The Giant Beastcast: Episode 232

Game of the year talk started early! Based on the first 20 minutes of the podcast, I would have to leave DS to an endurance run or something, I don't think I could play it

So Kojima's game about connecting people is his most divisive game ever.

nothing about death stranding sounds interesting to me, thank god i was never interested in buying it. looks like full-of-itself story with fetch quests and complicated systems.

never liked a kojima thing either so his lofty status as gaming icon has zero impact me.

Had to pause the podcast when they mentioned the thing in the SMBSS

Worth it

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated the way that Death Stranding discussion was handled. Everyone got to express exactly what they wanted to say, and the debate was very well-moderated! More stuff like that please!

The M4 and maybe the double barrel shotgun are the only blatantly overpowered weapons in MW at first glance. There are other weapons that may need to be looked at, but those two are the only ones I see people consistently cite.

To fix the squat problem in Ring Fit Adventure, when the excercise initializes make sure you keep your legs completely straight. If you already start with slightly bent legs it'll register that as your straigt leg/standing position, which forces you to go very low for squats.

I would not say that Hideo Kojima is known for his combat systems in the games he's worked on. He's known for the story and some gameplay concepts.

I would argue that the teams he worked with are more known for the combat systems, we just happen to ascribe all of the work that's done to a Kojima produced game to Kojima himself.

So it would appear this game is going to be divisive, as a lot of other publications are loving this game. Some other publications though agree with Giant Bomb (like IGN). A youtuber I follow, SkillUp, loves this game. And I tend to like a lot of the same games as him, so I will likely be getting Death Stranding

I can't wait to play Death Stranding next week and experience it for myself.

I've said this elsewhere, but I wish Dan had been allowed to speak more here. I'm very interested in what Dan's opinions are on this given that he's such a big Metal Gear fan but has a strong negative reaction, but it seems like Vinny and Alex are cutting him off a lot with variations of "this isn't for you, Dan." Alex cuts off almost every single thought he voices in the last 40 minutes of the discussion.

Also, Alex has no right to call Dan "the dumbest motherfucker alive" re: Metal Gear & politics given his very vocal and extremely wrong ideas about what salt is a few weeks ago, where he at one point seemed to be arguing that it was part or wholly plant.

The way Vinny and SkillUp talk about the gameplay really make Death Stranding sound compelling to me. I can ignore the story and just explore the world, like Breath of the Wild or a Bethesda game.

I wouldn't get too carried away with this idea, the game really does not reward exploration the way those games do. There's very little to find out there. The map is mostly a barren waste, which I guess is the point.

@indigozeal: Death Stranding is pretty markedly not Metal Gear Solid, so I don’t think they’re obligated to have Dan give some lengthy explanation of why it’s worse than Metal Gear Solid. It has some of the same sensibilities in storytelling and characters, but it sounds like the gameplay and story is pretty far removed from the pretend-sorta-modern-military gameplay and story of Metal Gear Solid.

It would be like having Jan give his opinion on some random Game Freak side game and he goes “Boo, why isn’t this more like Pokémon?”

I’m sure Dan will fill many minutes of his GotY time campaigning against Death Stranding and explaining his negative feelings about the game. Though I also wonder whether anyone at GB will really be fighting for Death Stranding at GotY time.

@humanity: I havent listened to the podcast yet, but hearing how monotonous and slow the gameplay is, I'm not suprised Dan will not like this, in the same way as he didn't like RDR2. As far I've heard, this game is not so much like MGS1-3

@bisonhero: I find this argument extremely disingenuous. Kojima made his name on Metal Gear, and people are interested in Death Stranding precisely because of the legacy of those games. It's not as if there's an expectation that Death Stranding be another Metal Gear, but the esteem that franchise has certainly built up anticipation for Death Stranding and Kojima's work as a whole; it's ridiculous to argue that the two are unrelated. Furthermore, Dan's hints that he hated Death Stranding have been the talk of the comments sections (and Reddit, and ResetEra thread) for the past week, to the point where a number of people were saying they were going to snatch this podcast up right at the 3:00 a.m. drop date precisely because they wanted to hear if huge Kojima fan Dan Ryckert had turned on this game. The position of "hey, no one wanted to hear what Dan had to say on this random game completely unrelated to anything he likes" is demonstrably untenable.

(And forget about "lengthy" opinions; Dan is barely allowed to speak at points in this. Alex and Vinny are great, and, obviously, given that they completed the game, they should have a lot to say, but there's dramatic interest in a big fan of an artist having a very strong negative reaction to his "unchained" debut, and Dan should have been allowed to speak his piece, too. (The two major complaints he gets out, that the game piles systems upon systems without regard for fun and that the story is incredibly ham-fisted, are not the kneejerk "it's not Metal Gear so it's bad" reactions of which he's being accused.) There seems to be an idea that certain opinions are prima facie bad if they're negative, which I find unreasonable and unhealthy.)

