Death Stranding – Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire
When in doubt folks, lead with the coolest screenshot that you have. This is one of those weekends when I spent a truly phenomenal amount of time playing a specific game… that I absolutely cannot talk about because reasons. I believe I clocked in around twenty hours playing the thing that I can’t talk about over the course of primarily Friday and Saturday. I look forward to seeing more of the thing that I can’t talk about seeing. Instead this morning you are going to get one of those general rundown type posts talking about where I am in various games.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Blood Elf Character Creator
I got into Shadowlands Beta out of the magnanimous nature of a friend of mine, so huge props to them for helping me out there. I’ve been piddling around over the last week and I am having a lot of fun. The most important thing to talk about however is the changes to the character creator. I can have a beard as a Blood Elf, which is phenomenal since that was not a thing you could really do well. The best you could do previously was a weak assed chinstrip. The undead models look amazing as well and are pretty much everything I have ever wanted in a rotting corpse. The big thing is it seems like they have expanded the options and decoupled them so whereas things used to be locked to specific sets of choices, but for example Tauren horn and hair and face are no longer combined in weird forced sets.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Intro Quest
As far as the Story itself… I am getting DEEP Wrath of the Lich King vibes here and it is more than just the fact that the Ebon Blade are factoring significantly in everything we are doing right now. I am also greatly enjoying that there has been no faction based bullshit yet, and it is all a big team pulling together to save Azeroth sort of feel. The intro quest reminds me of the storming of the Dark Portal in Warlords, if that even were less on-rails. It has a “we did a thing and we were absolutely not prepared for the ramifications” type feeling to it. As far as the zone content, it reminds me of the best parts of Legion and Burning Crusade in that we are exploring a world that works NOTHING like the one we came from and it is a “stranger in a strange land” sort of feel.
Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server
In more of my usual nonsense, I for some reason decided to reinstall Return of Reckoning which is a thing. I’ve not really done much but I did create a Dwarven Iron Breaker which was my class of choice back when this thing was a live game. I have to say that the quest advisement is not super amazing. Sure this was the first game to do the whole highlight an area of the map, which was cool… but I still cannot for the life of me find a damned book that is supposed to be on a nearby bench. I got in for a bit, played through a few quests and then got frustrated. Hopefully when I am in a different mindset I can pop back in and play some more.
Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller
In other random news I have settled on what I feel is the perfect controller for my Retro Freak. I greatly prefer the layout of the 6 button genesis and saturn controllers, especially when it comes to fighting games. I never got used to hitting the shoulder buttons in place of attack keys and spent a lot of my time on SNES playing with the Capcom Soldier Pad. Ultimately I was looking for something that would facilitate my preferred layout but also offer a bunch of buttons for mapping things to. Enter the line of officially licensed Sega Saturn controllers from Retro-Bit. The only negative is the home button appears to be unique to the Switch and is not mappable, but it gives me A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, Select, Left bumper and Right bumper to map inputs to which neatly fits all of the systems that are playable on the Retro Freak. I have to use it wired, but I went ahead and got the Bluetooth model for future options.
Death Stranding – The Final Run
Lastly I have been trying to wrap up Death Stranding, and spent most of the day yesterday working my towards the eventual conclusion of the game. My grand plan had been to be finished with it by the time Horizon Zero Dawn lands next week, and I think that is well within reach… at the very least finishing the story. There are a bunch of miscellaneous side quests that I could be doing, but I have to say the mountain region really killed my joy for running random fetch quests. Hideo Kojima really loves sending you completely out of your way… because there have been three times so far when I have been asked to more or less traverse the entirety of what was then my game map. Yesterday I was asked yet again to traverse from the furthest possible point on the west coast of the map, all the way to the east coast of the map while dealing with extremely ramped up versions of everything I had encountered before.
