Death Stranding 2: On the Beach... and a little retrospective on Hideo Kojima's Open World games.

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Dear Escapist friends,

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, the sequel to Hideo Kojima's first game following his separation from long time publisher Konami is due to release in almost exactly a month. It currently stands as my most anticipated game this year so I thought as a lead up to its release it would be fun to look back on Kojimas history in the open world genre.

Why only his open world games, you ask? Well, for one because if I wanted to cover his entire library I would have needed to start this thread way sooner. But also because his design philosophy has, if not done a 180, at least pivoted significantly after Metal Gear Solid 4. Which probably begs some elaboration.

Introduction: How We Got Here

The former half of Hideo Kojima's career as a writer and director of video games, including, among some smaller projects Snatcher, Policenauts and, most famously, most of the Metal Gear series was dominated by linear, relatively short games heavy on bespoke setpieces, cinematics and exposition. And that's the ones that weren't actual visual novels. Which isn't to say that they had nothing going for them mechanically, but compared to the other big trailblazers in the stealth action genre like Splinter Cell or Thief they were less concerned with expanding on their core gameplay than presenting the player with individual sequences that usually utilize the games core mechanics but feel more like one off "scenes" which are over with once you're done with them. You know. The sequence where you fight a tank. The sequence where you cross a minefield. The sequence where you fight of a group of guards assaulting you in an elevator. The sequence where you cover someone with a sniper rifle. The sequence where you disguise yourself as Raiden's Russian grandpa. They emphasize a variety of different experiences over building up a core gameplay framework. There is a core gameplay loop of stealth but more than anything it serves a connective tissue between gameplay setpieces and plot beats.

This school of game design worked out well for the series up to a point. That point, of course, being Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. A game that, in my humble opinion, still stands as the single lowest point of Kojima's career. Detractors like to accuse Kojima of making movies, not games and I'm fairly sure that MGS4 is the primary reason for that. Having written himself into a corner after intending to leave the Metal Gear series on a cliffhanger after MGS2, Guns of the Patriots is a desperate and messy attempt to to bring some sort of conclusion to a story that had gotten increasingly lost in its own mythology, a mythology that was starting to overshadow the social commentary and sharp speculative science-fiction writing that had become the series backbone. How did it try to do so? By going all in on story over gameplay.

The Metal Gear series, at that point, had already become notorious for its long cutscenes. I don't think having long cutscenes is exactly MGS 4's problem. Its problem is that the gameplay sequences between those cutscenes had gotten too short. Now, let me tell you my experience with Metal Gear Solid 4 and what I imagine was broadly a lot of people's experience with it.

MGS 4 came out on the PS3. Before the PS3 I never owned a Sony console. Accordingly, I had never played a Metal Gear game before, making MGS 4 my first one. Was it my fault for thinking it'd be a good idea to get into a series at its fourth installment? Yes, but at that point I was mostly unfamiliar with the Metal Gear series legacy and picked up the game thinking it would basically be like Splinter Cell. What I'm saying is, me and Kojima really started off on the wrong foot. What I got was a game that seemed to consist to more than 50% of cinematics and exposition about a story I only ever got the cliffnotes version of through its recap option, attempts to appeal to a nostalgia for the series I didn't have and a couple of disconnected gameplay sequences that were mechanically solid but barely ever seemed to go on for more than 20 minutes a piece.

At that point my impressions of the Metal Gear series and Kojima as a director was mostly in accord with those of his worst critics: Japanese David Cage. A director whose idea of a game is a series of cinematics of people talking about stuff only he cares about with the gameplay being an afterthought.

I later went back to actually play the MGS series from the beginning and I realized that Guns of the Patriots wasn't exactly representative but I figure for many people who had a similar experience the damage had been done.

Now, Hideo Kojima is not a guy who usually talks about his regrets and I don't know how he looks back on Metal Gear Solid 4 but going by everything he's made since, it seems obvious that he felt like he had to reconsider his approach to game design from the ground up. Whether you like MGS 4 or not, you will have to acknowledge that nothing Kojima has made since was anything like it. While he didn't, by any means, abandon his proclivity for long cinematics and dense exposition, in practically all of his subsequent games those are seperated by long stretches of uninterrupted, mechanics driven gameplay.

And that brings us to this threads actual topic: it's meant to serve as a look back on the games Kojima has made since. What has changed and what has remained the same and of course, how it affected his writing and direction. This thread will focus on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Death Stranding 1 and, well hopefully seemlessly transition into an opportunity for me to post my impressions on Death Stranding 2 as I'm playing it.

