Death Stranding: Great views, great tunes
September 19, 2023 6:39 PM Subscribe
Two of the best things about the game Death Stranding are the beautiful terrain and the beautiful music.
The entire playlist on youtube
The entire playlist on youtube
I'm pleased to see animated people now include breathing. they still don't quite look right (maybe the breathing is exaggerated), but at least the artists/programmers are trying. I won't be surprised to find out that breathing for game characters has been around for five or ten years.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:28 AM on September 20, 2023
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:28 AM on September 20, 2023
It really is such a gorgeous game. All of Kojima's games have this quality to their landscapes (subject to the technical limits of the time). Metal Gear Solid V takes place is this really nicely rendered, detailed rocky landscape. It mostly doesn't matter to the game but it's there and appreciated.
What I loved in Death Stranding is it's a game about terrain. And about traversing that terrain to deliver packages, wayfinding and climbing and stumbling through awkward terrain. Those rivers are pretty but a huge pain in the ass to cross, forcing you to find a ford. The particularly fun part of the game for me was the ability to modify that terrain, to build bridges and ziplines, to overlay something onto this beautiful landscape that makes it slightly easier to get through.
And then the horror part of the game, the way that terrain hides a second monstrous world that occasionally boils up and consumes the world, consumes you. It's lovely and awful.
posted by Nelson at 6:48 AM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
What I loved in Death Stranding is it's a game about terrain. And about traversing that terrain to deliver packages, wayfinding and climbing and stumbling through awkward terrain. Those rivers are pretty but a huge pain in the ass to cross, forcing you to find a ford. The particularly fun part of the game for me was the ability to modify that terrain, to build bridges and ziplines, to overlay something onto this beautiful landscape that makes it slightly easier to get through.
And then the horror part of the game, the way that terrain hides a second monstrous world that occasionally boils up and consumes the world, consumes you. It's lovely and awful.
posted by Nelson at 6:48 AM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'd never heard of this game until this morning when the game creator Hideo Kojima popped up on my youtube feed because he got to pilfer the Criterion closet.
posted by nikoniko at 12:13 PM on September 20, 2023
posted by nikoniko at 12:13 PM on September 20, 2023
> I'm pleased to see animated people now include breathing. they still don't quite look right (maybe the breathing is exaggerated), but at least the artists/programmers are trying. I won't be surprised to find out that breathing for game characters has been around for five or ten years.
Nobody is doing this better than Naughty Dog in the Last of Us. They have the least-uncanny valley character animations in games today, with a ton of details like breathing (they even have a heart rate internal param for the characters) and realistic eye movement. Compared to them the character models in Death Stranding look like robots.
posted by dis_integration at 2:06 PM on September 20, 2023
Nobody is doing this better than Naughty Dog in the Last of Us. They have the least-uncanny valley character animations in games today, with a ton of details like breathing (they even have a heart rate internal param for the characters) and realistic eye movement. Compared to them the character models in Death Stranding look like robots.
posted by dis_integration at 2:06 PM on September 20, 2023
>I'm pleased to see animated people now include breathing. they still don't quite look right (maybe the breathing is exaggerated), but at least the artists/programmers are trying. I won't be surprised to find out that breathing for game characters has been around for five or ten years.
When bringing game characters to life in the tail end of the '90s I included animation cycles for breathing, coughing, stretching, itching, etc. But it was the coughing I was most excited about, since it implied internal organs (a big deal with a character made of only a couple of hundred triangles).
So yes, it's been around for over two decades.
posted by Wetterschneider at 4:49 PM on September 20, 2023
When bringing game characters to life in the tail end of the '90s I included animation cycles for breathing, coughing, stretching, itching, etc. But it was the coughing I was most excited about, since it implied internal organs (a big deal with a character made of only a couple of hundred triangles).
So yes, it's been around for over two decades.
posted by Wetterschneider at 4:49 PM on September 20, 2023
This game contains multitudes. I jokingly refer to this game as "Norman Reedus and the fetus", but also this game meant so much to me.
It was summer 2020, in the middle of lockdown with just me and my partner alone at home for months. So much of Death Stranding is huge vistas and wandering across empty spaces, separated from seeing the people that you're delivering packages to by screens and gates. Yet what you deliver matters to the people receiving it, so you keep going, step by step.
The back half of the game has a long section set in the Rocky Mountains, where it's just silence barely broken up by the sound of your boots breaking through snow. Climbing, climbing, sliding down, slipping, pushing forward into the wind, on and on, for hours. And then suddenly, in the middle of that painful isolation, this song.
Yes, I cried.
posted by past unusual at 5:24 PM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
It was summer 2020, in the middle of lockdown with just me and my partner alone at home for months. So much of Death Stranding is huge vistas and wandering across empty spaces, separated from seeing the people that you're delivering packages to by screens and gates. Yet what you deliver matters to the people receiving it, so you keep going, step by step.
The back half of the game has a long section set in the Rocky Mountains, where it's just silence barely broken up by the sound of your boots breaking through snow. Climbing, climbing, sliding down, slipping, pushing forward into the wind, on and on, for hours. And then suddenly, in the middle of that painful isolation, this song.
Yes, I cried.
posted by past unusual at 5:24 PM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
That song is a lovely thing. I think of this as the Far Away moment, since a similar musical break in Red Dead Redemption was the first place a lot of people encountered it. A few games do it but fortunately they all seem to have earned it.
Death Stranding also had a fantastic asynchronous multiplayer system, where you could see the structures other players built sometimes. It could be a huge help, a bridge or zipline where you most need it. But also nicely balanced so it didn't make the game too easy or rob you of accomplishment. And of course it cut both ways, I was particularly proud when one of my zipline towers became quite popular.
IIRC part of Death Stranding's system was that other players' structures would decay over time, only persist in the world if they were continuously used and appreciated. I wonder what it's like now, 3+ years after release. Has the online world crumbled into dust?
posted by Nelson at 5:30 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
Death Stranding also had a fantastic asynchronous multiplayer system, where you could see the structures other players built sometimes. It could be a huge help, a bridge or zipline where you most need it. But also nicely balanced so it didn't make the game too easy or rob you of accomplishment. And of course it cut both ways, I was particularly proud when one of my zipline towers became quite popular.
IIRC part of Death Stranding's system was that other players' structures would decay over time, only persist in the world if they were continuously used and appreciated. I wonder what it's like now, 3+ years after release. Has the online world crumbled into dust?
posted by Nelson at 5:30 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
« Older She likes to have her belly rubbed. Figs are one... | From Unwanted To Sniffing For The Future Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by wierdo at 1:00 AM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]