Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (PlayStation 5)

Outposts - From IGN:

Outposts change over time depending on how you engage with them. For example, if you end up taking out all the enemies in an outpost, its threat level will reduce, so if you end up passing through it again, fewer enemies will spawn.

Alternatively, if you leave an outpost alone, its threat level will increase over time, and more enemies with better equipment will spawn. The catch, however, is that outposts with higher threat levels have better gear and more resources to loot, so it’s a good idea to consider which outposts you’ll want to keep at a low threat level for ease of travel and which ones you can afford to let grow, so that you can fund your most resource-intensive projects.

Lethal Weapons - The game still threatens you with having to dispose every body if you use lethal weapons. Seems like something to test out in a separate save game.

Spatial Audio - we tested the game at the office, and it does indeed have spatial audio, useful for combat.

There are 48 main orders.

After having engaged seriously with the crafting system and playing both online and offline, I have started thinking about what the cooperative online gameplay does for the game experience.

Aesthetics

Playing online will populate your landscape with useful structures such as roads and bridges, as well as aesthetic elements such as signs and lamp posts. This gradually transforms your game map from a barren natural landscape to a futuristic human settlement.

For players who prefer cities to mountains - which I would speculate are most players - this could be a satisfying transformation.

Although I can't argue with the usefulness of roads, bridges, and charging posts, I prefer the look of the game without them. I often made a decision to play offline in the Souls series, because I preferred the look of the game world without the player-created hints scattered everywhere.

After having logged in, I find these elements distracting, and I will often delete them from my game world, to clean up the map.

Solo or Cooperative?

I have played offline for a while, and enjoyed slowly building roads and monorails with my own materials that I gathered from bases or stole from enemies. It was very satisfying to single-handedly construct a road. Once in a while, I got a bit frustrated with a lack of a certain material (e.g. Ceramics) and went offline for a little while. Suddenly, structures would appear out of thin air, built by other players. I'm realizing now that I feel like I'm cheating when I do this. I get bored with doing the work myself, and cheat by logging in and lettering other players contribute. This makes me aware that there is a trade-off here: players who enjoy building structures will feel more satisfaction from using a structure they built themselves than one that was built by someone else. Players that don't care about this should play online and watch the landscape change as they play.

• Sam was BB-0, the first Bridge Baby, son of Clifford Unger.
• APAS 4000 is an AI evolved from the Automated Porter Assistance System merged with 4000 human souls from a Voidout. The APAS servers were hosted on The Beach(!).
• APAS 4000 wants to connect the world via the Chiral Network, and thus protect humans by controlling them, preventing travel. Eventually, they want humans to transition to The Beach (through death) and exist there forever, preventing an Exctinction Event from happening.
• Tomorrow is Lou as a grownup.
• Charlie is Die Hardman. He is alive and on board the DHV Magellan (DHV = Die-Hardman's Vessel).
• Neil was a porter that brought braindead pregnant women from Mexico to the US. He met Lucy as a child in a war, where he abandoned her.
• Lucy the therapist(?) had both Sam and Neil as her clients, and they both had a relationship with her.
• Deadman is the ninja, his dead body is inside, and it's somehow controlled by him from beyond the grave.
• At the end, Higgs takes over the Ninja.