So, we'll talk Phantom Pain next. Stay tuned!

 

[meiam]

Yeah but counter point


No seriously, how many game will jump between some "high" minded philosophy/geopolitics and then have a scatological joke (?) right after?

MGS4 is kinda unique like that, so I'm glad it exist in that sense. I'm also glad game aren't like that, but I think gaming would be poorer without it.

I'll agree that it could have done with more gameplay because it actually has pretty darn good gameplay. I even played the multiplayer which was pretty good.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Barring the bloated story and behind the scenes turbulence, MGS4 is a work of art that surpassed anything available in the medium on several levels.

The presentation was amazing, with real time interactive cutscenes, impeccable sound design and OST, the most advanced mechanics in the series (which even MGSV didn’t fully match), and generally speaking, a ton of Easter eggs for diehard fans to dig into. It was the epitome of an era that clearly was also showing its age. Kojima may have done it out of pure obligation but, god bless him, it could have gone far differently (worse) if he didn’t still care about his work so much.

With MGSV, I think Kojima got another gust of wind in his sails as the Fox Engine allowed him to create something much closer to what he always envisioned from a gameplay perspective. Sure, there’s the whole Konami debacle and his ego inflating beyond their tolerance for allowing a completed third act, but I loved nearly every minute of what was there. For anyone interested in diving deeper into all that -

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Codec: The Missing Link

In my last post I wrote that Kojima's approach to game design changed dramatically from Metal Gear Solid 4 to Metal Gear Solid V, from linear and tightly directed to open ended and player driven. Which is true. But what I failed to mention is that there is an odd little piece of connective tissue between these two periods of Kojima's career that doesn't quite belong to either.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

I won't go into it in depth because I haven't played it very much but Peace Walker is... a mission based handheld game with some management mechanics. Aspects of it certainly carry over into MGS V, which is a direct sequel to it, like its mission based structure and, indeed, the base management mechanics while others stand as remnants of the linear level design that Kojima would abandon in his subsequent games or as one-offs entirely. Its story is certainly relevant to MGS V, it is a canonical entry in the series, characters and plot points carry over into V, but it plays nothing like any other Metal Gear game directed by Kojima. It is a follow-up to a game called Portable Ops which I haven't played and which, as I understand, isn't explicitly... not canon but it certainly occupies a weird place in Kojima's library.

Perhaps I'm doing it a disservice by glossing over it like that, it is, as far as I know, only by a technicality that it didn't end up being a numbered entry in the Metal Gear series but for the sake of this thread the takeaway should be that it's the one game that neither fits neatly into Kojima's old, nor his new approach to making games.

With that out of the way, let's try to make sense of

Metal Gear Solid V

When MGS V came out, most people didn't know what to make of it. Let me give you some context: MGS V's release was overshadowed by the news that Kojima would leave his long time publisher Konami and it wasn't difficult to deduce that it was on less than amicable terms. While the specifics have never been made public, it seems reasonable to assume that it was related to Konami's decision to partially retire from the video game market as a whole and focus more on other parts of their business. A decision that, as of now, they seem to have gone back on, to some extent. This escalating tension between Kojima and his publisher clearly left its mark on MGS V's development. Not only was Kojima excluded from many of the promotional events, according to some sources, he wasn't even allowed to work in the same office as the rest of the development team, allegedly having to communicate with them by memo.

In other words, describing the games development as troubled is probably an understatement. All of this resulted in a game for which it was rather difficult to tell which of its more controversial design decisions were a product of its difficult development, which ones were simply on account of being made by a team with no prior experience with open world games and which ones are deliberate artistic decisions.

MGS V was certainly a big project. In scale, sure, but apart from the game itself, the team around Kojima also built its engine from scratch. Presumably with the intention of using it for other projects later down the line but unfortunately it was Konami that ended up with the rights for it.

Metal Gear Solid V was not what most people expected. Gameplay, writing and pacing were very much unlike anything long time fans of Metal Gear were used to. Instead of a non stop barrage of mechanical and narrative setpieces, MGS V was slow paced, highly focused on evolving infiltration and stealth gameplay and presented its narrative in a way that was both slow and, by Kojimas standards, more focused on subtle and easily overlooked or ignored nuances than face value plot.