Hey @ybbaaabby do you have amazon prime? If so you can claim some gold, the bounty hunter license for free, and a ton of in game consumables with Twitch Prime on Twitch's website. Also I think the last profession is free for PS4 only as well, the animal hunting one.

@indigozeal: I did not call Dan the dumbest motherfucker alive. I said the game treats the player like they're the dumbest motherfucker alive because it seems totally unwilling to trust that it will understand its various metaphors.

The comment section everyone is going to look at today. Hi ! hope you are having a good day comment viewing person.

Everyone here for Death Stranding but I'm absolutely stoked to see more Ring Fit Adventure (RFA) talk. I'm lv69 in it and ranked third in the world for planking. I told my mom she's real proud (30 years old by the way). Also:

This is true across the board. Go the bare minimum in where the game asks you to place legs and bend them, otherwise it'll start having you enter pseudo-limbo games. I haven't had as much fun performing RFA exercises since on P90.

@epidehl: I think people are maybe ...mis-remembering the mechanics of MGS3 a bit? You can basically "Dan" that game ( punching and shooting) in a pretty straightforward manner, the stealth mechanic is the iconic straightforward MGS stealth system except now clothes kiiiiiiiinda matter but you really dont have to pay too much attention there, and occasionally eating food to make stamina go up. Game isn't nearly as "system heavy" as people are making it out to be.

The complaints about how there are 20 minute cutscene diatribes explaining very obvious concepts and treating the player as a moron, makes me question whether any of these people have ever played a Metal Gear game. My biggest complaint with those games has always been that, at times, Kojima does not respect the player's time. MGS4 was the epitome of this where the damn game simply won't end and every villian has the exact same 10 minute sob story.

Death Stranding is a strange game to me: I have watched and read everything I can about this game, but have no drive to actually play it.

This is coming from someone who played every Metal Gear Solid game and LOVED Solid 1,3, and 5.

@indigozeal: I know there was audience anticipation about why Dan doesn’t like Death Stranding after he pretty deliberately tipped his hand ahead of the embargo, but I think it was misplaced. Dan said himself after watching the TGS stuff that he wasn’t sure if he was going to like the game but he’d give it a shot. And within the first 20 minutes of this podcast, he makes it clear that he just doesn’t like the minute-to-minute gameplay and systems whatsoever, in an even more immediate way than he eventually realized with RDR2. I just think it’s a less interesting discussion than Read Dead, since Dan did put in a ton of time into RDR2 before turning against it, since it is like RDR1 but with changes. DS, purely from recent gameplay videos, is a big departure from MGS, and not some inheritor of the legacy of MGS, and Dan could more immediately tell he wasn’t into what it was doing.

I think it was just increasingly obvious in the lead up to this game that Dan isn’t the consummate Kojima fan, and really he is the consummate MGS fan. Or rather, he’s a big fan of what he thinks MGS is. Let’s assume Dan’s entire public persona isn’t a Kaufman-esque character. Based on his opinions of film and games, Dan seems to vastly prefer talking about the concrete aspects of storytelling (action sequences, over the top characters, rattling off specific plot details of MGS) and rarely seems to talk about any subtext or themes or more abstract concepts that speak to him. Does he notice them and just not care, or is it a “I never thought of MGS as political” situation? Who can say. Based on basically all trailers and reviews I’ve seen, this Is Kojima’s most subtext-y and metaphorical game with the least fun action guy stuff and the most awkward upkeep-style gameplay, so it baffles me that people were so looking forward to hear Dan’s specific thoughts on the game. Based on his RDR2 thoughts that he also brought up again when he semi-broke embargo, it’s just not surprising that he doesn’t like it.

@kevlarkoala: I remember them talking about it on the west coast at some point, and there's a group of people that were VERY bothered by the healing stuff (bandaging wounds and all that) and act like it was a ton of menus and wasted time, which was not a thing I ever noticed or experienced.

I've come to accept that I'm just really tolerant of specifically lots of menus and lengthy cutscenes (especially opening ones) due to largely growing up on JRPGs though, so maybe it's worse than I noticed.

If anything these comments have reaffirmed the fact that people don't know what disingenuous means.

After the first few videos I saw and MGS5 souring me on Kojima a bit there was little chance I was going to buy Death Stranding. The first hour of this podcast sealed the deal. Thanks for a great show.

Reading review and impressions of Death Stranding actually have made me more excited to get my hands on the game. It sounds exactly like the kind of gene for weirdos like me who play obtuse shit like Dragon’s Dogma or Bethesda games on hardcore mode with half the mechanics disabled.

I dunno what it is about me but I love games that make you basically “work to have fun” so to speak. That there is fun to be had, but you truly need to sit down and earn it it find it through an intense layer systems.

