I think my point is that it can be both. There a plenty of games that come out with meh stories with excellent gameplay. Hitman for example. It’s story is meh but it has excellent gameplay. And it doesnt need a great story, it’s fine without it. But why can’t the reverse be true? Why can a game not have okay-ish gameplay to tell an amazing story?

Since we’re talking about movies, one example of a similar discussion I can think of comes from Tom Hooper’s 2012 adaptation of Les Miserables to the big screen. The problem with the film was that they wanted to make a musical and a movie at the same time. They would have the actors method act, have one actress legitimately look and sound like she was dying during one of her performances, etc. For film this would’ve been great, but it made for horrible music performances. And some reply with “well of course she sounds like a woman who is dying, her character is literally dying in that scene.” Which is literally correct but misses the point. If they wanted to be realistic and grounded, make a movie, not a musical. If they wanted to make a musical, lay off the “realism” elements.

Why do i bring this up? Doesn’t it disprove my point? No. Because you can make movie musicals, and you can obviously make realistic movies (I’m using realistic due to lack of a better word). But you have to choose. My point in bringing this up is asking if death stranding would be better with a gameplay system more to your preference. Because things are more than the sum of their parts. To use an easy example, Deus Ex Human Revolution objectively made the gameplay better, with better shooting, good cover mechanics, etc. But it didn’t make it’s gameplay better because it didn’t account for what making something better actually meant (for a more in depth explanation i reccomend Hbomberguy’s video on the game).

And I say a gameplay system you prefer, not one that is better. Because some people do like that kind of gameplay. I haven’t played death stranding myself, but I often have this conversation talking about red dead redemption 2. I find that people will often complain about the main character being slow and can’t move at max speed all the time, or that you can’t fast travel*, or that the shooting is worse than Max Payne 3. But would RDR2 be better if you had the shooting system of Max Payne 3? Sure it would objectivly improve the feel, but would the rest of the game cope with the fact that you were less human than the world surrounding you. Or would it be better if you could skip around the world however you wanted instead of experiencing said world? (*There actually are two ways to fast travel. There are the trains, obviously, but you can actually get a camp upgrade allowing you to fast travel to places without a rail connection. And also, in your original post you say “no body takes a train for the sake of taking a train.” I do, that’s me, I take a train because it’s there and I want to.)

And I want to reiterate a point because sometimes people really don’t understand this. I don’t mind that you like a different game genre than me, or that you like a game for different reasons. But I like the games I like too, and I don’t want games like them to just be made into movies instead. I like RDR2 as it is, being able to explore the world, find interesting plants and hunt rare animals. I like being able to engross myself in the chilly snow or search through a dark forest. I don’t think it would’ve been as fun if it was a movie, or if it felt like it needed to be GTA or something. I dont think every game needs to be like this (this is another impression I’m confused by. Just because one game might be good with deep in depth lore doesn’t mean chess needs deep lore [although the history of chess is interesting]. It’s antithetical to my point.) but just that games are more than their gameplay and that you and I have differing preferences and have different things that keep our attention.

If I can be “old man yells out cloud” for a second here, I despise the term “walking simulator” and other terms that demean story focussed games.

A.Its never actually properly defined. What makes one game a “walking simulator” and another a “game?” I see this a lot on the r/patientgamers subreddit and it bugs the fuck out of me. I think you’re better and admitting this is personal preference (kind of, but I’ll get to that in point 2). But I despise when people moan and groan about a game leaning into the cinematic elements and not being “just a game.” It demeans the medium as being “lesser at story telling” and that it ought to stick to just being about action and gameplay and such. I mean, imagine if people thought about TV the same way, that you can’t make a very in depth story based and slow TV show because “why didn’t you just male a movie?”

B.For the most part this seems to be a personal preference for you, but one part bugged me, “nor what I think games ought to be, because they don’t have to compete with movies!” Why do games “ought” to be anything? Games can tell incredible stories through the very medium of interactivity. In the literal sense there’s games like undertale and oneshot that tie their stories (somewhat) to the literal fact that they are video games. Spec ops the line directly interacts with you, the player, in a way that you couldn’t do for a TV show movie or maybe even a book. And why not have games be cinema? If it works, if it’s fun or interesting for some people then why not have your red dead redemptions and death strandings? A game can be a multi hour long cinematic epic or it can be a 2 1/2 dimensional shooter about shooting demons. I think that improves and gives credit to the medium rather than the latter “not being what a game ought to be.”

ahem sorry, that went on longer than I expected. Really I do agree with most of the rest of the post. It reminds me a lot of my experience with Deus Ex. If you have the opportunity you should definitely go and play the original game (it’s literally like, a couple dollars on steam). I even think it has a pretty good story. But it has a lot of what you had for dishonored, plus having commentary on capitalism and society and yada yada. Or Alternatively the “Hitman:world of assassination” trilogy can be good. It does have the same “gives you a level you need to kill someone in” formula (although no non lethal options, sorry). Actually, really any hitman game might be up your alley (personally I loved blood money, but I think all of them after the first one are definitely good to check out)

Kaiserreich is the usual suspect, but surprisingly The Fire Rises is also pretty good. It’s not positive (and depends on the country given the different teams). I reccomend the china paths (although it references “xinjiang” methods or whatever, but it doesn’t reference that stuff too much). There’s also red world, which allows you to shoot Gorbachev and making fully automated cybernetic production communism in the USSR.

I don’t have personal experience, but I would watch out. Neo liberals in the UK used a strategy of what I like to call “crushing you with tungsten to make iron feel light.” They made the trains worse and worse so they’d have an excuse to privatize them, so the inefficiency of private rail wasn’t as obvious since it was still better than the hampered government service

Tbf to Ming bros the Qing fucking sucked.

Yeah I dont understand how games journalism is so bad specifically. It’s so infuriating trying to find out about something only for an article to waffle on about nothing for 5 pages