And this is where I stop beating around the bush and actually get into the specifics of the story of the Metal Gear series. Metal Gear Solid has, effectively, had two main plotlines. Solid Snakes, encompassing MGS 1, 2 and 4, set in a near future soft Cyberpunk setting where the military industrial complex has become an all powerful, self propagating system that has pervaded every layer of society. A dystopia based on post Cold War American hegemony and War on Terror era militarism. The other one, consisting of MGS 3, Peace Walker and V, following Solid Snake's father Big Boss, cataloguing the rise of that very same military industrial complex over multiple decades of an alternate history Cold War.

Where MGS3 was following Big Boss, then still using the moniker Naked Snake, on a mission behind enemy lines in the Soviet Union, Peace Walker and V see him as the leader of a private militia. Big Boss and his rogue military, at that point known as "Outer Heaven" served as the antagonists of the original 2D Metal Gear games which is why his trilogy is sometimes characterized as a villain origin story and the lack of direct on screen character development of Big Boss often used as a major criticism against MGS V. But let me be real here for a second. I don't want to invoke the, at this point rather tiresome, buzzword of "media literacy" but if you've played the entire series and are, by the end of V, still wondering how the fearless war hero from Peace Walker who abandoned his corrupt nation to dedicate his life to liberating soldiers from the political machinations of their countries, challenges the hegemony ofnthe superpowers and provided food and shelter to war orphans on his home base where he taught them to defend themselves turned into the megalomaniacal warlord of Metal Gear 1 and 2 who was operating a rogue militia threatening war on the entire free world and training child soldiers to die for him on the battlefield, you should perhaps consider playing them again and paying attention this time.

All of which is to say, I don't think MGS V was ever primarily intended to be a story about a man succumbing to evil. Don't get me wrong, I know that the trailers certainly presented it that way, as a matter of fact they seem to have been very deliberately misleading in a number of ways. Which, considering Kojima makes a point of editing them himself, might have been a very conscious decision on his part, going with the games general theme of misinformation and indoctrination.

No, starting off with its prologue Ground Zeroes, MGS V sees Big Boss' injured in an attack on his mercenary base slash independent nation by a shady Intelligence Agency named XOF, putting him in a coma. 8 years later a man who is reasonably sure he is Big Boss wakes up in a hospital in Cyprus as it's raided by the very same agency, narrowly escaping and with a hunch that he should rebuild his army and take revenge on XOF. Now, the plot deals with him trying to track down XOF and uncovering an evil plot by its leader Skull Face. A plot that is indeed, as is often brought up, somewhat thin for a game that is really quite long. As it progresses it does include the quirky Metal Gear-isms one has come to expect, including undead super soldiers, giant mechs, deadly microorganisms that kill people by language, psychic children and ancient Native American nuclear scientists. The actual substance in terms of dense political commentary is, however, pushed to the background, easy to miss and even easier to just gloss over.

MGS V, you see, is a game about mercenary work. Especially early on, many of the missions you take on barely relate to the main plot at all. The game is set mostly between two different conflict zones. Kabul in Afghanistan, where American backed rebels are fighting the Russian occupation and the Angola-Zaire border region in central Africa where various mercenary outfits are engaged in territorial conflicts. And this is where MGS V does something quite interesting.

It's very easy to dismiss the mercenary work you take on for much of the game as filler content. As a matter of fact I did so too, on my first playthrough. As you infiltrate various military installations to free prisoners, take out targets, extract ressources or destroy infrastructure the game doesn't exactly go out of its way to elaborate on the why of it all. Where most open world games would have a short cutscene before every mission to contextualize what you're doing and why you're doing it, most of MGS V's operations get a short, optional briefing that might very well go in one ear and out the other and perhaps some audio tapes, more or less replacing the earlier games Codec calls, that you might very well choose to not listen to at all.

If you do, however, pay attention you will find that there is more to MGS V's writing than meets the eye. I'd actually argue that while V might have one of the weakest plots in the series, it has some of its best writing. What MGS V expects you to do is pull put your corkboard, put on your tinfoil hat and pay attention to who it is you're doing those jobs for, what it is you're actually doing and when you're getting contradictory information and what that implies. If you bother to do that, you will find that beyond the face value plot, there is a rather dense web of conspiracy and obfuscation going on in the background that you might barely notice at all on a regular playthrough.

