Dialogue
Edge readers share their opinions; one wins an 8BitDo controller
Dialogue
Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an SN30 Pro+ controller, compatible with PC and Switch, courtesy of 8BitDo
Eyes on the prize
I think Death Stranding makes a whole lot more sense if you try to not read it as a delivery simulator like you did in your (p)review ( E339). The format of the game seems so familiar, there are enemies and quests and an open world, that one can very easily think it’s a game around making deliveries – with questionable gameplay around it! The balancing of cargo is cumbersome, the stealth bits are little more than a nuisance on your way, trudging through the landscape is repetitive, the BTs don’t offer interesting tactical choices…
But the game still works as intended: everything serves the function to make you care about those deliveries. It’s not about the deliveries, it’s about you caring about them.
Especially because it’s a chore, you care very much about getting it done. In turn, you’re glad about any help you receive from other players. The praise of NPCs is meaningful because, yes, it was boring and tedious, thank you very much.
The story helps keeping you invested, but I think for Death Stranding to be correctly understood as a “strand game”, as Hideo Kojima intended it, all the gameplay can only be understood by its effect on your connection with others.
MULEs robbing your cargo results in a tedious trip to get it back so that you’re grateful for the ladder someone left there. You easily stumble so that you get angry at yourself for the damage you did to the packages, pledging to take better care of them next time. Likes exist so you actually ‘do’ the appreciation: you hammer the touchpad, thereby forging a connection to that other person, enticing you to return those favours. Obviously, you can’t be paid in cash, but in appreciation again, so that you care more and more about those likes – both about getting them and giving them.
I, for one, found a very strong urge to place something in the world that would enrich someone’s experience, thinking about a way to help ‘my community’.
I believe this wouldn’t happen if the gameplay was already rewarding. You need the cognitive dissonance between ‘I want to have fun’ and ‘this actually isn’t much fun’ so that you turn to meaningfulness as the solution: ‘Surely I do this because it’s important!’
The story is a part of what keeps you going, but what makes Death Stranding an interesting game to me is how it recruits you into its value system, suddenly caring about rebuilding America even though it’s not fun, it takes forever and really, why am I doing this? In this, we players get surprisingly close to Sam Porter Bridges, and suddenly the fourth wall breaking makes all the sense in the world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are some people, both within the game and outside it, who need my help.
Jan Müller
Fair point, we suppose, but it’s a rare developer that actively sets out to make something annoying, particularly at Kojima’s end of the budgetary spectrum. Still, it’s viewpoints like these that make us glad Death Stranding exists; we may not like the game that much, but the conversation around it has been (mostly) fascinating. Send over your address, and we’ll get a controller in the post. Hopefully the courier won’t fall in a pile of gloop on the way over.
Hi-fi
“What makes Death Stranding an interesting game is how it recruits you into its value system”
I’ve been dipping in and out of Death Stranding as I can – it’s a game that seems to demand hours of my time in a session, but being a flighty gamer, I’m split between The Outer Worlds, Pokémon Shield, my travails on Ring Fit Adventure and my need to delve back into retro games.
Yet there’s something about the strand game that keeps on nipping at my heels. It’s everything I despise in modern games – fetch quests, encumbrances, item endurance. And despite that, I want to keep going. I spent so long wondering why. Yes, I am a Kojima fan, but post- MGSV had no desire to return to the series, nor do I now. I have often pottered about in MGS2 and but don’t feel the need to return to them. Yet there is something in Death Stranding that I’ve only just put my finger on.
In the first Red Dead Redemption, when your character reached Mexico, a song by José González played. It was a stunning, and stirring moment. In Death Stranding, Kojima takes those goosebumps to the nth degree, and every crest of a hill potentially unlocks a new song. It’s intoxicating, and keeps the sense of discovery afresh. I’m unsure of any other game makers using music to the same extent as in Stranding, but appeal to the Edge crew – what am I missing in smart audio design?
