This video was originally released on August 4th, 2023 as a patron exclusive. That's why Starfield is referred to in future-tense rather than past-tense. I did not plan for it to be patron-exclusive forever, and for transparency: there are no other 100% patron exclusive videos at this moment, only patron versions. There will be a new video about a recent game coming out fairly soon.

Kojima definitely went on vacation to Iceland and immediately wanted to make a game about it.

“Welcome to post-apocalyptic America!” “You mean Iceland? Why does America look exactly like the landscape of Iceland?” “Because of the apocalypse. Shut up. We are talking about the myth of the USPS now.”

>Patrician releases a video >It's too short to sleep to, relying on the video still being on when I wake up My energy-wastemaxxing strat needs an update if he keeps doing this.

The Lost Cargo mechanic has one great element that was not mentioned in the video: besides the crappy random generated one, if other players lose their cargo that can appear in other players' games, which places it in actually sensible locations. It created a few nice moments for me when I saw a few scattered lost packages under a cliff, looking up and seeing where probably the other player fell down and imagined a few pieces of cargo tumbled down into the creek I was going through.

DS is a game based on how it is walking in the woods, how you have to be engaged in something as simple as how you plant your feet

I love the little "bad combat" jab at pathologic

The best moment of DS is towards the end, when you're working your way from one end of the map to the other in one go. Same as your excursions across MGSV, that trek with minimal resources is really exciting, and puts all your gameplay knowledge to the test. The combat actually shined, starting with no equipment and scavenging guns, ammo and health mid-firefight, using the environment as cover in a mad dash to protect from enemies which actually did a good job of surrounding me. DS2 looks to be more combat focused, so hopefully we'll get more of that. Plus, more combat means more bodies, so maybe there will be more consideration for the creation of BTs this time around as you say.

I can look at the game and see why people like it, but also know with 100% certainty that it is not in any way something I would enjoy. As always appreciate the interesting and fair takes Pat!

The "Its like a movie" guy finally returns! Praise Jesus

I regret to inform you that unfortunately, Toronto continues to be a real place.

Man i had a bunch of fun with this game, I just put on my audio books and went. I think there is value in games that are just experiences but are also challenging like this one

Calling Death stranding experimental is actually nice! It was an attempt to turn the most mundane mission in gaming (delivering stuff) into a Game! And I love it! Can’t wait for Part 2!

Death Stranding is one of my favorite games in the last 10+ years and a true masterpiece. It’s certainly not a game for everyone that’s for sure though

To avoid spending 45 detailing my love for Death Stranding ill just say, I love Death Stranding.

This is going to sound lame but Death Stranding got me back into going for walks a couple times a week. Driving out somewhere more rural and taking the time to just walk a trail for a couple of hours (or the rare time it's longer because I got a little lost) has made me feel better in general, and I get to see some really pretty woodland or heathland or seaside.

This video is great! I love the tone of it, it's not bitter or headstrong, just someone talking about a game they enjoyed. Looking forward to more like this!

“I just hate 99% of games” 😂

A PatTV video I haven't seen yet? That's like finding a hundred dollars in the couch cushions.

Yay! Another video! I am a little sad to hear that you wont be making Death Stranding into its own analysis video as I think this is one game I would LOVE to hear you talk about, but I can understand not wanting to turn every game into a project. Keep up the great work! I am always looking forward to the next long-form video. Your stuff helps get me through work days and I can't even begin to explain how many times I have listened to the Skyrim retrospective just for that reason alone.

The biggest thing I liked about Death Stranding is that it managed to make just kinda walking around fun moment to moment for me

8:03 "fear of falling over" _Sarcastic declaration:_ "So it is an Elcor simulator"

Quickly, quietly, becoming one of my favorite channels.

