This week: Tinkered with emulation on his Steam Deck, which was surprisingly easier than thinking of classics he cares to replay. Watched 28 Years Later around 14 days after watching 28 Days Later.
Last night, I set off on my longest delivery yet in Death Stranding 2. I was to cross the entire chunk of Australia I'd discovered so far, weaving past bandit camps, over rivers, and through BT areas while transporting 200kg of… who can remember, maybe baked beans.
I meticulously charted a route with the expectation that, at some point, I'd have to ditch the truck in some craggy rocks, either because the battery died, wheels got stuck, or BTs showed up. So I packed extra ladders and ropes, strapped on a new pair of boots, printed a shotgun and grenades, then set off.
No bandits took note of my existence, the BTs never showed, and it turns out craggy rocks are no match for Drawbridge suspension technology. I never left the truck. The whole trip took less than five minutes.
I've had way too many deliveries like that over the last 20 hours. I'm afraid Death Stranding 2 is too easy, which is a shame, because so was the original. It was a major flaw of one of my favorite games of the previous decade, and while the sequel is a step up in many ways, difficulty remains flat. Whenever it releases on PC (I'm playing on PS5 because we don't have a PC release date yet, but it's expected), I hope this changes.
I blame several things, but most of all, I blame the Chiral Network.
Should I have connected?
Hooking up a new region of Australia to the internet should be exciting, but I dread it, because as soon as I make the connection, I know I'll never need another tool there ever again. Thanks to the generosity of porters in alternate realities, all pathfinding worries are taken care of. Pre-placed ladders or ropes drape over every mountain face. Green footsteps of past porters reveal the best paths up a hill or through rocks. Watchtowers dot the perimeter of every bandit camp, just in case I need a backup observation tool for the magical marionette puppet on my belt.
And the generators—god, I've started to hate generators. Every time I'm wheeling across the desert thinking, "Hey, my bike battery is almost half dead, I might have to improvise here," boom—a convenient generator built by some guy named delta-jim774 saves me from the horrors of making an interesting decision.
It's all too much. It's one thing to lend a helping hand, but it's another when that help is so readily available that I feel like everyone else is playing Death Stranding for me.
I'm seriously considering severing my personal connection to the Chrial Network (my PS5's ethernet cord) to get rid of community assists altogether, but then I'd lose out on everything I love about Death Stranding's indirect co-op, like leaving little messages through signs, sending players requested tools, and peeing on the same mushroom that someone else peed on.
But honestly, help is the last thing I need in Death Stranding 2. Kojima has once again taken core systems that force me to constantly make meaningful choices—stamina, weight, balance, exhaustion, elevation, pathfinding—and undermined them with a reward structure that chips away at the challenge the more you play.
Old habits die hard
The people of Australia are handing out gadgets and weapons faster than I can use them. Many are fun to play with, like the tranq rifle, combat boots, and hologram grenades, but lots of them are just straight boring upgrades designed to trivialize the stuff I come to Death Stranding for, like an anti-grav generator for Sam's backpack that makes it nearly impossible for him to lose his balance (there goes that core mechanic).
That's on top of leg skeletons, which also make balance a non-issue while adding 100kg to Sam's cargo limit. New to Death Stranding 2 is a skill tree with further upgrades that come with zero tradeoff—I keep avoiding the one that threatens to automatically save Sam from falling on his ass. It's already hard enough to screw up an order, so if I'm tripping into a faceplant, I probably deserve it.
It's the double-edged sword of Kojima's love of the arsenal: Since the Metal Gear days, the man has been showering his fans with neat gadgets and doo-dads that are fun to play with, but he never makes things hard enough that we need them.
It's a "too many solutions, not enough problems" dilemma that began with the tranq pistol—the default weapon of Metal Gear Solids 2, 3, 4, and 5 that outclasses everything else in those games—and lives on in Death Stranding 2 in the form of vehicles with huge batteries that Sam has constant access to, a world that automatically populates itself with shortcuts, and also a literal tranq pistol unlockable early on.
The good news is that I can choose not to craft the overpowered stuff. I can selectively ignore the battle skeleton, pretend that battery boosters don't exist, "forget" to bring container repair spray, and make up a thin excuse for why a delivery must be completed on foot when I could get it done in a tenth of the time on a motorcycle. Death Stranding gives me room to decide what fun is, which is better than the alternative of all upgrades being mandatory and permanent.
But I don't want every bit of friction to be headcanon. What I want is a Death Stranding 2 that meets me where I'm at—a way to play that pushes me to conserve resources, think long and hard about routes, and makes BTs truly terrifying. I want a Death Stranding 2 hardcore mode.
Before you ask: Yes, I'm already playing on the highest Brutal difficulty, but it's barely different from Normal. My theoretical hardcore mode could have more specific limitations. What if Sam could only build a handful of structures at a time? What if the timefall destroyed ladders in a matter of hours, not days, and what if ropes could snap? What if guns couldn't be printed, only stolen from enemy camps, and what if that led to Sam relying on his surprisingly deep melee moveset more often?
Mileage would vary on those roadblocks, but these sorts of modifiers could go a long way towards sustaining the crunchy, manual action of DS2's opening hours—when you're just a guy with ropes hiking through an unforgiving apocalypse. Maybe something to throw on the whiteboard for the inevitable Death Stranding 2: Director's Cut, just in time to enjoy it on PC.
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