Death Stranding gameplay reveal

[Peppermint Lounge]

Eeyore

[Candy Arse]

I'm a proud member of the Kojima Kult...but not to the point where his name value would override a shit game.

MGS as an entire series is as up-its-own-candy-arse as you can possibly get...but I love the whole thing.

Also love Policenauts (grabbed an english fan sub) and Snatcher.

Death Stranding on the other hand...the name value isn't enough to get me to buy it based on trusted impressions/reviews I've been reading/hearing.

The Famitsu thing is dodgy as fuck. Nice way to kill your credibility guys.

[flipswitch]

EB rent if you’re tempted.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I'm a proud member of the Kojima Kult...but not to the point where his name value would override a shit game.

MGS as an entire series is as up-its-own-candy-arse as you can possibly get...but I love the whole thing.

Also love Policenauts (grabbed an english fan sub) and Snatcher.

Death Stranding on the other hand...the name value isn't enough to get me to buy it based on trusted impressions/reviews I've been reading/hearing.

The Famitsu thing is dodgy as fuck. Nice way to kill your credibility guys.

I'm more attracted than not but if I don't enjoy it I'm fine with saying it didn't work for me. Given my past tastes and capacity for liking quirky shit I suspect I might walk out like this guy who writes 'Bless This Mess'.

https://www.gq.com/story/death-stranding-review" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[lestat]

[Ambrose Burnside]

I can see value in Death Stranding if you're unemployed and want to experience what a shit day at work feels like.

[Twiztid Elf]

This is a bad video game. I'm out. I don't have time for crap like this.


(How rare is it for me to give up eh? Very.)

[Peppermint Lounge]

I'll be playing this one in secret I think.

[Twiztid Elf]

Nah man, we need to hear your thoughts.

Reflecting back on my soft rage quit here.
There are so many things that are wrong with this game that don't bother me personally.
Sure, the gameplay is boring and repetitive, but this did not bother me at all. The open world is quite pretty and interesting IMO.

Some of the missions are straight up trolls of the player that are tone and narrative breaking.
Delivering pizza? Delivering cosplayer supplies to Conan O'Brien?
Monster energy drink product placement? (It's been changed to an in-game made up brand now btw - the time must have expired on the Monster agreement).
Really? Still none of this bothered me that much.

Half way through the game (and they literally tell you you're half way), there is some story and cut-scenes that broke me.
I was looking for the story to keep me interested, even if it was nonsensical.
And it's not that the story is bad as such, it's fine.
It's just story that is not subject matter that I care for in my video games. Hence the quit out. I just felt that I was not interested anymore.
It's like the game does everything it can to dissuade you from playing it.
To the point I wonder if this is an experiment from Kojima to test players with how much crap he can get away with.

It was just the culmination of many factors, but in the end, there are other games that I'd really rather be playing that are more interesting to me. I gave this game plenty of chance.

(Edit: I just realized that if someone else had wrote this post and I read this, I'd be even more intrigued - lol).

[Peppermint Lounge]

(Edit: I just realized that if someone else had wrote this post and I read this, I'd be even more intrigued - lol).

Confirming yes.

Playing the masterpiece MGS5 right now and I love the narrative-disrupting quirks. My near naked sniper companion Quiet currently gets around wearing gold bodypaint.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Without spoiling I arrived at a point in MGS TPP that would rate among the most tedious drudgery I've endured in a game. I wouldn't wish the task upon anyone. If it was work I'd be embarrassed to delegate it to even the lowliest work experience resource. And yet I perform it willingly within the context of the game.

Sorry guys, I suspect my face will be black with Kojima pipe residue while playing Death Stranding when the PC release finally hits.

[t0mby]

There's a couple of places Pep that you've mentioned "I won't spoil it" that I can't even remember. I've been meaning to go back to the game after I purchased the hardback guide but there's always something else that needs finishing or I start a new.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Get onto it, man. Let's be FOB buddies. GZ/TPP (I count them as one game) is my game of the decade.

edit: oops forgot we're separated by platform.

[lestat]

We have a date for release on PC now.

[Peppermint Lounge]

With Half Life cross-over content. Why not.

[flipswitch]

PC Exclusive Features
*Headcrab.: Headcrab hugs the face of Sam for the duration of the game limiting his view to 7%.
*Extra 45kg of weight added in the form of Valve sponsored luggage.
*Radiation. Radiation “hotspots” will now fill the world. When in these locations Sam’s health will deteriorate rapidly.
* New weapon: ‘Crowbar’ which can be used to open crates to find special one-off items like Nike Vaporfly. This is a well sought after item for speed runners.

Planned DLC.

*Caronavirus Battle Royale. Currently beta testing in China.

[lestat]

Saw this over at era from an insider apparently, some juicy goss on the poor sales performance and drama.

