Stan Lee

You all need to calm down. OP brought an exploit for a 6.5 year-old game to your attention for you to use or not. I don't condone using exploits but there's also no need to dogpile on him. Though I will suggest OP that you could have left out the part about making other people quit the game and that your best option now is to lock this thread.

#89- DEATH STRANDING [PS4] Greatest of Great Deliverers Obtained all Death Stranding Trophies Enjoyment: 5/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time Taken: 1 Year, 1 Month, 3 Weeks (97 Hours in-game) Rarity: 2.7% Ultra Rare (PSN) / 16.71% Rare (PSNProfiles) Hardest Trophy: Best Beloved- Reach the maximum connection level with all facilities "If you're not scared of death, how can you value life?" I got this plat weeks ago but I struggled to think of what to possibly write. In the end, I realised that there really wasn't anything profound that I could add to the conversation about a game that released over a year ago so I'll just write what I really feel, which is this: Death Stranding is the game I love the most that I absolutely could not recommend to anybody. I truly mean that. This is not a game that can appeal to anyone based on any particular taste. Hideo Kojima said he wanted to create a whole new genre with this game and in many ways I think he succeeded as well as failed catastrophically. For one thing, a huge portion of the game is just walking around making deliveries. That is it. Of course, you have to avoid the BTs- ghost-like entities- as well as Mules/ Terrorists who stand as mild inconveniences most of the time. Seriously, the game is so slow in the early stages that nothing had really happened 15 hours in so I quit. Tried coming back a few times and pushed on but still couldn't muster the willpower to deal with my own life as well as this game. Then, over a year after getting it, I decided to use my Christmas holidays and just get it out of the way. And I really can't explain how or why, but something clicked. I started enjoying it more and had impetus to push onward, to get through the story and attempt what lay beyond. Now, that doesn't mean that it suddenly became a great game to me, but at least now I didn't feel that I had wasted my money. Even when bumping up the difficulty, I didn't die or get knocked out once. The challenge of the game was simply having the patience to get from one place to another and often back again. I didn't care much for the characters or the overall story and yet at the same time the last five hours of the story hit me hard. So much emotional weight that oddly made things pay off, even if I couldn't possibly even begin to explain the plot. Graphically, the game is stunning. Some varied environments make each area memorable. Navigating the mountains was particularly enjoyable and frustrating at once, dodging BTs, trying not to fall and getting lost in blizzards. What certainly became compelling was connecting everywhere to the Chiral network and strategically placing my ziplines so that I could access anywhere from anywhere particularly in the massive Central Region. I also got the entire highway network built so deliveries that required trucks were an absolute doddle, if only the vehicles were not so damn slow and clunky to control. Just zipping along areas that initially took me hours to traverse now in seconds was exhilarating although it bothered me that the thing I was enjoying most was skipping large parts of the map. The actors' performances are among the best I've seen in a game, along with some incredible motion capture. Although the plot is weird and some of the dialogue is downright cringey (classic Kojima), they really sell it with all of their ability, especially Norman Reedus. An interesting cast overall, including appearances by directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn (voiced by other people though), Geoff Keighly (and then wasn't this nominated for GOTY in 2019? Oooh) and Conan O'Brien. Weird and random stuff but certainly gave it some flavour. The story took me about 50 hours in total, but then the post-game grind took as long again- rebuilding roads, maximising your zipline networks, building up all facilities to Level 5 connection, then making the Premium Deliveries on Hard difficulty just takes up so much time and there is very little reward. As a final farewell to the game, having not killed anybody up until the platinum popped, I grabbed a bunch of lethal assault rifles and slaughtered every Mule and Terrorist in the game, creating more fields of BTs but I'm never going back anyway! There was stuff I loved and stuff I absolutely hated, so I think 5/10 is a fair score for me personally. I struggle to see how it can possibly be a masterpiece but that's just how I feel. I do think the interconnectivity- seeing other player's structures and getting their assistance on rebuilding roads- was very interesting and perhaps we will se this kind of online implementation in future titles. But otherwise, as I said, I just could never bring myself to recommend this game to anybody.

This game was awesome back in the day. My cousin still has it running on his high-end PC and the mods he has on it make it beautiful and play great. It truly was top of the pile of early 2000s FPS games. Having played this for the plat fairly recently, well, this version just isn't great. A step above the likes of Far Cry Instincts or Vengeance but still not indicative of the true FC experience.

I thought it went on a bit too long for its own good, but I still enjoyed it. Will probably do a NG+ run on PS5 at some point

Great post. I'm on the spectrum myself and found socialising very tough as a kid/ teen and to a certain degree to this day at almost 30, so it's great to see these stories being shared.

Erm, while it may not have affected the final product too adversely like Cyberpunk 2077, there was certainly quite a lot of stress, pressure and overtime in the development of Red Dead Redemption II.

Easy or not, any time it would take would be better spent on something I actually enjoy. I have less and less time for games as I get older so I'm trying to cut out as much grind as possible.

GTA IV without online so I could finally land the plat for it would be nice!

Hopefully it will be a game that actually makes the Series X worth buying.