If you are an author, you define the genres. You define trends, push the limits. Each project challenges expectations. What happens when the work of your life is torn off from you? What do you do when Metal Gear is removed? If you are Kojima-san, you do the only thing you know how. You do something bold. Bold. Risk. You do not know the expectations and do something that changes the rules. You do Death Stranding.
Since its revelation in 2016, Death Stranding is undoubtedly the most mysterious project of the video game. The split between Kojima and Konami was ugly and liar, but Sony did not hesitate to support the new Kojima productions. Released Konami's chains and METAL GEAR franchise, the sector was ready for Kojima without sequence. Miraculously, Death Stranding is here. No delay, no manifiers. And after more than 50 hours, I could even understand what happened.
_ * This article deals with the world and the history of Death Stranding, but great efforts have been deployed to avoid spoilers. However, if you are sensitive to these kinds of things, go slightly. * _
Death Stranding is a connection story. Create links between people and places. Face the loss and build at the top of the ruins. It's a great idea with many difficult circumstances, but it's a much more personal story than Kojima said before. Solid Snake was a protagonist with a personal interest in things, but the story of Death Stranding has a sense of sense that is not often seen in the games.
If you are a work veteran from Hideo Kojima, you already know how Death Stranding is written. Long conversations, big emptying information and more knowledge sufficient to make any credible. It is apparently unnecessarily descriptive in places, but a strange specificity partly explains why Kojima's stories attract attention. Death Stranding tackles enormous themes such as loss and connection, and Sam itself is an allegorical device for these themes.
So pretty it hurts
This game is ridiculously pretty. I remember the first shots they showed - I knew it was not possible for it to be released on PS4. Kojima, for his part, but it was too good. Environments are superb. Many regions look very strange, with bizarre rock outcrops or artificial colors, but they look real. As if I could make an exotic journey and see these exact landscapes. If there is a game with more realistic landscapes, I can not name it.
The characters are just as impressive. The rendering of Norman Reedus is as virgin that I saw a model being, both motionless and moving. The movements of tiny muscles are perfectly rendered, tiny mouth movements with subtle deformation of the face and the homogeneous appearance of wrinkles. If you play poker against one of these characters, the rendering would be granular enough to take it into account. However, each conversation is not a complete kinematic, and the vast majority of them are speaking_ variety. In these interactions, the animation is much less advanced and even the labial synchronization is a little shifted in places. However, the quality of the voice is excellent, and it is much better than an endless list of cassettes to listen.
In terms of acting, having an on board a list of actors is revolutionary. Mads Mikkelson is a clear shiny point, with magnificent delivery that overflows emotion. His work raises the other, already impressive. The scenes with Mads and other characters are among the best of the game. If you have seen The Walking Dead, you will have an idea of the performance of Norman Reedus. Far from phoning, he puts a ton of feelings in his delivery and I was looking for Sam immediately.
Tummie Earl Jenkins, Margaret Qricley and Lea Seydoux are particularly talented, each of their characters with multiple Oscar clip moments.
On the side of the game animation, things are great most of the time. Sam reacts in a credible way to the ground, placing his feet at the place where you expect there is a flow between the perceptible seamless animations. What really impressed me, that's how much SAM would behave differently on different surfaces or angles. If the animation is all boxed, there must be a considerable number. From time to time, I let myself be taken on a rock that I should not, or slide on a slope for no real reason, but these situations were rare.
Everything works with Guerilla Games Decima Engine, blocked at 30 IPS on PS4 Pro. Things have been considerably massed to feel a little more like MgSV, but when Sam ramps in the tall grass or has a strange interaction with a rock, the horizon bones: Zero Dawn reflect a little.
Sam is relatively agile, but its maneuvering capacity is progressively declining as you load. The balance is a constant concern, particularly at the beginning, and being too ambitious has led to many suboptimal deliveries. Stack your backpack too high and you will be both slower and more unstable, braiding from one side to the other and likely to fall. Although frustrating at first, I found the management of Sam's position quite relaxing once I had spotted his subtle signals that he was about to leave a tip. The carriers are classified and rewarded with I like depending on how they fulfill the delivery conditions. Sometimes a package is fragile or urgent, and exceeding expectations will leave more customers to love. The tastes are lost in buckets and reinforce SAM's ability to handle undisciplined loads or support additional weight, among other things. All this contributes to what your audience is confronted with Wearing Level, which is no longer a sign of honor than anything else.
People and community preferences also feed the Death Stranding Gear System. Stronger links encourage people to share technology with Sam. More sustainable shoes with floating freight carriers, there is a wide variety of equipment to use. Nothing crazy and impressive than the fist of MgSV, but as I said, it's not metal gear.
You will notice that I have not talked about fighting yet. The game is really not about that, but yes, there are some in Death Stranding. The mule, former carriers now obsessed with the concept of delivery, and terrorists who only want to kill you. As a general rule, it is better to avoid them, but Sam is able to sneak, to be sneaking, and to give punches if necessary. It's useful, but I missed the Variety of the Engagement of The Phantom Bread. Fortunately, shoot is nice enough, with enough weight to feel substantial.
One of the time you often want to borrow the avoidance path, it's when the BT appear. Invisible to the naked eye, Sam can use its Baby Bridge (BB) to detect and avoid or engage the BT. The rain is a dead gift that the BT are nearby, and I tended to slow down every time it was raining to prepare. Of course, the rain damages your parcels, so it's a risk of slowing down. Another example of a compromise balance.
Death Stranding is also an online game, and even if you will never see other players, there are many connection possibilities. Using your PCC (Kojima still loves acronyms), you can create different structures in the world. Things like bridges, mailboxes and other fun things that I will not spoil. Once completed, these structures will appear in the world of other players. In one way or another, it works absolutely transparently. The things I built obviously persisted in my world, but things put in place by others were also consistent.
For example, during delivery, I crossed a mountain collar because of a well-placed scale. On the way back, the same ladder was in the same place, placed by the same person. I started recognizing the user names of others and develop an honest assessment of their well positioned structures. That a group of similar names persisted throughout my experience was at the same time surprising and welcome. The server broke down several times and the game simply informed me that I was now offline. In my view, all the structures and all the names of users in the world have remained intact; It made me wonder how it works on the backend. Take note, other developers, because this online implementation is completely transparent.
There are things that strike me however. They are bugs, but they are here. The user interface is complex, there are not enough shortcuts to handle freight, and some functions are not very well explained, even in the huge codex. Control management must also be simplified because you will enter and out of terminals several times to perform various tasks.
It's something I absolutely wanted to understand for more than 3 years, I really did not know what to expect. What I found while crossing the country with Sam Porter Bridges is a unique game. Its central mechanism is a monotonous room of modern life, on a daily basis, and Kojima has managed to do a very satisfactory thing. At times, it distract me a lot from the plot, and I think the middle of the game would have been more convincing if the story beat more often. Still, the quality of the story is undeniable. Death Stranding is an exceptional title that eventually broke the expectations I was not even aware. For an author like Hideo Kojima, it sounds like unequivocal success.
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