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发表于 2019-11-22 17:45 · 未知
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DEATH STRANDING
Opinion: Death Stranding Finally Gets Good After Beating It
Death Stranding's endgame is what it should have been all along.
By Joe Skrebels
Posted: 21 Nov 2019 3:58 am
Warning: As you might have guessed, this article contains spoilers from up until the very end of Death Stranding
SEE DEAL
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I recently listened to a podcast about the Donner Party - the tragic group of American pioneers that tried to take a wagon train from Missouri to California and met just about every awful impediment they possibly could. It was almost completely horrible – a story of very human mistakes and inhuman acts, that stemmed almost entirely from poor planning. But what really struck me was that this whole tale is a fascinating reminder that, not so long ago, slightly misreading a map could lead to total ruin when the world you’re travelling in wasn’t yet built to accommodate you. It really made me want to play a game about that.
Death Stranding Ending Explained
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And then Kojima Productions gave me that game. Sort of. Death Stranding, fairly often, plays out as a sci-fi cousin to those pioneer tales, a dangerous Westward journey across America’s vast, changeable expanse in the hope of making it slightly more hospitable to the shivering groups of people dotted across the country. Sometimes it’s about other things; like the power of human connection, and global extinction, and ghosts who absolutely hate being covered in mailman piss. I like it a lot less when it’s about those things.
Which is why, after 50-odd hours, after watching multiple credits sequences roll, after having the ludicrous plot explained to me in ludicrous detail by characters I never learned to care about, I am so happy that Death Stranding’s post-game is, basically, what I wanted all along.
For so much of its runtime, Death Stranding swings wildly between AAA gaming’s most complex fetch quests - which I mean almost entirely as a complement – less successful attempts at stealth-action, and blockbuster cutscenes Hideo Kojima has become notable for in the latter half of his career. There are people who feel very differently to me about the relative value of those things but, in my experience, I was only ever truly won over by the first part.
Death Stranding Final Bosses
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From the day I found out that it was about a sci-fi postman in weirdo Icelandic America, I always hoped Death Stranding would be a game that made getting from place to place both diffi** and interesting. Sometimes, it was. Sometimes, it was a game in which I travelled patiently along the banks of rushing rivers to scan for safe crossings; or meticulously planned vertigo-inducing paths down the sides of what, in most other games, would be impassable obstacles; or found the remnants of someone’s else’s experiment in getting around, and fixed them up to help the next passer-by. It’s basically life-or-death orienteering, or a hands-on version of The Oregon Trail, or Norman Reedus’ Xtreme Hiking - whatever you call it, I am extremely into it.
But throughout the game proper, that lonely, contemplative work was regularly interrupted by BTs (somehow both boring to fight and sneak past), MULEs (moronic AI impediments) and terrorists (moronic AI impediments with guns). There’s an opinion piece to be written about how the man that popularised stealth-action has seemingly forgotten how to do it, but it’s not here.
Even when I got past all of those roadblocks and finally got to do a bit of fantasy-pioneering again, there would inevitably come a decades-long cutscene where people speak in unexplained jargon, after which Sam Porter Bridges would say something insightful, like: “Huh?” To someone enjoying the core of the game, it felt like I was some schoolchild, yanked out of playtime by Principal Kojima to do a bit more learning on a subject that will absolutely never be useful to me. And even then he never actually explained what DOOMS stands for.
But then something wonderful happened. I finished the game. I made myself wade through the series of barely interactive sequences and thinly concealed expository monologues that make up Death Stranding’s last two hours. And when I was finally allowed to play my video game again, Mr. Kojima couldn’t stop me anymore.
The post-game of Death Stranding is set amid two halves of the final act, a dead zone between Sam stopping complete human extinction and the weird bit where the president breaks down in tears at his feet in a corridor for ages (aided, to be fair, by the best performance capture I’ve ever seen in a game). It’s a glorious shard of frozen time, an endless cloudy day during which Sam can go on as many diffi** walks as he likes, and get absolutely everyone’s post delivered, with little to stop him bar his own degrading shoes.
The more I play of its post-game, the more I like Death Stranding in retrospect, simply because I’m able to forget about most of the stuff that bothered me. Cutscenes are absent. Plot-related asset stripping has mercifully stopped (no one can take Lou away from me again). Even my problems with BTs and bandits are allayed by the sheer range of tools and choice of routes I have available to me. I can basically dodge all the stuff I don’t like (or use the excellent Sticky Gun, which is essentially a F**k-You-Machine for thieving MULEs).
The more I’m allowed to just live quietly in this wide, weird world, the more I appreciate its smart touches. I truly love that this is a game map where even a small rock can alter your route through it while, equally, almost any huge terrain obstacle can be overcome. The old video game boast of “if you can see it, you can go there’ means a lot more in Death Stranding, because the ‘going there’ is that much more involved than just hammering a jump button and hoping your character clips onto the edge of another bit of non-slidey rock texture.
With every one of the game’s deliveries now available to me, I’m building chains of quests, seeing how far I can push myself across the Central Region, and how far my fully inflated set of tools can keep me going. I’m watching this game’s beautiful roads build themselves across the horizon, and bridges pop up across rivers as more and more players invisibly flood across America around me. I’m starting to think up self-made challenges for myself - refusing to use other players’ structures on my routes, or loading up with PCCs and just building zipline networks across entire swathes of map.
Plucked out of its narrative mire, the game at the centre of Death Stranding does begin to feel like quite a special experiment, a surprisingly literal AAA successor to the ‘walking simulator’ popularized in the indie space. There are things I’d change (I will never find constantly readjusting my balance fun), but there’s a lot I wouldn’t. I would not have had this opinion even days ago, before I’d seen the “TWO WEEKS EARLIER” intertitle that introduces the endgame.
It’s a shame – to me, at least – that Kojima didn’t seem to want that experiment to be the key part of his game, so often stepped over in favour of a grand storyline that, if I was being charitable, I would say is ‘distractingly overwrought’. It’s perhaps a step too far into what-iffery, but I wonder about how much better that wonderful walking could have been if a little less development time had gone into all the bits where you weren’t walking at all. Could we have had more varied and interesting vehicles, buildable transportation beyond those brilliant ziplines, or a wider variety of terrain hazards? Or at least more than one place where that oxygen mask item I carried for 10 hours was actually required?
But the very fact I’ve got those wishes at all speaks to the fact that, after all this time, I’m still engaging with Death Stranding’s core mechanics, its basest game ideas. After the credits roll, it really does begin to become a game about the triumphs and tribulations of travel, just like I’d hoped for. I just wish it hadn’t taken 50 hours to get there.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK Deputy Editor. |
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发表于 2019-11-22 17:52 · 重庆
