Death Stranding - New Trailer

I’ll post more later, but I have about 8 hours and an overwhelming majority of the game has been walking. People always refer to games as walking simulators, this game might actually be one. You have to balance yourself, everything makes you fall and damages your cargo, you drastically slow down as you hold more cargo, etc.

As dumb as it may sound, being in a rocky area and having to sneak through BTs with a heavy load can be quite interesting. Holding your breath reduces your chance of being detected but it takes from your stamina meter, and you have to stand still to be able to even see the BTs. Falling over and taking big jumps can upset BB which will make him cry, and I believe that can attract enemies.

It’s all very weird and not really what I was hoping to see, but I’m intrigued so far. Too much of the terrain is flat and empty which doesn’t make for challenging traversal but maybe this will change as the game goes on. I saw a video that showcased an enemy camp from later in the game and it certainly looks like MGS5 ver.2. I’m hoping it doesn’t take too much longer for me to get access to more tools.

@Infinity_Divide

Thanks for the info! Are controls responsive ? I heard this game is pretty easy, do you think harder settings could help or enemy AI is just too bad?

>Hearing a lot of talk that it is like Ico and SotC indeed
For me it's this weird feeling. Like with most open world games with tons of collectibles and people walking around, I feel these worlds are more dead than SotC's map, which has pretty much NOTHING. Just the wind blowing most of the time.

Something about SotC's world really draws me in and I never get tired of wandering it.

Maybe it's because in SotC the land is meant to be empty because it's a forbidden area story-wise. I don't know exactly what it is that gets me with this world.

DS is kind of giving of a similar feel but it might end up being the complete opposite. This is just how it looks and feels at a glance. Similar set up if you think about. Both DS and SotC are worlds where people can't exist in the open like all these densely populated games.

I agree about the actors.

>are controls responsive
I think so, not as much as MGS but it works within the the pace of the game. Sam doesn’t seem to respond as well when you’re carrying a lot(more than 50% max weight) and can’t stop immediately which has caused me slip off of an edge a few times.

>heard the game is easy
It certainly is so far, I set it to hard and haven’t had any problems yet. I’ve only seen human enemies three times and each time I ended up getting spotted(what kind of MGS player am I), but you can easily counter their attacks with a “strand”, an items that lets you do takedowns. Theres a parry window and it’s extremely forgiving and goes right into a KO. Enemies don’t seem to have hitscan weapons like MGS so being spotted doesn’t seem nearly as threatening yet. Nothing seems to deal much damage yet either.

>strand counter
Do you have other options? I saw something about swinging cases on the strand or throwing them at people.

Have the same notion about actors, not only does it take away my immersion, it takes away a core strength of a videogame, namely the ability to really create characters. Sam Bridges will forever be the actor. But Solid Snake is Solid Snake. The facial animations also tend to be much better when not using motioncapture I feel, more personality and less uncanny valley.

@Infinity_Divide
Sounds about right to what I've heard. The game still has a ton of those weird 'coolantspray' elements to it if I can call it that. Fact that you can use pissing as a weapon is glorious. The game still has my eye, but I'm going to wait for a pricedrop. Considering it is such a divisive title, I'm sure the used-price will drop rapidly from people that mindlessly followed the hype. The game already dropped 30 bucks used here since last friday, pretty wild.

Incoherent rambling ahead, proceed with caution:

First, my plan to play this game all weekend was interrupted when the HDMI port on my Pro went bad. I ended up taking my wife’s standard PS4 instead, but I wasted a good bit of time trying to fix my Pro. Took it to a local repair shop and whatever they did to it was of no help. So, I’m still playing on a slim(not like it really matters, there’s very little different between the two consoles with most games).

