Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Flogger23m said:

I'm not sure if Sony can pay enough to offset the lack of PC and Xbox (despite dwindling) sales. Kojima will likely try and self publish or find someone else in the future. 505 Games published the PC version of DS1. OD, Kojima's next game, is being made with UE5 and published by Xbox Game Studios. I assume if MS and Sony decide to go back to console exclusives Kojima will likely have a prior arrangement for OD to come to Playstation. Physint, the other game being worked on, is being published by Sony and will again use the Decima engine apparently. That can be a problem moving forward potentially. Even though Kojima is 3rd party if Sony decides to stop porting their games to PC they might take it a step further and disallow their in house engines to be used on games ported to PC as well. In which case, Physint might have issues coming to PC.

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I have high hopes for any of his future games being set for release on PC, especially since I'd enjoy playing DS2 & the future ones on my desktop & Steam Deck.

My current aim for DS2, is to wait for some major patching & optimization to play it on Linux before I buy it at (hopefully) lower pricing.

I've been playing this a bit over the weekend. So far it's mostly more of the same from the first game. Less esoteric since you know all the acronyms, but the gameplay seems to be the same. I forgot how clunky it can be transitioning between guns, grenades, and even just trying to keep yourself upright. None of the controls seem to be designed for speed or efficiency in combat.

I've been using the dynamic FPS option to stay at 120fps (just like in Spider-Man) and it looks and runs well. Framegen works especially well during normal gameplay, BUT it also makes cut scenes and menus stuttery. I ended up turning it off since you never know when the game is going to shift into a random cutscene. Plus, the game runs well enough without it. At least for me.

As far as overall impressions go, I don't think this is going to win over anyone who didn't like the first one. If anything, the controls get so granular that they border on clumsy.

Yeah, I'm pretty much willing to declare that this game is just more of the same. You have more control over things (like your backpack loadout and such), but it's so granular that literally everything you do required a big ass subscreen menu. There are more/better guns, but there still isn't much motivation for engaging. Killing BTs = mostly pointless beyond just getting them out of your way. Might as well just run/drive past them. Human enemies are so slow on the draw that you can mostly just stand still and pick them off when they approach. They seem to move strategically, but they don't shoot until they get super close and they're terrible shots.

If you didn't like DS1, you aren't going to like this one either. In some ways, I actually like that one more. I feel like they tried to fix some complaints about that game, but ended up exacerbating the problems.

Death Stranding 2 PC Review + Optimised Settings


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtjHZ5ctBSg

Domingo said:

Yeah, I'm pretty much willing to declare that this game is just more of the same. You have more control over things (like your backpack loadout and such), but it's so granular that literally everything you do required a big ass subscreen menu. There are more/better guns, but there still isn't much motivation for engaging. Killing BTs = mostly pointless beyond just getting them out of your way. Might as well just run/drive past them. Human enemies are so slow on the draw that you can mostly just stand still and pick them off when they approach. They seem to move strategically, but they don't shoot until they get super close and they're terrible shots.

If you didn't like DS1, you aren't going to like this one either. In some ways, I actually like that one more. I feel like they tried to fix some complaints about that game, but ended up exacerbating the problems.

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Not my game but for the first game the world building had me keep playing. That and infrastructure building (roads and zip lines along with the acquiring of the necessary resources) got me. Definitely a good game even though I'm not normally interested in hiking simulators.

But yeah the enemy conflict type stuff is just kind of silly in the first

SecretStash said:

Not my game but for the first game the world building had me keep playing. That and infrastructure building (roads and zip lines along with the acquiring of the necessary resources) got me. Definitely a good game even though I'm not normally interested in hiking simulators.

But yeah the enemy conflict type stuff is just kind of silly in the first

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I never got into the world building stuff. No clue why - it just didn't appeal to me. I spent countless hours building my HQ in Fallout 4 and again in Fallout 76.
I think Death Stranding didn't have a core game I enjoyed, so I wasn't compelled to do more than I had to. The same applies in DS2.

I did end up playing DS2 from beginning to end. Like the first game it's consistent, but unexciting. Not much changes from the early game all the way to the end. You now have to fight enemies every 3-4 missions, but those missions are mindlessly easy. You can just roll up in a truck and shoot the enemies as they approach. You're borderline unkillable if you have multiple blood bags and you aren't blind. There's one BT that can swallow you for an instakill, but that's basically the only way to die while you're awake.

You get new guns, but the enemies are so stupid that it doesn't much matter. The other new items seem to mostly be alternatives to driving everywhere, but there's zero reason to actually do that. The truck can get you anywhere you want to go, it holds a ton of cargo, and it's faster than all the skeletons.

The boss fights are fun, but the rest of the game feels like an intentional obstacle between me and those fun moments. I started things off by doing all the missions and earning upgraded weapons and whatnot, but I stopped doing that after a few hours. It just wasn't worth it. Plus, you can get the upgraded guns as drops later on anyway. Once you get grenade and missile launchers there isn't much reason to use anything else anyway.