In other words, while it is easy to dismiss MGS V as underwritten or the product of a team that hadn't quite figured out how to balance narrative and gameplay in an open world game, I think a lot of that is the result of it just taking a different approach to the previous Metal Gear games or even most other open world games. The story isn't in the foreground the way it was in MGS 1 - 4, the cinematics and setpieces are spread farther apart while the dynamic stealth gameplay now makes up most of the game but its still there. You just have to actively pay attention to it.

All of which, to me, suggests that Kojima was trying to make a point here. By emphasizing gameplay the way he did, by hiding pieces of important information where the player is likely to gloss over them, by expecting the player himself to notice when he's being lied to by his clients or his handlers and by expecting them to find connections without getting them spoonfed, it not only ties into the themes of information warfare and brainwashing that the plot deals with even on the surface level, it also creates a sort of game within the game, a jigsaw puzzle of information the player is required to piece together if they want something approaching the whole picture.

Which, of course, doesn't mean that the rough development didn't take a toll on the game or that there aren't some aspects where the teams inexperience with this kind of game shows. There are some plot threads that get no proper resolution. There is an epilogue to one in particular that didn't make it into the game due to time and budget reasons, which had its unfinished cinematics and story boards released on YouTube. There are some mechanics that feel half baked (Despite being set in active war zones, you never get any NPC's fighting each other). The Side Missions are for the most part just repetitive filler.

I'm not by any means saying Metal Gear Solid V is a game that lives up to all of its ambitions or succeeds on every level. But what it does show is that Kojima and his team were aware that they had to do things differently after MGS 4 and that they were ready to take risks and try some experiments. I know that more than a few people consider it a disappointment and I absolutely get that but I feel like it deserves being engaged with on its own terms. By all means, the story of Metal Gear was over after 4 and even Big Boss' character arc had basically come full circle after Peace Walker, there wasn't much left to do except elaborate on some of the details. MGS V worked with the fact that there was little to add in terms of plot by making the fact that the character drama playing out in the foreground is primarily a distraction from the sinister machinations playing out just under the surface one of its core messages and expecting the player to actually look under that surface. That might have been what Kojima meant when he wrote that was doing something so risky with MGS V that he might have to retire if he fails. I don't think he did and I'm quite glad he didn't have to retire.

Whether you consider V a success or a failure, it was Kojima's final Metal Gear as well as his final collaboration with Konami. His next project was going to be an entirely new property made without the backing of a publisher. That, of course, would result in Death Stranding... which is up next!

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Pretty recent from Gman -

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Barring the bloated story and behind the scenes turbulence, MGS4 is a work of art that surpassed anything available in the medium on several levels.

The presentation was amazing, with real time interactive cutscenes, impeccable sound design and OST, the most advanced mechanics in the series (which even MGSV didn’t fully match), and generally speaking, a ton of Easter eggs for diehard fans to dig into. It was the epitome of an era that clearly was also showing its age. Kojima may have done it out of pure obligation but, god bless him, it could have gone far differently (worse) if he didn’t still care about his work so much.

With MGSV, I think Kojima got another gust of wind in his sails as the Fox Engine allowed him to create something much closer to what he always envisioned from a gameplay perspective. Sure, there’s the whole Konami debacle and his ego inflating beyond their tolerance for allowing a completed third act, but I loved nearly every minute of what was there. For anyone interested in diving deeper into all that -

Those Futurasound videos on MGS V are really quite good. They're probably the most comprehensive analysis of what's going on in MGS V.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

I'll agree that it could have done with more gameplay because it actually has pretty darn good gameplay. I even played the multiplayer which was pretty good.

MGS4 still has the best TPS gameplay ever IMO, MGS5 is rather dumbed-down in comparison. The multiplayer was amazing and still the best online shooter I've ever played, it had so many innovations that almost every shooter since integrated that originated from MGS4/MGO. How the SOP system worked where you linked up with all your teammates so you could share skills (so you could see an enemy that a teammate shot for example). Most games have had e-locators (sensor grenades) in them from COD, Ghost Recon, and I believe Halo has well. Even the online of Uncharted/TLOU integrated mechanics from MGO. Lastly, MGO had the beginnings of battle royale modes, it was called Stealth Deathmatch, where everyone randomly spawned on the map (in stealth camo) and then there was circle slowing closing in on the map to force players to converge on each other.

