Death Stranding: Director's Cut

Death Stranding: Director's Cut is a richer version of the 2019 action adventure game produced by the Kojima Productions studio headed by Hideo Kojima (the "father" of the Metal Gear series) - as lead designer and writer. The creator of the title himself describes it as "defining a new genre".

Plot

The action of the game takes place in the future in the present United States. After a series of explosions there was a Death Stranding, as a result of which the world of the living and the dead merged with each other. The physical shape of the Earth changed dramatically and many anomalies occurred, changing beyond recognition the lives of the surviving humans, now scattered and hidden in small groups. Now every human corpse, if not burned before complete necrosis occurs, explodes, leaving behind a huge crater. The temporal rains accelerate the aging process of everything they come in contact with, destroying objects and killing living beings.

Staying outside has become extremely dangerous and only a few are able to survive in these conditions. These are the couriers, one of which is the main protagonist of the game, Sam Porter. He transports packages between population centers, avoiding bandits (so-called "MULEs") and supernatural threats with the help of the Bridge Baby (a premature baby in an artificial womb, somehow suspended between life and death). At the same time, he carries out a mission to create a chiral network between cities, intended to contribute to the reunification of humanity and the reconstruction of America.

Game mechanics

Basically, the gameplay mechanics in Director's Cut do not differ from the basic version of Death Stranding. As a courier, we move between locations in the open world in third-person view completing missions, delivering goods and information while expanding the chiral network. During the journey we have to face many dangers: supernatural Beached things, temporal rains, "MULEs" (cargo thieves) and terrorists.

With humans we can fight, but every dead body, which we won't deliver to the crematorium, can explode and create a crater - we can avoid it by using stun weapons or sneaking and not allowing to fight. On the Beached things a completely different kind of weapon is effective. We can also try to avoid them, and in case of being caught - escape. Temporal rains primarily affect the packages and other items we carry - they can seriously damage them, or even destroy them completely, which means the failure of the currently executed mission (or at least a much lower payment at the end). The journey is further complicated by the extreme terrain - the challenge in Death Stranding is just to carry a pile of packages on your back in such a way that you don't lose your balance and damage the transported goods.

To deal with all these obstacles, we can use many helpful gadgets, different types of weapons and vehicles, as well as build infrastructure such as roads, ladders and bridges. The game also features a crafting system that allows us to make items from resources found in the field or acquired in other ways.

Game modes

Death Stranding: Director's Cut offers both single player gameplay and network elements - we can find content added by other users on our way (roads, item caches, messages, etc.) and use it.

Director's Cut

Director's Cut adds extra content to the game: locations, objects, weapons, equipment, quests and features, including guides to help beginners learn the mechanics.

New missions give us more details about the locations and characters we already know. Fights with bosses can be repeated. An interesting feature is the rebuildable racetrack with a dedicated car, as well as the shooting range, where we can test the effectiveness of weapons against various enemies. Among the new items and objects that deserve a special mention are the Maser Gun, a long-range "stun gun" that makes it possible to neutralize enemies without killing them, a new type of exoskeleton centering the characteristics of the two models available in the game so far, a jump that makes it easier to overcome difficult terrain and a robot that accompanies us on our journey and helps carry additional packages (or even ourselves).

Among the new content there are also items inspired by Half-Life series and Cyberpunk 2077, not only in the form of collectibles, but also useful during the journey and clashes. Previously unavailable customization options have also been added - now you can, for example, put patches on Sam's backpack and change the color of the Bridge Baby's capsule.

Technical aspects

The Director's Cut supports higher resolutions and displays a smoother image than the original PS4 version, apart from that the differences in graphics are minimal (e.g. the drawing range was slightly increased). It was developed using the Decima engine, created by the Guerrilla Games studio for the game Killzone: Shadow Fall and also used in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Death Stranding is full of cutscenes made with the help of performance capture technique (more advanced motion capture) with involvement of Hollywood stars such as Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Lea Seydoux.