I’m not sure if this have been explored before but I haven’t heard of it on any of the ‘Death Stranding’ video breakdowns floating around.
Although I’m still in the cold about plot and the overall goal of the game (which I think is way more than just delivering packages), I’ve came up with a little theory about some of the gameplay mechanics on the game.
This is all just guesswork based on what little have been shown and several choices on Kojima’s previous work. I may be dead wrong about all this but here it is.
I think that Sam will be a breathing/living thing that will react realistically to everything on his environment and our work as players will be to make him survive said environment so he can complete his missions.
Everything you do in the world will have a consequence on Sam and his surroundings will be as much as an enemy as the “chiral beings” that may suck him to the water-death-realm or whatever that place may be. A true survival game.
If you pay attention to the small portions of gameplay on the E3 2018 trailer, when you see Sam loosing balance while carrying a corpse, taking a sip of his water bottle, looking around the ruins of a building in the rain, all of these are automatic systems that informs the player on Sam’s being and the actions they must take (i.e. if you keep going through terrain that makes you lose your balance, you’ll trip and lose your cargo and/or injure yourself). I’m guessing that when you are giving a mission to transport ‘X’ cargo to ‘X’ location you’ll be given a certain amount of resources and I’ll the players job to manage said resources to make Sam get to his destination alive with the cargo safe and sound (The water bottle I mentioned, the rope he uses to climb mountain cliffs, the extra pair of boots he’s seen carrying around).
Maybe that scene when he uses a ladder to cross a giant crevasse is not his only choice but the most “effective” way to reach where he needs to go with the items at his disposal. Maybe he could circle that area instead of risking falling off but that would make him take way more time to get where he needs to go.
The way you are informed on Sam’s health/status will be entirely environmental, aided by the handcuff/bracelet telling his health via color code (blue/yellow/red) and Sam’s own gestures. Maybe if he hurts his foot he’ll start to have a limp and you’ll need to treat your injuries (like when he has to rip-off his toenail in the trailer) otherwise it’ll make your mission more difficult. But all of this won’t be made through screens like in MGS3 but I’ll be a mechanic of self-examination and treatment aided by sub menus like in MGSV.
The same will be true as of how he interacts with his surroundings and how that affects the flow of your mission. Think of the trailer introducing ‘The man in the golden mask’. Imagine the difficulty of having to evade that giant lion creature with a live cargo on your shoulders and no visible weapon to aid you.
I’m not putting any of this out of my butt, all this comes from paying attention to the way Sam reacts to his environment in the gameplay trailer: the way he stretches his fingers after climbing a steep hill, the way he looses his ground when crossing the river it being too deep, the way he heavy breaths while walking on what looks to be hot terrain, the way he corrects the position of his heavy loaded backpack possibly as an indicator of tiredness or maybe injury (you can even see some bruise marks on his shoulders during the shower scene or when he has his shirt off in the scene where he meets Lea Seydoux character). All of this are layer upon layer of mechanics to make both Sam and the world around feel as real as possible (like the world of RDR2 but taken even further).
There’s some excerpt of a Norman Reedus interview where he asked Kojima if the players “will play him” and he responded that “they will BE him” so all this is my educated guess of how that’ll work.
I also think that all of the above is just one of the many layers the game will have but this is all I can speculate given just one trailer of ambiguous footage.
What you guys make of all this?
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