giant whale boss while carrying meds (well, cryptobiotes) for Fragile under the rain, you eventually reach the capital and after a get-together with the scooby gang around Fragileâs sickbed she links you (but without Lou) to Bridgetâs beach to negociate the end of the world. The formatâs a bit strange there because Bridget delivers a plot dump which you donât get to hear, and then offers you a choice between killing her or watching the world burn. Both choices are wrong (your weapon, Die-Hardmanâs gun, doesnât work on her anyway) and instead you have to hug her to convince her to postpone the end of the world. Only the connection to Bridgetâs beach is destroyed, and Sam is stuck on the now empty beach as a wandering ghost (interactively!), while the credits roll. The end!
OK, not the end, of course. You now get, via flashbacks appearing around Sam, the plot dump that you didnât get before. Bridget was born as the extinction entity, existing simultaneously on the beach and the real world, she wanted a way out so she gained a position of power and started research into the beach, the BBs and all things chiral to give mankind a fighting chance. Her physical body aged and eventually got cancer but her spirit, on the beach, remained the same so she created her daugther Amelie as a cover story. She also adopted Sam and, as he actually died very young, turned him into an undying repatriate. Eventually, after what seems an eternity to both Sam and the player, Sam attempts to shoot himself with Die-Hardmanâs gun, which is empty. Then Sam sees five shadowy figures in the sky, the same youâve seen in the trailers and at different points of the game, Deadman, Fragile, Mama/Lockne, Heartman and Die-Hardman, the five living persons most closely linked to him (well, six, thereâs Lou too!) who located him through their respective beach-walking abilities, Lou, and Die-Hardmanâs gun (to which is he emotionally linked by Cliffâs murder) and have come to bring him back to the land of the living. This also shows that Deadman had a soul all along. He only needed the power of friendship to find out.
A couple months later, Die-Hardman has become the new president of the UCA and gives a rousing inaugural speech. Sam has chosen to remain in the shadows and even refuses a job offer from Fragile. In a final encounter after the speech, Die-Hardman tearfully apologizes for the death of Cliff and ensuring the whole BB project would go on. Then Deadman comes and gives you your final delivery: Louâs service life has come to an end and the trip to the incinerator canât be postponed any further. He does, however, mention that Samâs temporarily free from network surveillance so if he were to disappear itâd be hard to track him down, and also that although the survival rate is low there is precedent for a BB being taken out of the pod and surviving. Sam finally hugs Deadman as his friend and then you have to accomplish your final mission, the exact same trip to the incinerator you started with. This time you can see the sun and a vocal version of Louâs theme is heard throughout. I wonât lie, this sort of emotional manipulation worked wonders on me and when I arrived at the incinerator I just sat down for a while and played the harmonica to the now unresponsive Lou before finally approaching the terminal.
Now, Iâve been dancing around the matter for a while and hopefully youâve figured it out yourself. A player would probably get it after the second Cliff fight, and almost certainly after the third: there are two BBs in this story. The first one you learn of is BB-28 aka Lou, Samâs ghost sonar throughout the game. The second is the one whose flashbacks youâve been seeing all along, Cliffâs son, Sam Bridges. Cliff took him out of the pod during the escape and he survived the extraction, only to be killed by the same bullet, shot by Bridget, that killed Cliff. Thatâs when Bridget brought him back from death.
This is kinda maddening because thereâs some marvelously subtle hints throughout the game, some diegetic. Itâs actually in the first thing Deadman mentions about the flashbacks (âdonât mistake them for your ownâ), the limited BB lifetime wouldnât add up otherwise, but also that flashback-BBâs birthday is the same as the playerâs birthday (youâll only know if you played on your birthday, though) or that Sam knows BBâs lullaby before itâs introduced through Cliff or flashbacks. And for a while during the ending hours I though it was quite interesting yet odd that they were clearly building around it very forcefully (notably through Die-Hardmanâs apology) while leaving it unsaid. Of course thatâs actually because it is spelled out during the very unsubtle final flashback, which is treated as an incredible revelation while as I said probably most people got it midway through the game.
Sam decides to take Lou out of the pod and after the requisite tearful minute where you almost believe Lou died, she starts breathing again. Yes, she, Lou for Louise Bridges. After delivering her into the world, Sam incinerates the pod and the network cuffs and walks, free but not alone, into the sunlight, as the credits start rolling. The end!
For real.
For completion purposes the save is set two weeks after Samâs rescue, some time before Die-Hardmanâs speech, so you can rebuild what the storm destroyed and complete your completionism. Outside of the premium deliveries I think Iâve gotten pretty much everything, although I know Iâm missing a very special vehicle (this is not an invitation to anyone to tell me where it is).
So there is your delivery, the full package. That was long! The ending feels even longer.
EDIT: Oh, also the credits include every other player you âmetâ through structures and items and whatnot during the game.
9 Likes
I advanced the story a little more last night, and I agree with HOBO that itâs difficult to care much about the characters. Then again, I donât like the talking parts in most video games. And at least I donât find myself having to actively ignore the characters to find the game tolerable, as with something like Disgaea or Okami. Maybe itâs the motion-captured actors, combined with sometimes weak dialogue writing, that makes these characters feel particularly flimsy.
That said, Iâm still enjoying the mechanics of the game, even if they are repetitive. (I liked Chibi-Robo, too.) I just gained the ability to fabricate my own truck, and I was surprised at how much cargo I can move now. Even compared to the vehicles Iâd taken from MULEs.
A few times recently, Iâve found myself in a situation where Iâm describing this game to someone who has never heard of it (or who doesnât even play video games), and I still think the summary version is a great concept. This reminds me of the time I tried to explain the story of Upsteam Color to someone, and in doing so I gained a deeper appreciation for that movie.
4 Likes
Whatâs funny to me about DS is how much I ended up liking it while not really caring about many of the characters as people at all. This is another âmost Pynchon thingsâ about this.
3 Likes
Yeah, I didnât really care about the main story characters all that much during the game (I actually warmed up quite a bit to a couple of them as the end approached), but that was just indifference, I canât imagine being repulsed by them to the point where I would dismiss the wonderful, wonderful gameplay.
2 Likes
i am at the part where you lose BB for a bit in the mountains and itâs kinda dulled my interest. avoiding BTs is fun. itâs not fun avoiding them when you have absolutely no indication of where they are and oh hey iâm getting grabbed again
i donât care about any of these characters. i am only here for the pure, raw, hard logistics
1 Like
You can actually locate BTs without BB, as Sam is still sensitive to them. BBâs only real function is the sonar arm, youâll still see BTs flicker briefly when they enter your range or if you get close enough or, obviously, when they get to the hand print stage, and can still cut their cords. Also, donât forget (or learn now) that if youâre sneaking around (crouch walking, not too fast) and donât panic, they suck at detecting you unless youâre pretty much right under them. That last point was a huge and relatively late realization for me and it completely changed how I approached BTs.
Oh for all the FUCKING NUMBERS in the game was there really no visible number for how close to overweight a truck was?
Iâm like over 15 hours into this now I think, and still havenât encountered most of the codec characters (eg Refn, Mama) in the flesh yet. The amount of times they show up on the codec to give advice suggests I should be more familiar with these people, but they just all just feel like humanoid versions of Clippy to me. Makes me feel like I missed some cutscenes in the early chapters, but I guess this is just how the game is?
I never found any weight-number read, but eventually figured out you can see this light up (lower right) gauge when selecting truck cargo. Near max capacity itâs all lit and iirc, turns red/orange.
5 Likes
5 Likes