MGSV, a game with probably 30 hours of content got me to hit a playtime of over 1000 hours just because the gameplay feel was *that* enjoyable, as well the loop of traveling and collecting soldiers and resources, while challenging myself to drop in with as little as possible. It's still unmatched almost a decade later, for me at least. Death Stranding was good, and felt reminiscent of MGSV in some ways, but I found myself get burned out on the traversal and delivery loop much, much quicker. I do love the world and the tech within it. Very few Scifi settings feel as alien as the tech I see in DS/DS2.

One of my favourite games and game worlds of all time ❤️ great vid!

when I played it in 2021 I adored it, thanks for taking a look at it, love your stuff pat.

Loved the journeys you make for yourself in this game. I would like to see some imitations of the delivery/route/walking mechanics but maybe for a historical game or something.

I've always thought that open world RPG games should take a look at DS. Making the challenge not just combat but also traversal would be extremely interesting, imagine having to plan an entire route with ropes, ladders, etc. in a dungeon. What kind of armor are you going to wear? What kind of weapons? What about utility magic? It would feel like a real adventure damnit.

AYYYYYY excited for the video, thank you :)

Zip Lines do indeed break the game but i feel like the balance of cost in mats and bandwidth which comes with them is not perfect but good enough. When going through the game at first they allow you to industrialize the process of farming rep which gives mats, bandwidth and even some lore and useful gear recipes. Setting up a path becomes a game in itself and isn't prohibitively expensive but you still can't quite go insane with it and there is no trick to making the process of setting it up easier. Once you finish the story the game of logistics becomes your only task and if you want to engage with that then building a comprehensive zip around the whole map is very tricky and time consuming while each strategic improvements massively increase your ability to build more as it makes farming incrementally easier. I do think the main story doesn't actually require much farming at all and it's reasonable to expect most people could finish it without zip lines at all being available. But i do appreciate them being there in the post game. Building out a full network after the main story doubled my playtime and i ended up discovering like 3 or 4 settlements that are entirely ignored in the main story besides brief mentions by email.

Honestly I never paid any attention to this game but it does look kinda cool. Would be interested in a synopsis on the story even if the video wasn't much longer than this one.

That’s funny I just started replaying this game a few days ago now my fav KZfaqr makes a video, everything’s going to be all right

Thanks for making this available to us plebs, appreciate the shorter form content too

Patrician TV video on death stranding is absolutely something I needed but didn’t know until seeing this

I’m a bit late to see this, but I really enjoyed seeing this game for the first time, another patrician tier Video. A note of praise on the extra crunchy footstep audio as the patrons were credited. Very stimulating ❤

Even with ziplines being a bit too good, I eventually resolved to not take them and instead did my usual high-volume treks from one location to the next. Once you've maxed out a location it does unfortunately mean there isn't much reason to deliver there except to complete every legend of legend of legends ranking.

To me death stranding is a collectathon. The entire point of it is to collect more weird gearsets and cosmetics. Having the maxed out exosuit armor and dead sprinting across a mountain is a great experience. It also has obscure rpg mechanics.

Well done I'm glad to see your still making video essays! Your longer videos I truly appreciate but this is good too. I'm also glad you haven't been discouraged to keep speaking your mind, I hope you keep it up and important people realize your words are valid.

Excellent. Thankyou.

I absolutely love you dude. Watched all the elder scrolls vids. You’re my fucking hero . What you do is appreciated.

This game is so Inspired and fun, such a shame that the internet has totally boiled it down to “haha silly kojima”

played DS last year. Weird game but im glad I played it

This game might just be the "man against nature" trekking experience I've been looking for since watching your Skyrim segment about the 7000 steps

I absolutely loved Death Stranding, no urge to ever play it again tho

Be kind to my favorite FedEx simulator in the post apocalypse. Looking forward to coming back to it for the director's cut. Kojima stories are a favorite for me, like diner coffee that's been on the burner al day. I don't expect everyone to be into it, but it's great for those who are. My only great gripe about the game is the later areas are very combat focused that the REAL enemy from DS: THE WORLD becomes flavor and setting. I mean, sure.. cultists are a part of the world, but come on.. to go from spooky oregon trail to full MSG future shooter was a little whiplash. The story bound combat missions are amazing, albeit they can be opaque and annoying to trail/error. +World +Mechanics +Fun Loop +Working with other players to make routes (sucks it's bound to unlocking the shelters, atleast for trails, it's a little obnoxious to see everything populate at once.) -Combat.. oh, the combat. BOLA is best. I'll fight anyone on this.. Anyone who played knows what im saying. If you haven't. open combat is a mechanical punishment. the latter half of the game is all combat.. :l Solid would recommend.