 

[Dreiko]

Apparently Pekora is in this game. I may have to play it.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Codec: "Durch Nebel schwindenden Bewusstseins"

Here's another little bit of apocrypha before we get to Death Stranding, although it might very well be among the most important footnotes in video game history. About a year before the release of Metal Gear Solid V, Kojima and his studio released, under a fake Identity, a bite sized little demo under the name

PT (Playable Teaser) (2014)

One that is rather funny, considering he had previously declared his intention to never go back from making open world games to linear ones. PT is set in a single corridor and a small bathroom. According to him, players were meant to take multiple weeks to figure out its puzzles and get to its real ending which would reveal that it's intended to be a teaser for a new entry in the Silent Hill series and that he would be the director. So, unsurprisingly, people caught on on the same day.

This was part of a wider marketing strategy Kojima was doing around that time, you see. He also initially announced Metal Gear Solid V under the fake name "Joakim Morgen" chief developer of the fake Swedish studio "Moby Dick Studios" under the title "The Phantom Pain" that would become its subtitle. And in case you're wondering, no, that wasn't fooling anyone either. Those quirky little publicity stunts that weren't really fleshed out enough that you could call them ARG's were a bit of a spleen of his in the 2010's and now serve as little more than a bit of trivia. Either way, PT, despite being by its own admission only a teaser, somehow turned out to be one of the most influential horror games in the history of the genre and is often considered one of the "best games never made".

Which is a pointless way to describe something, of course, because I don't think there is much of a point to judge something by the potential it had. Nevertheless, despite its publicity, PT is widely treated as a pretty big deal.

So, what happens in PT? You're a guy who wakes up in a small room. After leaving it, you find yourself in a corridor. A corridor that loops whenever you try to enter the next room. As it does there are subtle changes. A radio relays a news story of a family man who murdered his pregnant wife and children for no apparent reason. Haunted by the spirit of a woman and a deformed fetus in the sink of your bathroom, you piece together that you're probably that man. After solving some rather esoteric puzzles, the game zooms out and you finally see yourself as a character played by actor Norman Reedus, who would go on to play the protagonist of Death Stranding, in the streets of a foggy town as we learn that what we just played was supposed to be a demo for a game called Silent Hills.

There is not much to PT in terms of gameplay and even Kojima himself stated that it wasn't representative of what the actual game would play like. According to him, Silent Hills would have been a Third Person title like the rest of the series. But it was well directed, effectively scary and what it had in terms of exposition was quite evocative. Apart from the face value setup of playing a man who had murdered his family as he's caught in some sort of purgatory, the rest of the games flavour text suggests some brainwashing plot going on behind the scenes and directly references the MK Ultra government experiments. Also a line saying "The Radio Play of 40 years ago was real, they're among us", which is clearly a reference to the War if the Worlds radio play done by Orson Welles in the late 1930's done in the style of a new broadcast which had the reputation of actually having successfully fooled multiple people into thinking there was an alien invasion (which is an urban legend, by the way, but the reference here is clear.) I believe the protagonist was also vaguely implied to be a Vietnam veteran which, I just realized, probably means that Kojima was going for a Jacobs Ladder reference with a lot of it.

All if which, of course, led to speculations whether Kojima was planning to make his version of Silent Hill tie into the conspiracy themes of the Metal Gear series. This, along with an illustrous crew of collaborators like Oscar winning dark fantasy director Guillermo del Toro and horror mangaka Junji Ito being involved with the project created a lot of hype for it, which eventually led to an equal amount of disappointment when it fell victim to Kojima's seperation from Konami.

So, not much more ever came of it. Audio from PT was used during a horror themed segment of MGS V, Norman Reedus, as previously mentioned, would go on to star in Death Stranding while Guillermo del Toro would lend his likeness to a supporting character and Junji Ito would have a small cameo. Not to get ahead of myself, there are a lot of weird visual motives and themes that carry over between Metal Gear Solid V, PT and Death Stranding. Whales. Hands. Babies. And that's not even getting into some of the footage from Death Stranding 2 which seems to be laying on the Metal Gear references really thick.