Death Stranding – Corpse in a Cart
At this point… I am ready to be done. I have greatly enjoyed this game and the storyline has wound its way through some deeply interesting lore and world building bits, but I am ready to say goodbye to Sam Porter Bridges. It is a phenomenal game, and pending you have the time to really spend exploring it then I would highly suggest giving it a go. There is a lot that you have to get used to early in the game, but it really is a masterpiece as far as games go. What has been surprising is how much of the stuff I considered to be complete nonsense on day one, has been fully explained and has paid off in a significant way. Extremely impressive.
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For years I have complained about doing escort missions in MMORPGs. They generally involve taking some hapless character along a fixed path as they aggro every single thing in sight. I have long wished I could literally just pick the NPC up and carry them along to the goal to hopefully get it over with quicker. I’ve now played Death Stranding and can without a doubt tell you that having to carry an NPC to the destination is not better, and also apparently humans are really hard to balance on your back. You might be wondering also how in the hell did we get into this situation and I will explain.
One of the things that porters occasionally carry is the bodies of the dead to the nearest incinerator to prevent a “void out” when they go necrotic as they attempt to pass over to the other side. You have to understand that the world of Death Stranding is extremely dangerous and unforgiving, and most of the individuals in this world live in a bunker or vault and have never gone outside for any length of time. So there have been a few cases where some NPC needs to move to another location and asks you to carry them on your back like you would a body. In this case I had to carry a fairly important story NPC effectively the entire length of what was the currently discovered world at the time. It took a good chunk of last night and the entire time I was having to adjust for her listing to one side or the other.
In this case it was an NPC that I have come to really like over the course of our interactions, so as a result I felt like I needed to be super careful as we traversed the landscape. Every time she would shift on my back I felt bad that I was not more careful transporting my “cargo”. Another thing that I love about this game is the random holograms that players have access to, which ultimately break up the wastes. It was really cool to see a Tallneck looming out over the horizon, because it is literally the same size as one in Horizon Zero Dawn making for this massive hologram. I’ve seen a few other HZD cross overs, so I am guessing this is all due to the fact that both games use the same engine, so Kojima more than likely spent a lot of time working with the Guerilla Games team.
If I am correct, I think I am at roughly the halfway point of the game. My goal is to try and finish things up to a reasonable level of satisfaction before the launch of Horizon Zero Dawn on August 7th. That gives me roughly 15 days worth of play time to push across the finish line. I feel like this is a game that I most definitely want to finish, especially given that there is supposedly a 15th chapter that is open ended allowing you to play around in the final state of the world. I always hate it when the continued play option for a game is to effectively “roll back” the world to the moments before the final conflict. Those are the games that I often times never quite finish because I know poking around in the world after that will feel fairly unsatisfying.
On the me front, I am doing better. Taking yesterday off was a pretty good idea even though I hate not actually blogging for a given day. You need to give yourself room to make these decisions every now and then, because in my case it gave me another day to clear my headspace a bit. My wife is healing nicely from the accident, and me… yesterday day was really bad but I am dealing with it. It is like every so often I kinda have to mentally bandage myself up a bit. I have all of today and half a day tomorrow and then it is my weekend which should help a bit. As always thanks for the kind words I received, they do help and they do mean a lot but I mostly share my struggle for anyone out there who might also be struggling.
So I did not get 31 people for the promptapalooza, but I have decided I am going to try and make it work nonetheless. I got pretty close and as a result I will just stub in myself for several days in order to make it work. Tomorrow afternoon since I am off work I will be pulling it all together, creating the list of prompts, the tentative posting calendar, and contacting everyone to try and link topic prompts to people. This is way less lead time than I would have liked, but I should have been more vocal about it. I’ve been in a really bad headspace this month so trying to deal with this has added a lot of stress to my plate as well. For those who have no clue what I am talking about, check out this original post that sorta outlines the idea. There is still time to sign up.
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I have been playing an excessive amount of Death Stranding over the last few days. On paper it does not seem like a game I would necessarily enjoy. I remember when it launched on the PS4 it was universally lauded as a flop or as a “Walking Simulator”. However there is a quiet brilliance here that seems perfect for the time in which we are living currently. We find ourselves in a scenario of dealing with a pandemic that keeps us separated in ways that we are not used to and many are struggling with this reality. Death Stranding is a game where a cataclysmic event has separated what is left of humanity into a bunch of disconnected pockets, and your role as a “porter” is to deliver packages and also link all of these people up into a shared global network.