10:38 I pointed at my screen like Leonardo DiCaprio when you said Metal Gear Solid *Vee*. If you know you know

“I dont like games.. i just make 8 hour reviews of them…” - this guy

great video

Now I want a 7 hour critique and analyzation of the story. Done by Patrician. 😈

@Patrician I imagine this has been asked before, but how do you feel about a big analysis on Fallout New Vegas?

Cloudpunk is basically the same, but there you need to learn the best route to deliver the package, taking the speed highway is not always the best option because your flying car go fast and you really not want to take damage, because credits or money is really important in this game, and you want to waste a little as possible.

I also gotta mention, we only need so much weird imagery. I’m okay with Odradek from Kafka and the baby. But do we need the self handcuff thing? Nothing really was cut in pre-production even story wise

I’m so used to seeing several hour long videos from you, that when I saw 20:00 my brain immediately thought it was 20:00:00 and I just about had a heart attack.

11:00 Holy shoot I thought I was the only person who still just screwed around in this game like that. Idk why but MGSV is my comfort game, even though I exhausted all its content years ago

Death Stranding is one of only a few games I could spent all night ranting about why I love it so much. But at the same time I feel like I could never be bothered trying to convince someone who doesn't already like it. It's one of those games that just won't click with some people, but that's typically just a sign of artistic value. Good art resonates with some people but not others, and I think we're used to that idea with paintings and films and sculptures but we're not quite ready for that happening with video games. I think that's why Deat hStranding had such a harsh reaction. The problem is not that it was a divisive game, but the idea that a AAA game CAN be divisive. AAA games are supposed to be crowd pleasers but this is the first example I can think of of a AAA game that was clearly not trying to be a crowd pleaser. It caught people off guard.

It's okay if we don't like the same games, bro. I enjoy your commentary and appreciate the work and quality you put into your content.

The only thing that I might wanna see changed in the sequel is the world of death stranding to feel even more alive, a more intense ecosystem than we got here. Games like the Stalker's anomalies or Rainworld's livable environment. May seem counterintuitive to its setting but I think they could work something out.

I’ll always click on a Death Stranding video essay, great stuff 👍

Death Stranding is the Gran Turismo of walking sims

What mic do you use? Sounds phenomenal

This was a really nice vid dude, comfy.

Ive been waiting for this!

I've played a lot of Death Stranding - ending up with a full complete 100% Legend of Legend of Legend save - and I've become very frustrated at the disconnect between the chiral network and the world design. The game is designed around you playing a very particular way. There are many dialogue and musical triggers for main quests that only fire if you take the route they've laid out for you. So you deviate from the path laid out on the delivery screen, and approach Heartman's place from the rear, you miss a lovely song queue. Now that's not too bad, but if you start building the chiral network as you go, and especially if you play online, it becomes very easy to ruin many major setpieces. For example, the Lockne - Mama trek back and forth across the mountains. By the time I got that, I already had a full road network, so I just drove. It was quicker, less risk, and I wanted to use all that tarmac I'd created. And in doing so I trivialised the entire sequence, and missed out on the experience. But the worst one for me was the Mountaineer / Doctor deliveries. When I approached the valley of BTs, I found that someone else had handily placed a zipline on the other side. The wonders of multiplayer! So I dropped one of mine and simply sped across the gap, and turned a tense timed delivery into a 5 minute affair, my feet barely touching the ground. This turned one of the hardest deliveries in the entire game into an utter cakewalk. And once I'd got a full zipline network, it was so convenient that BTs soon stopped being an issue altogether. The most I'd encounter them was when a zipline path would clip the edge of a BT zone, and the game would get all moody and the music would step up, only to vanish and when the path carried me out. That was what ziplines reduced BTs to. A temporary slowdown and ominous music for a couple of seconds during zipline travel, in which I was never at risk. I go walking a lot in the middle of nowhere, and I adored how this game captured so much of that, but I feel a little sour looking back on my playthrough due to how interacting with all the mechanics it offers means that you no longer get that experience. That all being said, I personally found it a 10/10 due to my love of hiking, but I just wish that the traversal mechanics were properly balanced, and that the chiral networks didn't expand nearly as quickly, or at least had a much lower limit. As is, it's too easy to accidentally optimise the fun out of the game. Hopefully they'll fix that in DS2, but I'm not holding my breath.

