*some spoilers* (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Sunday, July 27, 2025, 11:43 (4 hours, 1 minutes ago) @ Cody Miller

What could have been done? Either make the world even more a pain in the ass and restrict your tools even harder, or else maybe lean full into it now being a combat game.

I wish I had a good answer. I'm not sure how you keep the challenge of traversal without it just becoming annoying long term. To be clear, I think the first game had that problem, too. Past a certain point, the problem had been solved. I had hoped there would be more dynamic elements to contend with. The trailer showed avalanches and rockslides and flooding, but none of that matters. I've only seen one avalanche so far, and it's a scripted event based on the delivery. Flooding seems to happen, if not at random, at least not always tied to specific missions, but it doesn't actually present anything the player needs to contend with. I just wish more unexpected things could happen that the player might not be immediately able to account for. I couldn't actually say what that would look like. I only saw the one wild fire, and that was an awesome moment that, while not necessarily challenging, at least provided a fun moment to deal with, either with a tar cannon if you have one or finding the safe path through it. The only other wild fire I know for sure happens in the game is also tied to a specific delivery. I don't think it's just a thing that can happen while you're out and about.

I started a new playthrough. I'm not completely offline, but in the cargo only mode. I don't see other people's structures, but I can still interact with entrusting cargo for others and delivering shared cargo. It's been much more enjoyable. While still not actually challenging, it's much better to have to build my own infrastructure to deal with inconveniences.

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed the answer to "Should we have connected?" is "Yeah, probably." I think there would have been a really great story in there about the different type of connections, and how modern connections actually drive us apart. Maybe the chiral network isn't the answer, and the real answer is actual community.

While I think the story was a fun ride (at least the final few hours), I ultimately find it pretty disappointing. The tagline is "Should we have connected?" and the game doesn't really do a whole lot to address that point.

I also don't think it does anything interesting with Sam. The game is ostensibly his journey of dealing with the grief of losing Lou, except it's not, because that is never addressed like at all. Sam doesn't seem like a character going through grief. It honestly feels like Norman Reedus was expensive and spent a day recording dialogue and that was all they got. That made a certain amount of sense in the first game, or it at least felt like it fit the vibes of the game, but it feels very out of place in this one. It's just weird.

I also don't like that Lou is literally Sam's kid. Tomorrow being Lou is fine, but her literally being the kid he had with Lucy seems unnecessary. So that random corpse disposal dude in the beginning of Death Stranding just happened to have the super secret ur-BB?

I loved all the stuff with Higgs at the end, even if it's absolutely stupid as hell. It was ridiculous and fun, but the actual story of the characters of DS2 is basically non-existent.

There's a point in the story where Rainy needs to go see the Doctor. It's sort of set up like its an emergency. The game tells you, but then is like "finish up anything you want to take care of before we move," and I absolutely dropped everything--like Rainy is in trouble and needs to go see the doctor, lets go! And then nothing happens. We don't get any actual character development, we don't learn anything new--that scene just reiterates stuff the doctor already told us when we first met her, only we get to see her do it instead of being told about it, and the fact that it's Rainy doesn't affect anything at all. The whole game kinda feels like that.