That being said, I managed to put almost 20 hours in. It seems that I’m still not very far and there’s a lot more to see and do in terms of tools to acquire and schemes to come up with. For the first 10 hours or so, the game was indeed mostly walking. It is a little different here though, as traversal is much more focused than it is in other games. Obviously in most games, you run over various terrain easily and can jump over obstacles, and fall from great distances. You have to worry about everything here, and it’s mostly due to your cargo. You have a weight limit, and the more you carry, the more like Sam is to get off balance, and this is especially troublesome during sneaking, traversing rocky/uneven land, and during battles. A lot of things effect this further as well, if the wind is blowing it’ll affect your movement more if you’re carrying a heavy load, and it even affects your ability to sneak(enemies can see your cargo over the top of grass if you’ve stacked it too high).

When your carry weight is too high you want to balance yourself with the triggers, but this prevents you from doing other actions. There’s now been a couple times when I’ve been sneaking past BTs and went to hold my breath to prevent myself from being detected, but I couldn’t do it since Sam was using that arm to hold on to the cargo. Doing certain actions affects stamina the more you carry too, and when you run out of stamina, your endurance gauge starts to drain. Endurance is essentially the maximum amount of stamina you can have, so if you go past your maximum stamina and drain your endurance, it won’t recover as much until you rest again. This is pretty important to watch out for since you’ll be using stamina frequently during encounters, especially BTs.

Speaking of BTs, I don’t have a ton of notes about them yet, but I’ve learned a few things. The most obvious way to deal with them is the hematic grenades, they seem to get stunned for a few seconds and re-locate, giving you a chance to run by. Turns out, you can also use the grenades on the things that grab you(which is what happens when they spot you), and you can break away easily. However, walking through the radius of the grenade hurts BB and he can become KO’s pretty easily. When he’s KO’d you can’t scan the environment, which means no detecting BTs. Urinating on the BTs seems to stun them as well, but that’s harder to pull off. Haven’t had a chance to try the Bola gun either.

As for the mules, I was expecting a copy/paste of MGS5 but there’s some differences, and there’s a couple I actually really like. Most MGS players know how godlike the tranq gun is, the bola gun in this is sort of like that, but you have to do some more work for it. It binds the enemies but they break out of it after a minute or so(like KO states on extreme MGS2-4), and to make it take further effect you have to kick them while they’re on the ground. This makes it so you can’t just stand on a hill and snipe everyone like in MGS5, especially since the range of the bola gun seems very limited. So far I also have smoke grenades and cargo decoys, so some MGS staples, but haven’t used them much yet. Throwing a hematic grenade at the mules does work, I can’t tell if it simply just confuses them for a few seconds or what the effect is, but it’s bought me time on more than one occasion. When you get hit by a mule it damages your cargo and can even knock it off, if you’re running from a group of enemies and they hit you with their lightning rod things, you can lose your cargo and potentially have to run back into them. Simply getting away in a vehicle doesn’t always work either, as their lightning instantly disables any vehicle(so far) that it hits. Was also being cheeky and wanted to see how far I could push the “counter with the strand” tactic and the enemies were very quick to surround and go behind me, making it a pretty tough plan to carry out. And as seen in one of the trailers, you can smack mules with cargo if you’re carrying it in your hand, when I tried it I got a OHKO in, pretty nice.

This is certainly a weird game and one that I wasn’t sure if I would like, but I’m quite fascinated by it so far. Obviously I don’t love everything, the excessive menus and side quests that contain no enemies or obstacles at all are low points for me, but I’m definitely going to be playing more when I can and take as many notes as possible.

Thanks for the write up, I'll be looking forward to more impressions on the game. It's really, reaaaaally hard to get any actual info on how the game plays that goes beyond the surface "MUH WALKING SIMULATOR ITS BAD WAHH" or people shilling the plot.

Yeah there's no info like this anywhere. Just these losers screaming about scores and Kojima hate.

The more real info I hear, like this post, the more I want to play it.

Have you 'died' yet? A review said you don't really die but if you get caught it causes some kind of disaster. Apparently enemies only KO and rob you because they don't want the result of a dead body or something. Sounds super interesting.