Fundamentally it is in fact a game about transporting cargo between point A and point B and attempting to do so as safely as possible. You are graded based on how much damage the cargo took, and believe me that cargo is constantly taking damage. However what is happening behind the scenes is the interesting part when you talk to the individuals at the destinations who are grateful that you risked your life to cross the wastes to bring them something they desperately need… like medication. Essentially you are in a time of vast networks of 3D printers that can replicate almost anything, but anything organic or very specific needs to still be transported by hand.
The most interesting aspect of the game for me is how your actions and the actions of other players are constantly impacting your decisions. I brought with me three ladders and ended up using them at the top of this waterfall to create a path that future porters would be able to cross safely. Me laying down those ladders worked on top of the efforts of those who came before me, because there are a total of I believe nine ladders that make up what is effectively a safe way to cross. That isn’t to say it didn’t terrify me to cross it, especially while hauling a bunch of mission critical cargo behind me… knowing that one slip would probably send it all plummeting down the falls and become unrecoverable.
The other really interesting thing about the game is how players are impacting the world in ways that are directly obvious. See this dirt path that is in front of me? This was not here a few days ago when I started playing. This represents a path that players are carving through the world, and as I understand it data is being collected about player movement and this is then impacting the terrain of the world around you. So a common footpath turns into a place where the grass is worn down and eventually ends up in an area of exposed dirt. These don’t always appear in the most efficient paths, but more the most commonly and as a result easiest to travel paths for transporting cargo. If you are adventurous there is still plenty of room to carve out your own path however.
On the podcast this weekend, I described the game as what if you were playing Fallout in a world where all of the Vaults were active and you were instead playing a caravan leader delivering goods between them all. There are definite moments where it feels Fallout-like, especially any time you are called to explore the ruins of some part of civilization from the fall of humanity. Instead of Deathclaws however, you are left to content with BTs or Beached Things that you can choose to deal with either through sneaking around them or later in the game by outright attacking them with weapons that have been developed specifically to deal with them.
The thing that I did not expect, is that I have actually started to grow my BB or Bridge Baby. There is more happening here with this child in a bottle than I initially expected, and as you encounter bad things you have to take its mental state into account. Soothing the BB ends up making it produce these heart shaped air bubbles and increases the bond between you two… and as a result its effectiveness in detecting bad things as well as its ability to handle psychological strain. The whole thing is a really strange concept, and I did not at all expect that I would slowly find myself being attached to the little runt and taking actions that I know specifically that will make it happy. For example when you are running with the speed exoskeleton you can make these massive leaps, and the hang time seems to make the kid extremely happy… so I find myself trying to plot a course that is going to allow me to do a bunch of them in the process.
I am still not entirely certain why I like this game as much as I do, however for now I am mostly just rolling with it. Death Stranding is exploration porn, and roaming the wastes is gorgeous. Right now I am more or less roaming around the same neck of the woods trying to “finish” with a few objectives before moving forward the story. I am specifically trying to convince a few individuals that joining the network in full is a good idea, and trying to track down missions specific to them in order to gain favor. There are so many interesting cameos and references going on, and I realize this is not going to be the game for everyone. However for me it seems to hit all of the right notes and is the sort of game that apparently I need to be playing right now. I will be sad once my journey is finished.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
This evening we record an entire show where we basically talk about three games. The first of these is Ooblets which came out this week in early access and how it is a blending of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Pokemon and a Card Battler. From there we talk about Ghosts of Tsushima and how it presents Samurai gameplay in a new high fidelity light. Additionally we talk a bit about Kurosawa mode which offers you a unique black and white/film grain way of playing the game. Finally Bel talks about his adventures being a post apocalyptic fedex driver in a world seemingly run on twitter likes… aka Death Stranding. He talks a bit about the odd social aspect of the game where other players can only have a possible positive impact without ever causing any negatives.
