Death Stranding’s Online Functionality Is Both Brilliant and Helpful

death stranding online

Alone, on a snow-covered mountain top, Sam trudges his way through a whiteout. With near-zero visibility and only the pulse of his Odradek scanner to briefly give him a glimpse of the terrain, being outside of the Chiral Network, Death Stranding’s version of the internet, getting to your destination can be harrowing. Once you reach your destination and make the required delivery, you can use your Q-pid (basically a USB that provides areas with connection to wi-fi) to connect the recipient into the Chiral Network. And this is where the true brilliance of the game comes through.

Once connected, you see the impact being connected online — the actual internet — opens up Death Stranding’s post-apocalyptic America to other players in all manner of ways and they are all helpful and encouraging. Once you connect an area to the Chiral Network the game allows you to see other players’ structures, signs, ladders, climbing ropes, post office boxes to drop off packages other players dropped, even vehicles to help you get around faster and the roads they’ve built to drive on.

Every single aspect of the online connectivity is meant to assist others as well as yourself. That above whiteout scenario that I described. That was my experience. As soon as I connected the NPC to the Chiral Network, I saw someone had constructed a safe house where I could stay to recharge my batteries. And I don’t mean this metaphorically, either. As you progress in the game you get more and more tools to help you make the job easier and that includes exoskeleton legs that carry more weight or all-terrain “legs” that let you travel better over various surfaces and these have batteries that drain through use. Seeing a safe house or a charging station that another player has set up in just the right spot offers the kind of relief usually reserved for shortcuts in a From Software game.

Without being connected to the Chiral Network, Death Stranding’s world feels lonely.

Even signs in the game have benefits. Passing through certain signs restores your stamina. So you might find these signs at the top of a steep hill where you had to use your stamina to keep from falling over. On highways, the speed up sign gives you, well, a speed boost. Other signs give you bonus “likes.”

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Speaking of which, the more “likes” you get and give will connect you to more player structures in the world. At one point in the game I had to make a trek back to Lake Knot City, the main hub city for the second half of the game and I was dreading it because it was a long way to go, with a few MULE camps (MULES are NPC enemies addicted to stealing cargo who can be a royal pain in the ass if you don’t have the weapons to deal with them), and a whole lot of Timefall (the time advancing inclement weather of the game which ruins your cargo if not sprayed down with repair spray, each can of which takes up valuable cargo space), and with Timefall comes BT (Beached Things) which are the enemies from the other side that drag you into mini-boss fights if you can’t escape them. Timefall Shelters felt rarer, however, they were always helpful as the emitted the repair spray and you could pass the time in them to wait out the Timefall.

I can’t even properly describe the elation I had when I saw that the find people also playing the game in my instance created a road that leads from the Distribution Center I was at which lead all the way back to Lake Knot City. I loaded up a truck that had long-distance capabilities with all of my cargo and off I went, using the “Speed Up” signs to drive right past the MULE camps, through the Timefall, missing the BT territories in the process, right into my destination. Now I can only imagine what that trek would have been like without the help of unseen friends and fellow porters.

Perhaps the most useful tool in the entire game would be the network of zip-lines on the snowy mountain tops. I had to add my own zip-line structure to a few which means anyone else in our instance passing through the area afterward would have an even easier go of it. These zip-lines need to be within 300 meters of another zip-line structure to be used, but finding a perfect spot and a series of them can make traversal and hazards such as Timefall, BT, MULES, Terrorists (yes, this game also has terrorist enemies that will kill you) completely negligible and making your experience even better. Something not possible if you’re playing offline or ignore other people’s structures.

While the bulk of Death Stranding has a feeling of being alone, the way it uses being connected to the internet and thusly- – other players — it creates a level of cooperation that I’ve never seen before in a game.  Sure, it’s easy to dismiss Death Stranding as a walking simulator if you’re being completely reductionist, but playing this game as intended you have so many options open to you via Kojima’s brilliant strand network, you will find that maybe other humans aren’t so bad and whiteouts in a video game aren’t as scary as it seems.

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Limit Break
Limit Break
4 years ago

C-can we stop, please ?
I hate it and I am trying not to say anything, ignoring it as much as a ex-Kojima fan possibly can, but you people are just continuing on to talk about this insane waste of time of a anti-fun of a open-world delivery game.

Can we stop ?
There is not much to talk about. The story is supposedly great – go watch it on YouTube. The game itself is the new word in all-consuming tedium that is trying to get a “point” across without much fear of sacrificing people’s fun and excitement they want to have when coming back home from work and having maybe 4 more hours till they have to go to sleep.
That is literally all that has to be said.
Stop.
This game will win all the VGA anyway, so we haven’t escaped it still. But please, stop making it worse.

AtrocitusRage
AtrocitusRage
Reply to  Limit Break
4 years ago

Nah, dont stop. Your reviews are great. Butthurt McGee needs to go mouth breath somewhere else.

Limit Break
Limit Break
Reply to  AtrocitusRage
4 years ago

Um… Shoulda wrote that as a different comment, not as a reply to me.

AtrocitusRage
AtrocitusRage
Reply to  Limit Break
4 years ago

Nope.

jameslara
Reply to  Limit Break
4 years ago

honestly, discussion is fine. I enjoyed the game the same way i enjoyed RDR2 and Witcher. I don’t find those games fun, but engaging.

I dont think DS is particularly great like other PS exclusives, but I dont think it’s bad. def not my GoTY, but the game does have some cool features. (I’m not the author here), for a SP focus game they nailed the online implementation

it really isnt a game for everyone though

Limit Break
Limit Break
Reply to  jameslara
4 years ago

As somebody who is playing Witcher 3 on Switch right now… I just cannot hear it being compared to Death Stranding. A eastern European inspired epic with a huge but truly varied world with surprises and sudden discoveries, be it loot or actual out-of-nowhere quests that are so not one and the same you are never sure you won’t fail them immediately due to not reacting fast enough… It just cannot be compared with a truly slow-paced game with empty dead world that is all about getting around terrain and delivering packages, which only sometimes are more interesting then just container boxes (corpses, living humans).
It would be like comparing… I don’t know even… I lack a proper example that would truly be able to mirror the same level of tedium Death Stranding does posses. Outer Worlds and No Man’s Sky, maybe ? But see, No Man’s Sky is at least a somewhat varied mess of tedium – at least the creatues can be some fantastically wrong and horrifying amalgamations…

It truly is way too hard for me to compare Death Stranding to anything. It is so unique in how utterly un-fun it is. People are drawing comparisons between it and MGS and I’m just laughing out loud.

jameslara
Reply to  Limit Break
4 years ago

it was a personal comparison of “fun” factor
I find find witcher 3 “fun” but it kept me playing and I enjoyed it. I know witcher 3 combat is garbage, but it does much else that I like.

DS is boring more than it should be, but there are things I like about it, the online connectivity being one

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