When you “die” you lose your cargo and it gets stored in a nearby mule locker, which is usually in the center of an enemy camp.

After playing quite a bit more, I really don’t know what to think. I’m unlocking more and more generic open world stuff(vehicles, fast travel points, bots that do automated missions for you), and my biggest problem with the game is that it just doesn’t offer anywhere near what MGS does. It seems we’re not going to get anywhere near the number of toys that we had in that series(not even as many as 2 or 3, let alone 4) and the room for creativity isn’t there.

OHKOs aren’t as big of a focus either it seems, they were the name of the game in MGS with sleep, stun, and lethal options but so far there isn’t as much offered and what’s here isn’t as interesting(the strand is not a suitable replacement for CQC, no slam or ground throw equivalent) or intuitive. My absolute biggest problem so far is the enemies. The interaction with guards in MGS is part of why it’s so legendary, tons of unique reactions and states to put them in but that’s not the case here. There doesn’t seem to be hold ups which was an enormous part of my play style and the lack of a proper alert/evasion/caution equivalent reduces the stealth to your generic “one enemy sees you so now the whole world is aware of you” garbage we see in so many games. No way to manipulate and blind guard senses like in MGS either I don’t think(waiting for them to radio in or check on a body to take advantage of limited vision and hearing).

Guard placement and level design is bugging me too. Guards in MGS were spaced out meticulously and avoided scripted conversations and other crap, and levels were full of objects to hide behind, vents, varying elevations, not to mention you could use camo(with a lot of it having utility in MGS3), but here guards are cluttered together closely in their camps and so far every time one mule has seen me, they all instantly surround me. These camps are usually also pretty barren even by open world standards, so there’s very few places to hide or create any set ups. Almost every encounter so far has been: take out one of two enemies with a strand->get spotted by an enemy I can’t see->everyone else rushes me->shoot everyone with bola gun. Even MGS5 did a much better job with this.

I’m not even going to comment on bosses because I should know better than to expect a game with bosses anywhere near on the same level as MGS3.

The game still has good ideas and is unique overall, but I can’t help but feel this is just a bastardization of MGS. The traversal aspects are neat but they’re not enough to carry the game in between encounters, which is usually a pretty lengthy amount of time. I’m going to play all of tonight and tomorrow to see if it picks up.

Damn...
Will wait for your future posts then.

You should post these views on the PS4 board. They're all going berserk over this game right now.

Keep them coming Infinity. Reading these with great interest. I will probably give the game a shot when it hits 20,- (which should be soon seeing as how bad the game is doing).

How do timefall and voidout work?

These are the only two concepts that sound interesting to me at the moment. Don't want to run into story spoilers elsewhere so could you go over the mechanics of these?

Timefall appears intermittently and it damages the containers of your cargo. All of your cargo has “health”, it also in a container that has its own health. Timefall damages the container over time, and the more damage the container takes, the easier it is for the cargo itself to be damaged(this happens by falling or getting hit by enemies). As far as I can tell, the only ways to avoid this is to use container repair sprays(which you can make) and build a timefall shelter to wait it out and repair stuff for free. The game tells you to take shelter when timefall appear but there’s almost never anywhere to go because of the empty open world. Neat concept but it doesn’t amount to much when the only solutions are hoarding items.

As for voidouts, I’m not even sure how they work. It seems like they don’t happen near any major location, and it seems like only getting caught by a BT causes one but not dying. I’ll have to look into this more.

As I understand it, no one in the DS world wants a dead body on their hands, which is why the mules knock you out and rob you instead of just murdering you.

I read something about having to dispose of corpses in a hurry because they'll soon trigger a voidout.

What I want to know is, can this be weaponized? Consider it. Smuggle a corpse into a mule base somehow. Store it in one of their trucks so they drive it in, or just take it in yourself. Take a guy hostage and threaten to kill him if they don't hand over their stuff. Seems like tons of potential for a system here. I'm guessing none of this is possible?