Cool vid.

Patrician, I know you know this, but you NEED to make a video about MGSV. I'd enjoy hearing you talk about it.

"Everybody forgot about Korea, as not as many popular war films were made about conflicts post Vietnam" The Korean War was absolutely NOT "post-vietnam" ???

Another upload from the 🐐.

Finishing DS gave me the same feeling of watching a very important movie

i wouldnt suggest anyone play this game, my opinion of it is entirely skewed by how much the setting vibes with me, i just wanted to see more of it. Yeah its a walking simulator, yeah the mechanics are minimal, yeah the player involvement is minimal, yeah i stopped playing 2 or 3 times because i was going to be late for a thing i was doing, only to come back and walk right into a cutscene before needing to go do something else 15minutes later, and yes there is what feels like an hour long cutscene at the end. I loved the experience the whole way. The way i like to think about the game is via inputs. If you took the game and gave it a different coat of paint, so instead of pressing buttons for balancing you were pressing buttons for reacting to an enemy throwing a grenade to kick it back? Failure to do either results in a negative outcome, theyre both minimally expected occurrences etc. Why is kicking back the 17th grenade more exciting than the possibility of tumbling down a whole ass mountain?

Patrician released a short?!

I loved this game, it’s so awesome. Different and fun. The story was great, idc what anyone says I liked it. And I’m a contrarian like the narrator here. Like I don’t like when something has a celeb just to have it, but the world was interesting and having to survive with some new apocalyptic world was nice.

Same. I enjoyed DS only while I had to walk.

I played this game on PS4 however many years ago, and as much as I liked the gameplay I hated just about everything else; the characters, the plot, the combat...The idea of a game where the main "enemy" is the environment and the main gameplay is just navigating it is really interesting to me, so of course I lost a whole lot of interest when they gave me one of those big, stupid trucks to drive around in. The point where I gave the game up entirely though was when, while exploring without cargo, I was attacked by a BT and dragged to spooky ghost world. I heroically walked away from the dead whale that was flopping around in the oil and eventually the real world faded back in. I was basically done after that when I concluded that death was consequence-free. The last thing I remember trying was drinking 2 cases worth of Monster Energy to see if it changed Norman's pee color, like how such a thing would if you did that in real life...and no, clear...unless of course it was clear because I caused some kind of kidney failure.

Access granted to the poors (me)

12:54 this is a good channel xD

I'm actually really excited for DS2. I liked one, but something about it felt off, or lacking. From the jumping point of a whole game, they can swing outta the gate and make something awesome, if it's not a lazy sequel, that is. A better ratio, but also a better mix of combat to traversal/delivery. Like have combat be a part of the delivery mechanics. And we can make the world more varied, exciting and worth exploring. They have a good enough base, hope Kojima goes nuts. Ooo! And more of those dream battle segments! Like different ones, not just the same guy 3 times. Kinda like Psychonaut's mindscapes. We had a WWII-ish one maybe we can get some weird ass stuff like sci-fi, fantasy, medieval, all mixed with dream logic and crap.