Anyway, as is, PT's legacy precedes it. It influenced many a first person horror game that came out after it, was referenced even in entirely unrelated titles like the DLC to Watch Dogs Legion and is considered one of the great "What could have been"'s of gaming. Personally, I wouldn't trade in Death Stranding for it but it would have been very interesting to see Kojima's take on Silent Hill. Games like Visage and Post Trauma make an attempt to present their interpretation of what it might have been and make no mistake, those are quite good, but what the real thing would have looked like, we can only guess. Kojima's clearly made a very deliberate decision to not just continue the project under a different name when he went independent.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I can't forgive PT for it's puzzle solutions. Hiding a single collectible in the options menu when the rest exist in the game world is just terrible.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

How about we get to Kojima's most recent game? 2019 saw the release of

Death Stranding (2019)


Following his divorce from from Konami in 2015, Kojima announced that he and quite a number of people who've been working with him would go independent. At long last able to move on from the Metal Gear series, many were excited to see what his first standalone title in a long time would look like. Early footage turned out to be very evocative, if rather cryptic. A character modelled after Norman Reedus crossing barren, volcanic landscapes, the weight of the world on his shoulders and a child strapped to his chest. War torn pocket dimensions. Black beaches by timeless oceans. Ghostly apparitions and monstrous abominations rising from black tar. It was clear that Kojima had a lot on his mind. It was much less clear how that would actually translate to a game.

Kojima was rather cagey when it came to describing the gameplay. He was open about it being another open world game. He stressed that there would be an overarching theme of connection to both its story and its gameplay. But up until very close to its release, the core gameplay of DS was wrapped in mystery.

The circumstances of its development, not so much. Not being able to work with an in house engine, Kojima Productions licensed the Decima Engine from Dutch studio Guerilla Games, developers of Sony's flagship Horizon Zero Dawn series. Various recognizable personalities from film and television were to lend their likenesses and sometimes voices to its cast. Featuring next to Norman Reedus was Leah Seydoux, on a never ending quest to expand her collection of auteur directors she's worked with (Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino, Bertrand Bonello, Yorgos Lanthimos, Woody Allen, Raul Ruiz...) and Mads Mikkelsen, by far its biggest name, plus the relatively unknown Tommie Earl Jenkins along with the likenesses of directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Matter of fact the games marketing was so vague about what it would actually play like that the reveal left many people underwhelmed. Death Stranding is a game about being a delivery man. The player plays Sam Bridges, a courier in a post apocalyptic world in which the boundary between life and afterlife has broken down, man-eating ghosts have invaded the material world, rain ages everything it touches and the extinction of mankind is looming. Sam works for the remnants of the United States government, sent on an expedition to travel across the country and connect its isolated cities and settlements to a communications and supply network and reunite the nation, all the while fending of bandits, separatist militias and the spirit of a war veteran seeking vengeance for a grave injustice. Setting in motion what's effectively a New Weird reimagining of the 1985 post apocalyptic novel The Postman by David Brin (Some might be vaguely familiar with the famously unsuccessful 90's Tom Hanks movie loosely adapted from it) and a fictionalization of the 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy.

What's interesting about Death Standing is that it has all the basic gameplay mechanics of an open world action game but uses them to very different effect. You walk. You shoot. You punch You drive cars. What separates it from games like your Assassin's Creeds or Horizon Zero Dawn is how Death Stranding uses combat and action to punctuate the gameplay rather than be the gameplay. There are enemies and enemy camps and guns and even the occasional bombastic boss fight but most of the game is spent carrying or driving cargo between places, dealing with various environmental hazards and using tools like bridges, ladders and ziplines to build stable connections between them. The unique thing about Death Stranding is that it's very easy to imagine a version of it where Sam isn't a courier but a soldier or a mercenary and instead of connecting cities and outposts his task would be to liberate them from separatist occupation, Far Cry style. I'm sure this version would have had an easier time finding an audience and I'm so glad that it's not what it is.

Kojima sometimes likes to claim he invented stealth games with the original Metal Gear. That claim is... highly dubious but his contributions to the genre of stealth games definitely speak to the fact that he's always been interested in what games can be about other than direct combat. Death Stranding comes very close to being a sort of pacifist manifesto. You will, in all likelihood, spend the entire game without killing a single human enemy. Matter of fact, you are severely punished if you do, considering due to a peculiarity of its setting, dead bodies will trigger a giant explosion unless they're correctly disposed of in a specialized facility. Death Stranding deliberately recontextualizes the gameplay conventions of third person open world action to emphasize its themes of connection and nonviolence.