Finding this to be less interesting that the first game. DLSS Quality looks kind of bad as the bushes have a lot of instability, I should have the newer presets enabled in Nvidia App. The other upscaler looks kind of bad as well. I like ray tracing but it is quite minimal and even with frame gen (and no upscaling) I can get some low frame rates in some places. No ray tracing and no DLSS/frame gen does not produce good enough frame rates. I was stuttering with ray tracing and frame gen, found out that I was running out of VRAM. Apparent when you get to Australia. I turned off ray tracing and will leave frame gen on as that seems to have helped with the stuttering and will keep upscalers off for image quality.

It looks good but a bit disappointed with the performance, as it does need some type of DLSS/frame gen to get 100-120 frame rates.

But I am finding the traveling to be more bland in this game, you get vehicles too soon, and roads are easy to complete. Less BTs so far.

Flogger23m said:

Finding this to be less interesting that the first game....But I am finding the traveling to be more bland in this game, you get vehicles too soon, and roads are easy to complete. Less BTs so far.

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It's because people whined about taking too long to get things, and Kojima decided to vomit everything at the players early on to shut them up.

DS1 felt like a struggle from the beginning. I mean it only took a little commonsense to realize on the first map: Hey, I have this 1 vehicle, I don't see a way to build another, and I should probably take care of it. People would destroy it then whine about DS1 being a walking sim even though I drove probably drove 70-80% of DS1. Without the highways, the terrain in DS1 was a total pain in some areas like the rocky places in front of the weather station. DS1 without highways was a lot of fun since it forced me to scout ahead to plan my routes.

I think it feels like less BTs because the maps are bigger. More land provides more alt routes. My dream of having random BT areas seems to have never occurred. Their areas are fixed and easy to circumvent. I have important packages to deliver to bother with BTs.

I'm not building my hwys on the first DS2 run, and I'm only sticking to headshooting those armed mules with a Bola to keep the game interesting. Since the bike recharges itself in the sun, I'm considering scouting ahead and making a drive to all the unconnected areas to rough it out. Just me, a stack of gear, the lonely world where no one greets me at their station, and the hope that my bike doesn't reach 99% damage.

Flybye said:

It's because people whined about taking too long to get things, and Kojima decided to vomit everything at the players early on to shut them up.

DS1 felt like a struggle from the beginning. I mean it only took a little commonsense to realize on the first map: Hey, I have this 1 vehicle, I don't see a way to build another, and I should probably take care of it. People would destroy it then whine about DS1 being a walking sim even though I drove probably drove 70-80% of DS1. Without the highways, the terrain in DS1 was a total pain in some areas like the rocky places in front of the weather station. DS1 without highways was a lot of fun since it forced me to scout ahead to plan my routes.

I think it feels like less BTs because the maps are bigger. More land provides more alt routes. My dream of having random BT areas seems to have never occurred. Their areas are fixed and easy to circumvent. I have important packages to deliver to bother with BTs.

I'm not building my hwys on the first DS2 run, and I'm only sticking to headshooting those armed mules with a Bola to keep the game interesting. Since the bike recharges itself in the sun, I'm considering scouting ahead and making a drive to all the unconnected areas to rough it out. Just me, a stack of gear, the lonely world where no one greets me at their station, and the hope that my bike doesn't reach 99% damage.

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Yeah it does seem like some of the challenge has gone, which makes it feel more... repetitive. With DS1 the beginning was challenging and we had to move around the terrian and then gradually built roads once we explored those things. Cargo loads got bigger which required the vehicle for areas we already crossed. Now I am not struggling at all. Maybe I can increase the difficulty but that may just make it more tedious. The first game had a minor horror element that seems to be missing here, so few BTs.

Maybe it changes later.

Still have a fair bit more game left but I think I can safely say this is a step back in every way. The gameplay is just not as fun, the routes are even more simple and the "hazards" are stupidly easy to avoid. The first game often forced you to go through hazards or bunches of BTs and always kept it a bit challenging. It wasn't hard, but it did require a bit of planning and I recall once I had to abandon my truck in the mountains for a while thought I went back and got it. The paths in DS2 are stupidly easy to navigate. You can essentially just walk right to something, there is always an easy and obvious path. In the first game I often have to stop and reroute. I can just brute force anything in DS2. Just run or drive up any obvious path.

Take this mission I started. They give us this "planning" phase but all you need to do is drive or walk down from the green ship to the place on the right.



And it is as straight forward as it gets. Likewise for going up the mountain. You just drive or walk. The first game had some rougher points and the walk to climb the mountains wasn't as simple as looking and walking/driving.

There are occasional stutters as well. The frequent stuttering was gone when I turned off ray tracing (hitting VRAM limits). It looks good, but not that much better than DS1, and it does require frame generation to get 100+ frame rates. I don't think it looks good enough to require such a more powerful PC relative to DS1.

Story pacing is even worse, and like most sequels it fails to make a truly interesting follow up. Always inherently hard for a sequel to be as fresh and interesting as the first game/movie... but this seems a bit more underwhelming. So little time allocated for the antagonist and major story.

Shame. You guys have confirmed my feelings towards DS2, and others have mentioned it's not going to get more interesting or challenging. I haven't even played it since my last post, and I'm nearing that line of forgetting about it. Too bad I can't do my own memory wipe of DS1.