Like the more I think about it the reviews seem to really mirror what I remember seeing of Dragon’s Dogma, a game I consider one of the best RPGs in the last decade. So someone like Kojima, with all his weirdness that I’ve been infatuated with since I was a child, making a game like that with all his story bullshit on top?

Honestly, this sounds exactly like the game I want it to be

10 minutes in and Abby makes a "bones are money" joke.

This is a great podcast.

@devitiffany: Maybe this is overgeneralizing, but yeah, Death Stranding and Dragon’s Dogma both seem like part of a broad type of game that are doing a specific...style/feel in their gameplay/mechanics, which you as the player kinda have to meet halfway. It’s the kind of game I expect that Jeff G and Dan rarely like because one thing that they have in common is that they want the game to immediately control/handle in a responsive, expected way. Conversely, some people like the exercise of engaging with this style of not-immediately-easy/fun gameplay (Patrick and Austin have aspects of this, also Brad).

Honestly, all this outrage and shouting over a video game is excessive. It's a game. Some will like it, some won't. Stop shouting to try and impose your belief on to others.

I feel like the segment on Call of Duty was my own personal Death Stranding.

@avioto: Holy shit SAME. Outer Worlds is so unbelievably dull to me. Disco Elysium completely ruined it for me. Every time I turn in a quest and see that "How about a bigger reward (persuasion)" I just sigh and roll my eyes. I miss my skills talking to me and affecting my character's personality. Putting points into hacking should mean more than "can hack harder stuff."

Holding E for five seconds on a box to lockpick it and one of your companions shouts "wow how'd you do that!??" made me hate video games

with back to back years of Dan's most anticipated games letting him down will he finally become crushed and jaded?

@mattcorb7: Yeah I'm not into Outer Worlds at all. It follows the same template every Bethesda game has followed since Oblivion. It's just so predictable in every single way.

Even though Obsidian does it better. Still too formulaic

The thing with Kojima is that he's the living embodiment of that Garth Marenghi quote about subtext.

Maybe they mention it later but the game Abby wants Call of Duty to be in terms of dealing with consequences of shooting people is Spec-Ops the Line.

Hey Abby, I'm playing Ring Fit Adventure too. I have the exact same thing with the squats. I was only getting 3 points per squat at what I felt was the right level of squattiness-- thighs parallel to the ground. To make my pants catch fire, I have to lower my butt below my knees.

I think the calibration for that exercise is off or something.

PS: Nintendo, turn off the fucking screen capture assigned to buttons on both controllers. I end up taking a dozen accidental screenshots of stupid workout menu scenes every time I play. GAH! Screen capture on the right controller's bumper button?! Who thought THAT was a great idea?

Cut scenes are bad in all games. All.

@brad: Thanks for the warning, although I would say Breath of the Wild also doesn't satisfyingly reward exploration, which is my major gripe with the game. It's either Korok seeds to make the inventory less of a pain or a temple to make traversal less of a pain.

Would you say the feeling if building things and helping other players out passively is an enjoying concept if I'm someone who likes Dark Souls' messaging system or walking alongside other players in Journey?

Got to the haunted house ideas: Vinny's sounds the most terrifying. Also, probably the easiest to pull off in real life as well.

I really enjoyed the discussion about DS. Seems like a lot of people are going all in on what dan said one way or the other.

This game being 50+ hours and from what everyone said is maybe an interesting at times but ultimately goes nowhere story was the most revealing to me.

@bisonhero: Your entire comment is a bunch of assuming and extrapolating about what Dan thinks that could easily be avoided by...allowing Dan to say what he thinks. You yourself claim not to be interested, but a bunch of folks are, which makes it worth hearing. There's a reason why he's on one of the leading video game podcasts, and this whole "we don't need to hear this person's opinion about video games on a show about opinions on video games; it's better if we just guess" argument is kind of ludicrous.

And that person is you.

@loktarogar: Yeah, Jeff’s discussion on the Bombcast also made me think of Spec Ops: The Line. I feel like as much as it’s a little blunt with its Heart of Darkness message, I still appreciate that it’s one of the only big budget shooters to actually call into question whether these commando squads in military shooters wouldn’t just end up committing war crimes in their singleminded pursuit of the “bad guys.” I’m amazed that game ever got a biggish publisher budget.

Just wanna say I also really liked the way the Death Stranding discussion was handled. Felt like everyone was able to get their feelings across clearly and we got a decent balance of voices at any one time. What a fascinating thing.

@indigozeal: Hnmm...not sure you're right there, duder.

MGSV was a great game with amazing gameplay. This game isn't even on the same level as MGSV.

@sethmode: I can certainly back up my usage of the word if need be, so I'm afraid this is between you and Noah Webster.