What's funny is that despite its tremendously odd world building and metaphysics, DS is a relatively simple story by Kojima's standards. It sets up a fairly straight forward goal. Travel across the country, connect all the cities and facilities on the way to the network and rescue the president's daughter and designated successor (The United Cities of America are... not very far along when it comes to reestablishing democratic institutions) who is held hostage by the leader of the separatist movement. Up until the final act when the apocalyptic stakes of the story come into focus, that's what you'll be doing. Additional depth comes from the characters and their relationships, some of which pay off as the game's concluding, some of which stand as simple quirks.

Most of what there is to DS' subtext is again in the details, which see Kojima firing from all cylinders. You are given the job to deliver oxytocin supplements to outposts whose inhabitants barely have human interaction. You deliver preserved semen to remote towns with little biodiversity. Babies are delivered to brain dead mothers who are connected to the world of the dead and used to power devices that detect hostile spirits. Bandit gangs of disgruntled former couriers who were replaced by drones roam the lands. It's all that patented Kojima mix of being extremely complicated and at the same time comically on the nose about the points it's trying to make. Much like MGS V it's once again a relatively simple plot with a rather complicated backstory, albeit missing its connection to real history.

The other thing about Death Standing is what a weirdly humble project it is by high budget game standards. It's graphically and mechanically sophisticated but compared to proper Triple A open world games its scale and scope seems rather humble. There is only a small variety of enemies, no populated towns you actually get to enter, only extremely simplistic side content, almost no friendly NPCs to interact with... outside of its lavish cinematics and a number of infrequent but extremely opulently staged action setpieces there is a distinct Double A feel to its production values. Of course I don't know what its actual budget was but it feels much more modest than something like an Ubisoft open world title or a Horizon game. Matter of fact, considering some allegations that part of why Konami fired Kojima was that development time and budget for MGS V were getting out of hand, I feel like it was in part intended to demonstrate to Sony that he can deliver a quality game under budget and with only 3 years of development.

Anyway, I think Death Stranding was overall a successful beginning to a new IP and a pretty good showcase that Kojima doesn't need the Metal Gear brand to make a compelling game. His strengths as a writer, director and game designer translate just fine to a new project. Which, of course, makes me excited to see what DS2 will be like. My hope is that it will expand on DS1's courier gameplay with more dynamic and more hazardous environments and obstacles. My worry is that they got the wrong idea from some of the more critical reviews and try to turn it into more of an action game. Now, if the early previews are anything to go by, it seems like it's effectively both and I do hope it won't lose some of unique gameplay identity. The story of course could go either way, according to Kojima he's intending to explore the negative side of connections with the sequel, colonialism and imperialism, which I hope means a return to some spicier social commentary.

As of right now, the release of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is almost exactly two weeks away and I'll be happy to share my impressions once it's out. See you then!

 

[BrawlMan]

of right now, the release of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is almost exactly two weeks away and I'll be happy to share my impressions once it's out. See you then!

Have fun.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Preload is done. Less than two days to go.

 

[BrawlMan]

It's time @PsychedelicDiamond....

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[PsychedelicDiamond]

It's time @PsychedelicDiamond....

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I'm happy it's so warmly received! Critical reception of the first game was overall positive but there were quite a few outliers who really couldn't get into it. Seems that 2 managed to win a lot of those over.

Game unlocks at midnight, so in about 8 hours here. I don't think I'll stay up for it but I will surely start it up first thing in the morning.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Pat and Woolie talk about Kojima wanting people to be less happy with the game.

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It's the raison d'être of the auteur- to be controversial, so that people talk about you.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Pat and Woolie talk about Kojima wanting people to be less happy with the game.

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It's the raison d'être of the auteur- to be controversial, so that people talk about you.

Clearly, he wasn't very succesful with that, considering DS2 is reviewing really well.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

ok hearing woodkid mesh in the game world made more than perfect sense kojima chose them, and kinda suspect experiences music the way myself and others who lose themselves in the grand sea of emotions and imagery certain soundscapes conjour, like even that specific first song am sure the first time I heard it was a moment of grandiose environmental/earthly despair, except he had an expanding creative project world of his own it symbiotically fused with whereas I had nowt but aimless existential political OCD. is strange to play a new fancy game and the main thought bouncing around the head over and over again is - maybe we should swap playlists or something he's probably got some other stuff I ain't heard yet!

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

Not that far in, a couple of chapters and I reckon this is exactly the kind of sequel that most people will praise for its increased complexity in terms of gameplay and writing compared to its predecessor while also creating a loud minority of players who will be very vocal about how they preferred the comparative simplicity of the first game.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Ok, legit tips courtesy of Boomstick -