Death Stranding (2019)

One of the little big things that keep nagging me about this game is that cities and settlements don't really change.

I'm supposedly delivering mail to reconstruct the US but I don't see any impact from my deliveries in game. This means that standard deliveries are just random busywork that the game generates infinitely. Also lost cargo; at the beginning I was enthusiastically picking up and delivering lost packages, but eventually I noticed the artifice and realised that they were just random, infinite and without any impact in the world.

It would be su much better if places started small, dirty and/or non-functional and then developed more and more as you and your fellow porters made deliveries. I would actually go out of my way to deliver to the more remote locations that are a hassle to visit (like the timefall farm or the wind generator) if I felt that I was actually making a difference.

I love how utterly stupid everything about this game is. A single death can basically cause a nuclear explosion, but somehow this doesn't seem to be much of a problem? You have to burn bodies to prevent this, but they put the furnace high up in the mountains because of the -bad substance- pollution? Why not just capture the remains and dispose of those? Nothing makes sense even on a basic level.

One of the best things is that you and others constantly risk your lives and the obliteration of entire cities to travel between them to deliver... toys. And books, movies, games. People magically get food, they just want you to bring them underwear and pizza's.

Bridges: Hey Sam, we invented bots that can carry large amounts of material by themselves.

Sam: Can they deliver packages in one piece?

B: Lol, no.

S: So we use the bots to upgrade structures like roads which are incredibly annoying to upgrade, not fragile and easy to access?

B: Lol, no, we use them to deliver packages.

For. Fucks. Sake.

Connected the weather station to the network. The dude in charged (called Weatherstone 🙄) tells me that now I can access weather forecast. Then Momma rings and tells me, that now I can view he forecast, which will come in handy when planning routes. Then Die-Hardman appears and tells me AGAIN that I can access the forecast, adding that it will come handy when planning deliveries. Then I press Start to go to the map and I get a tutorial screen and an audio message telling me... you guessed it, that I can access the weather forecast when planning routes.

Also, I don't se the forecast on the map and don't really know how to enable it.

WTF happened with this game. How did anyone thought it was a good idea to give the player the same information 4 times one after the other and even still fuck up the tutorial?

My experience so far:

His mom is the President?!

The company trying to fix things is called Bridges and her name is Bridget?!

Her last name is Strand?!

The boss of Bridges is named Die-Hardman?!

Your sister succeeds your mom as President?!

The writing is somehow even more ridiculous than Saint's Row 4 but they play it completely straight. Wow.

It's been 5 days since the servers are offline. I'm a bit puzzled by not seeing any article about this in the gaming press. "Epic Games gives out Death Stranding, shuts down servers" could be a catchy headline. Although the servers are probably not handled by them, but by the publisher or the devs. Still, bad look.

(error 51003 is the error code given by the game)

This trekking simulator has all those things that I loved about BOTW (which I still haven't reviewed!). Planning your route on the map with consideration of slopes, rivers and other obstacles, preparing your equipment, making micro decisions on what path to take. I can anticipate loving this gameplay loop.

What I don't love so much is the writing, which is exuberant, cringeworthy and most of the time absolutely redundant.

I also don't care for the BTs, but I guess that's intentional.