Would be cool if you could somehow manipulate timefall as well. Have it rain over an enemy base or something, or maybe mess with their shelters somehow.

Not sure if any of that is possible, actually sneaking into the heart of a camp is much more difficult than in MGS due to the lack of hiding spots/camo/effective weaponry. I murdered a whole camp and the corpses have just been sitting there for several hours now. And rainfall is actually a lot more static than the game makes it out to be, it typically only occurs when BTs are around and never over a mule camp.

Messed around with some lethal options. Got a handgun, assault rifle, and shotgun(these are their actual names which makes me think there won’t be many, if any, variants) and they seem to absolutely trivialize encounters to a pathetic degree, even on Hard. Enemies are slow to react and are predictable, and most enemies so far have projectile weapons that are easy to dodge, making them little more than target practice. They don’t seem to hide or take cover when hearing gunshots like in MGS, and some things like shooting both legs for bleed out is absent. You’re given a crazy amount of ammo so that’s never an issue. Also this game is very big on clearly not wanting you to take a lethal approach, Hardiman will constantly tell you not to kill and firing a lethal weapon drops BB’s health significantly(he got KO’d after just a couple kills for me). The anti-BT weapon says in the description that it doesn’t work on human enemies and I figured it was lying but it seems true. Tried charging it to different strengths(you charge it with your own blood) and shot at different body parts on the mules but it did nothing. Very disappointing.

As for non-lethal shenanigans, the sticky gun can grab objects from a pretty decent distance and bring it to you, and you can grab cargo right off of the mules. Shooting the mules directly stuns them for a couple seconds, but it’s pretty pointless when the Bola gun exists. Speaking of the bola gun, I tried to see if you could wrangle more than one mule with one shot, and it doesn’t seem to be the case. You can Bola an enemy near a cliff and they’ll fall off, but unlike MGS it won’t kill, they’ll stay in KO status. When I tested it the enemy fell from a pretty good height but maybe a bigger fall will kill. Best thing about stun grenades is it stunning vehicles and forcing the enemies out, easy Bola shootin gallery setup.

Everyone is attacking Kojima now, and I read somewhere someone criticizing him for putting 'a Kojima game' all over his work when many people are involved in development. I don't care for any of that, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe someone else came up with all the cool gameplay options in MGS, and now that Kojima is working alone, he doesn't actually know how to do any of that stuff.

I decided I don't care if I run into spoilers because the game isn't sounding that great so here's a video of a voidout. This is why mules don't want you dead. Apparently, you have to to be 'killed' by a BT for this to happen though.



Can you escape these guys? Would be interesting if you could lure them into other enemies.

>the corpses have just been sitting there for several hours now
I read up on this and apparently, anyone you kill is on a timer and will voidout eventually.

>can you escape these guys
The big creature that grabbed him? Yeah, they’re actually really easy to avoid. That’s the enemy that I ran from and it just made all the BTs disappear in the area.

>wondering if someone else came up with MGS’ good gameplay
I have suspicion that it could have been Shuyo Murata, I believe he do-directed MGS3 and 4 and directed ZoE2.

The voidout thing is weird and I haven’t seen one in 30 hours. This game takes way too long to do anything.

Tried some weapons out on the BTs, the anti-BT handgun stuns the enemies and they start drifting upwards, but I can’t tell what good that does over the Bola gun. I guess it’s advantageous because you don’t have to worry about ammo as long as you have a lot of blood bags. Standard lethal weaponry does nothing to BTs, it just creates this weird ripple effect and goes through them. Looks like you can use the Bola gun as well as the anti-BT gun on the little things that grab you out of the ground. Doesn’t appear to be any kind of melee to perform on BTs and the sticky gun does nothing. The experimentation here just doesn’t seem like it’s going to go anywhere near MGS, I’m afraid.

