Death Stranding Director's Cut - Kojima's post-apocalyptic deliveryman simulator

[TheHeroOfTime]

If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the internet, it is that many things may change the nature of a videogame. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a videogame, can. I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag's heart half-circle. This entire website has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and achieve it. And it has made a posturing user think videogames are something more than entertaiment.

 

[Irata]

lol have you never gotten past stage 2 in pac-man or something?

Haha. No, I just haven't played it in nearly 40 years. Regardless, I was just trying to be witty.

 

[Machocruz]

People have some illusions about how art is created and for what purpose. Anything in any media, of great complexity and scale, often requires group effort. Was Peter Paul Rubens any less an artist because he had a workshop full of assistants who worked on various areas of his paintings before he came in and laid in a few final touches, sending it out into the world as his own and reaping all the accolades and material rewards (not uncommon in his time and the surrounding centuries)? I doubt any single painter of any era could do something like his The Elevation of The Cross completely on their own. And you don't hide that kind of work away in the study, it's made for the public square.

There are writers that hire assistants to do research for them.

Show me a one man film that can rival Lawrence of Arabia in scope, scale, and technical proficiency, 57 years later.

Even comic books. You see those dozens of finely detailed buildings being blown into even finer bits in Akira? Took me some years to find out that assistants (possibly architecture students, but I forget) handled a lot of that, which seems obvious in retrospect. You don't see that level of exacting work in mainstream American comics, with how they normally have one penciler and one inker doing everything.

It's all very time and labor consuming to create anything 'next level'. Toiling away on your own, lone genius, sounds romantic. And maybe with enough time one can create a work of astounding scale and complexity. But I suspect the kind of creators given to that kind of ambition are also the kind to want to enjoy the rewards before they find themselves back in diapers.

Edit: not an endorsement of Death Stranding or any other game, btw. Just a general thing.

 

[Venser]

 

[Sigourn]

If people call a game an artistic masterpiece and use it as an example to why games can be art, then its artistic value must come from its interactivity, because that's the medium's unique feature that contrasts it with every other medium. If you removed every single cutscene from the game, and then people stop calling it a masterpiece of art, the game failed at being game as art because its artistic elements relied on a wholly anti-game feature such as cutscenes.

Pretty much.

Nobuo Uematsu's soundtracks are art. Just because Final Fantasy uses his songs doesn't mean the games themselves are art: it just means the games have art in them.

 

[you know what time it is]

: The Game

A friend bought it for whatever reason, saw him play it for a bit and I can see how it can be appealing to a Euro Truck Simulator crowd. Not sure about it having any artistic merit though. As they say, more than two strokes is a wank, and in this case, especially when cutscenes start rolling - it's just a constant barrage of douchey 'artsiness' mixed with even more obnoxious melodramatic nonsense.

Hilariously, it could have been a good game, without a massive egomaniac behind it.

 

[DeepOcean]

I agree on the importace of gameplay, I just don't get why your criteria of games as art is that it has to have RPG mechanics (dialogues and c&c).

No need be RPG mechanics. Did you ever play the Myst series of adventure games? You discover the world by interacting with it. You know, instead of blowing off the budget into hiring Norman Reedus for 9hs of cutscenes, Kojimbo could have added alot of weird mysterious shit to find and interact while delivering your packages and you discovering the world by yourself instead of listening to endless and confusing exposition dumping monologues delivered by Hollywood actors.

Even the people that like this game sometimes comment how they can't wait for the cutscenes to arrive for the story to continue, because the story just stops when there are no cutscenes around and this gulf between cutscenes (where things really happen but the player can't do jack shit about it) and gameplay is a weakness derived of Kojimbo wanting to be seen as a movie director instead of a dorky nerdy gameplay designer that isn't cool to mainstream culture.

If I killed a bunch of enemies and didn't burn their bodies, then a void out happened out of sudden or the BTs started appearing more and more if I killed enough enemies , I would be far more intrigued than seeing Troy Baker's going on a rant saying America this and America that and other meaningless platitudes that sound smart but say fuck all then super easy boss time.