Death Stranding was a flop. It sold well initially, but I've heard it has over 3 million unsold copies of what's been produced, but the sales kinda' slowed to a crawl and the game hasn't done as well as anyone involved has been hoping. Death Stranding was also originally supposed to be a very different game, a lot darker and more horror-esque, but around a year and a half before launch the development got soft rebooted. Sony and Kojima had some disagreements, and some other studios at Sony's Worldwide Studios were a bit upset at the money Kojima was getting for the game, along with disagreements lead to Death Stranding not ending up as a PS5 game and a sharper window for release even after the soft reboot. There's a looooot more here, but this is the part I'll share that's relevant.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/is-koj ... ng.174882/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Ambrose Burnside]

I didn't know there was so much internal drama, but gameplay alone explains the poor sales.

[lestat]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/death ... ce-preview" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Reviews for PC are out right now and it looks like with DLSS every RTX card can run this at 4k 60fps easily.

Moving on to performance, DLSS as usual makes less of a difference on the fastest RTX GPUs, particularly at lower resolutions. The RTX 2080 Ti basically performed the same at 1080p with or without DLSS (DLSS was 2% faster), hitting an apparent CPU limit of around 160-165 fps. At 1440p, DLSS quality mode provided a more noticeable 23% boost in framerates (156 fps vs. 127 fps), while at 4K it delivered a 34% improvement (105 fps vs. 78 fps). We didn't test the RTX 2080 Ti in DLSS performance mode, as Death Stranding isn't the sort of game that really needs much more than 60 fps, and at 4K it's already well above that mark.

The RTX 2060 is the bottom of the RTX line, and it benefited more from DLSS at lower resolutions. DLSS quality mode improved performance at 1080p from 103 fps to 128 fps, a 25% increase. 1440p went from 75 fps to 100 fps (33% faster), and 4K improved from 43 to 56 fps (31%). It looks like DLSS quality mode can boost performance by 30-35% overall, provided you're GPU limited. What about DLSS performance mode? That was enough to take even the RTX 2060 above 60 fps (77 fps to be precise) at 4K. Obviously there's a lot less rendering work going on, since DLSS performance mode renders at half the vertical and horizontal resolution (so 4K DLSS performance is 1080p with DLSS upscaling). Still, unless you're pixel peeping it's difficult to see the difference between the various upscaling modes at 4K.

I did run some tests with an RX 5700 XT as well. Performance was fine, but there were clearly some bugs that need fixing. The default TAA mode for example didn't work, so everything looks full of jaggies. FidelityFX CAS did clean things up for the most part, but performance was slightly lower than the base settings, suggesting the upscaling aspect wasn't working right. Still, 4K at 60+ fps was possible on the RX 5700 XT (it got 76 fps with the broken TAA, and 71 fps with FidelityFX), so Death Stranding shouldn't have any trouble running at lower resolutions on various AMD GPUs.

Looks like the Decima engine runs really well on PC, good news for the horizon zero dawn port.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I've got this preloaded ready to go. Didn't become available until midight last night AEST so tonight it is. Will let you know how it runs. I know it was designed for a controller and rumble would be nice but kbam reports are good with the balance aspect of gameplay being controlled by left and right mouse buttons. Then again if there's next to no aiming in the game maybe I'll give the controller a go.

[lestat]

PS4 Pro settings:
Model detail - Default
Shadow resolution - Medium/High
Streaming memory - Default
AO, SSR, Motion Blur, DoF - On
TAA
4x AF



Alex's optimised settings:
Model Detail - Very High
Shadow resolution - High
Streaming memory - Default
AO, SSR, Motion Blur, DoF - On
TAA
16x AF (of course)


All RTX cards can output at 4k/dlss/60+fps at optimised settings

DLSS 2.0 continues to be the biggest leap in gaming technology since the fan attached to the gpu.

An added bonus video from Nvidia

[Froggy]

Hang on are they showing there they got over double the frame rate and graphical performance all due to DLSS?

[lestat]

Yep DLSS allows a game to render at a lower native resolution, then a machine learning AI algo takes several previous frames and the current frame, motion vectors and then renders a high resolution version of the image with AA applied.

So the performance saving is largely due to rendering the game at a lower native resolution. The DLSS algo isn't free of course but the performance cost of running it is far lower than full native res.

It's pretty amazing tech and apparently MS are working on a similar version for DirectML on Series X. This could be the big next gen game changer, especially when it comes to ray tracing, which we've seen so far requires much lower native resolutions to run adequately. This is largely the push behind the tech.

What's amazing is the game looks better than native 4k, with far better temporal AA resolve than current TAA implementations.

[flipswitch]

This is pretty amazing. The Cyberpunk gameplay was using it apparently and it looked very sharp like 4K. I was blown away when later on they said it was 1080p.

Is this hard to implement in games?

Time to update the old 1080ti.

[Froggy]

OK that is seriously impressive. I might go back and give control a burn with this then and see how that goes. I was getting a pretty solid 60ish FPS with my 2060 and ray tracing I think on medium so I'm keen to see the difference now.