Its not for everyone, id imagine a lot of people would just get bored, but I think DS is an amazing game. Idk how they made being a delivery man an interesting game, but if anyone could it was Kojima.

Would you rather be dead standing or live kneeling?

20 minutes... Patrician's version of shorts

I feel like a lot of the weirdness of death strandings world is just a barrier to entry for what is actually some petty compelling stuff. The weird stuff isn't the compelling stuff though, and a lot of it just feels weird for the sake of being unfamiliar to the audience. And to me it makes the world feel like an artificial setting for a story rather than an actual living world that became this way. Just my thoughts

4:48 he said it😂

Oh heck yes

I'm kinda weird, high action segments in games tire me out, while the planning and walking the segments of DS do not. Kinda like how parties tire me out quickly, but I could read a book for hours. Love your zipline recomendations. Great vid.

death stranding is both far from perfect and also one of the most interesting games ever made. i remember playing it close to launch and even as a huge kojima dick rider i was almost *frustrated* with how obtuse it was. by the end my emotions were so strong yet vague on the experience that I genuinely needed to hear other people's thoughts on it. to this day im not sure if i even like the game, but they mustve done something right cause the minute they announced the sequel i was right back in the kojima hype machine lmao

That's because DS actually had design documents

I am glad this video exists to help elucidate that Starfield's "Empty Worlds" could have been right if they were at all creative. If its experimental and fails, we'll remember and talk about that too. The game is about the journey to get from A to B, its not fast travel.

i love euro truck simulator. To me death stranding felt like Euro truck simulator on drugs... except somebody stole my god damn truck

While, under any normal circumstances, I would believe you when you say "Your favourites are all on my worst games ever list", I'll be honest, I have never met anyone who knew my favourite game... Except that one time, but she also knew the developer personally. Anyone here who knows "A House of many Doors", by any chance?

I never even used the ziplines, I only saw a few in my playthrough and they were in worthless spots so I totally bypassed them. I enjoyed the slower pace and planning, the game rewards player devised challenges like can I get to the top of that mountain just for fun. They do give you to many powerful options later but I think they had to or people would complain. I found it pretty enjoyable over all.

Appreciate the unlock. Good thing I'm still early in the Starfield video!

Overdeveloping the world with roads and ziplines really hurt the pacing near the end of the game. If I ever replay the game, I think id make it a point to minimise my use of them.

How much would it take to bribe you to do a quick retrospective on Enderal?????

DS giving you the tool to trivialize your previous mission kinda irritated me since it happened so many times.

If your headcanon didn't rename your PC to Jeff you are objectively thinking about the game wrong. Jeff Bridges. Never stops being funny.

I didnt play this game specifically because norman reedus I just don't want to have movie/show actors in video games idk I can't ever see anything but the boondock saints guy.

"made up places like Toronto" had me laughing so hard haha

was that conan o brien?

It's funny, while I was playing this game I kept thinking the only part I liked was walking, but I really did like it. Unfortunately the story was horrible, the combat was pretty bad and boss fights are among the worst experiences in "recent" gaming for me. I will never understand why non combat games force combat on players. I also loved the idea of building roads, mostly because I like slow grinds toward a greater goal, but then I found out I hated using them, because driving means less walking and walking is the good part of the game. Ziplines were the coup-de-grace, especially when using them to traverse mountains. On the BT side the handcuff thingy is the same. Once you learn how to murder scores of BTs without danger all the tension just stops. It's a case of the experience not being tuned for endgame, I think. All in all I had fun during my playthrough but when I finished the game the only thoughts I had were "well that was fucking dumb" and also "if i ever hear another low roar song i'm gonna start blasting". Never played it again but i guess i wouldn't consider it a bad experience, just weird and mildly disappointing.

I couldn't get past the cutscenes. They weren't bad, I just wanted to get to the gameplay and it was sooooo slow to get started

Something must be wrong here, it seems as if the other 8 hours of this video wasn't uploaded