All those 9hs, I bet if you cut the endless "I'm so smart." platitude ridden monologues about America, the story of this game could be told by 1h of cutscenes.

 

[Egosphere]

I agree on the importace of gameplay, I just don't get why your criteria of games as art is that it has to have RPG mechanics (dialogues and c&c).

No need be RPG mechanics. Did you ever play the Myst series of adventure games? You discover the world by interacting with it. You know, instead of blowing off the budget into hiring Norman Reedus for 9hs of cutscenes, Kojimbo could have added alot of weird mysterious shit to find and interact while delivering your packages and you discovering the world by yourself instead of listening to endless and confusing exposition dumping monologues delivered by Hollywood actors.

Agreed with this.

A game pitched as a postman simulator in a post-apocalyptic environment ravaged by storms that defy laws of physics sounds interesting, but you'd be forgiven for imagining the landscapes within such a game to be far more complex and fun than what you see in DS. The timefall storms could have been tweaked into storms that permanently fuck up the topology of the planet's surface into mind-bending shapes, so that instead of traversing Scotland the player battles his way through wacky, impassable terrain with the help of hi-tech gadgetry. Even in the real world there are plenty of interesting places:

Spoiler

And these examples are very tame compared to what could be implemented if you just use your imagination. Giant skeins of rock with hardly a flat surface, arrays of pillars that stretch to the clouds, webs of subterranean tunnels, rivers of oil slick with ever shifting currents etc. Morrowind was really memorable, despite having no mechanics explicitly designed for climbing. Now imagine a high budget sci fi game with that as its central tenet.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

To be fair, you need to be highly European to appreciate Death Stranding.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

To be fair, you need to be highly European to appreciate Death Stranding.

In eastern europe they had death stranding since a year ago



date: 25 jul. 2018

 

[Bigg Boss]

 

[Gerrard]

I'm glad Pokemon came out and put the final nail in Kojimbo's coffin.

 

[Whipped Cream]

date: 25 jul. 2018

The video is parodying the Death Stranding trailer from E3 2018. We already knew from that trailer that the game was a package delivery simulator interspersed with cutscenes. Its just that some people were in denial thinking "That can't be it, can it?".

The comments on the YouTube vidoe reminds me of how some people who took one look at Fallout 76 and said it was going to be shit were called "prophetic" by casuals outside of the Codex who bought into the hype, when Bethesda's E3 reveal told us pretty much exactly what the game was, its just that many Bethesda fans were in denial mode.

 

[Sentinel]

Are BTs supposed to take a random amount of grenades from 1-3 to kill? Sometimes they just turn red and start screeching until I put them out of their misery.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

I'm glad Pokemon came out and put the final nail in Kojimbo's coffin.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Are BTs supposed to take a random amount of grenades from 1-3 to kill? Sometimes they just turn red and start screeching until I put them out of their misery.

If they do that with red around them shoot them.

 

[Luka-boy]

 

[Sentinel]

Are BTs supposed to take a random amount of grenades from 1-3 to kill? Sometimes they just turn red and start screeching until I put them out of their misery.

If they do that with red around them shoot them.

Yeah I didn't have access to guns yet, but when I did I immediately got that tooltip. But it doesn't seem very effective. It just alerts other BTs in my experience.

 

[Bigg Boss]

It's more for boss fights, but can be used in a pinch.

 

[sullynathan]

Wow, Death Stranding is nominated for so many awards on Geoff's show. Who didn't see that coming?

 

[Venser]

It's the same nominees appearing over and over again in general. But why are there awards for the best esports host, coach and event? Those should be reserved for esports awards instead of general game awards. How about best journalist?

 

[cvv]

Death Stranding absolutely deserves to win Best Art Direction, Best Performance (Mikkelsen) and maybe Best Sound Design, although Sekiro is also a great candidate. The game IS a masterpiece in everything not related to Kojima.

 

[Venser]

How is art direction not related to Kojima?

 

[cvv]

How is art direction not related to Kojima?

I don't know if it is or not. It's great so I just assumed it isn't.