Martin Hollis
As RDR2’ s handful of attempts to recapture the brilliance of its predecessor’s Mexico moment proved, merely following a template rarely yields magic. For us, the frequency of Death Stranding’s hill-cresting interludes lessened their impact, because we quickly learned to expect them. In games as in music, less is often more.
Migration of souls
With an eye on the title of the letters in E340 (you having been rumbled by Martin Hollis in E339), I’d like to tell the very same Mr Hollis; You’re Playing It Wrong. Or at least, playing the wrong thing.
Unlike Martin the merely 35-year-old whipper-snapper, I’m a fan of Dark Souls. But in an intellectual sort of way; I appreciate the game design and I love the reviews. God knows at 46 I’m self-aware enough never to actually try to play the thing. It sounds like a world of pain.
But there was good fare on your Games Of The Decade list for those who want great narrative with low (read: zero) challenge: Gone Home and The Walking Dead. And I’m going to shout out for Life Is Strange, because… just because, dammit. Also What Remains of Edith Finch. Great narrative and a bit of challenge? See Sunless Skies.
And yet, occasionally one does like a test of skill. Like Chris Hemmens, I loved Into The Breach; last summer it was the first game in a decade or so that I completely completed, achievements and all. My only regret was that I played it through on Normal difficulty, except for the ‘win on Hard’ achievement. So last week when I picked up Chris’ new favourite game, Bad North, I set it straight to Hard difficulty and got stuck in. My only gripe is that it has a checkpoint in the middle of your run. Checkpoint in a Roguelike! I ask you. But as I keep reloading my checkpoint, grinding through the first easy island afterwards, then splitting my forces and trying to achieve the near impossible of defending the power-up island with two units, so I can take the other island with my three units, so I have a turn in hand, so I can claim the extra general in two turns’ time… I wonder if I’m not playing a Soulslike after all.
Tony Park
We are big fans of the way Dispatches is steadily turning into the world’s slowest and smallest Internet forum, in which a small but passionately engaged readership have intelligent conversations about the issues du jour and there’s a four-week delay between posts. Long may it continue.
You still believe in me
It’s been less than two weeks since it was announced and I’ve already had an argument about Half-Life: Alyx (this is the reason I’m not allowed pen pals, Robert). My friend, an avid Half-Life and Portal fan (and an exceptional theoretical physicist – coincidence, Dr Freeman?), thinks it looks similar to Half-Life 2. He was surprised by how little progress games seem to have made in 15 years. On one hand, I partially agree with him; I wrote into E340
about diminishing returns against hardware. On the other hand, as a committed fanboy, I frothfully disagree. E339 gave an excellent synopsis of just how much the industry has changed over the last decade. And Alyx, if it works, could revolutionise VR in the same way Half-Life 2
revolutionised game physics – a much more significant achievement, in my opinion.
Nonetheless, my friend’s scepticism did make me wonder what videogame evolution looks like to an outsider. And in particular, what it looks like to someone who invests time in games very rarely, but invests it in ‘proper serious games’: Portal 2, Deus Ex, BioShock, that sort of thing. That’s a very curious demographic.
The short answer is I have no idea. And this bothers me, because it’s made me realise that I don’t really know how to convince someone who is not already converted that videogames are an exciting and innovative medium that’s worth people’s time. If a Half-Life fan who hasn’t really played anything made since 2011 isn’t excited for Alyx, then what does that say about people who have no idea about games at all? Or is it that, precisely because I’m already converted, I’m not able to view the medium of games objectively?
Then again, perhaps all that’s missing is the phenomenology. There is something about actually playing a game, and a VR game especially, that a two-minute trailer seen on a flat screen just cannot capture. Maybe when the headset is on, it will all fall into place.
Leo Tarasov
If it helps, you’re both right. Alyx does look like a Half-Life game, which is of course precisely the point. Yet even if we assume that Valve showed us absolutely everything we need to know about the game in that trailer – which it surely hasn’t – even the notionally familiar will feel completely different in VR. Will it represent the same sort of generational leap as HL2? Perhaps not. But VR finally has its killer app, and we’re sure your pal will come around.