>big creature
Does it continue to wander around?

It wanders around while you’re fighting it and sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s aggro’d to you or not. When you run far enough away it disappears along with all the BTs. It only appears if you’ve been grabbed fully by BTs and drug through the tar.

Does the game fully explain how the world turned to shit?

>fully explain how the world turned to shit
Not yet, but I also haven’t been paying much attention so who knows.

I think I’m about halfway through with 32 hours, and my will to continue playing is almost gone. It seems the biggest thing about the game is creating zip lines and using vehicles to get around easier, so the point of the game is crafting stuff to skip through it. Massively disappointed.

So it's really inferior to MGSV, isn't it ?

It is, and I’m not even the biggest fan of MGS5. I suppose DS could still get better, but there’s no reason a game should be taking this long to introduce stuff to the player.

Yeah, MGS1-4 are far better games than MGS5, but I thought Kojima could improve his open world design in Death Stranding. Have you played many subquests? I heard you get different tools completing them.

Just traded this in. After 40 hours I got bored and couldn’t finish it. Maybe I’ll pick it up on sale later.

Been playing it for about 10 hours now on and off, honestly, pretty happy with it. It's a very different game and I think because I'm so seperated from its creator I'm having an easier time enjoying it. I'm mostly happy to see a lot of 'smart design 101' things i.e. only three resources, clear interface, arranging items is fun, detailed animations but not overly so, can toy around with items.

I wonder if the repairspray works on enemies if you point it at their faces or if you can throw ladders at them. Would be fun.

Who said you could play this over Knack 2?

>Who said you could play this over Knack 2?


Or Chaos Legion? And if I am not mistaken, you have never played RE1?!... Roy...

Ah shut it, that's exactly why I bought this game. Something different for a tad. Unfamiliar.

It is definitely different, I will give it that. I am excited to play the PC version.

I honestly wish the game had less stuff though. The combat, the plot - it all feels there because it is expected or just something Kojima feels like doing. But it, and the insanely obnoxious online systems, really put down the game imo. If it was just walking from A to B, with these pretty detailed walking mechanics, I'd honestly like it a lot more.

Yeah the story stuff seemed like a response to people saying Kojima's games are so weird, he was just like check this out. I mean diehardman, deadman, heartman? Makes the words Liquid Snake seem normal.
Reminds me of SWERY with D4, he just went all in on the weird after Deadly Premonition.

Is the combat as shallow as it seems? Anything hidden no one has talked about?
I never played MG Survive but the melee animations in that looked pretty OK, I wonder how many of Kojima's combat people stayed at Konami.

The downside is that it is just so childishly on the nose. If this were a film it'd be laughed at I fear, and not in a positive way. I mean you have this insanely cool visual concept of a New Zeeland-esque world, weird invisible ghosts that seem to have a birth-cord and you can only see their marks off and you need to hold your breath. You can only spot them with a baby. There's this weird beach. All visually stunning.

And then you get 30 minutes of a guy just straight up dumping the lore on you and all the myth is gone, taking away all of the horror surrounding it.


> combat
IIRC on Gamefaqs SBK put in the work, but his notes are lost somewhere in my inbox. He wasn't too impressed iirc. From what I've heard a lot of the detailed combat mechanics in MGS2 came from the entire team being allowed to pitch ideas. The coolant spray was apparently from a random dude. I wouldn't be surprised that his ego got to him and it's now all him.

I'm far from a Kojima vet thanks to my limited MGS2 experience, but coming off of ZoE2 I can now understand the combat disappointment of this game more.

Mostly in that equipment only has very singular uses. Repairspray for instance, only repairs. You can't spray it in someone's face. The Strand only ties people up, it can't be used in other ways. You can't punch someone with an extended ladder. You can't use blood to lure enemies. The piss/shit grenades are very singular in function and pale in comparison to the raw DPS of your blood weapons. Blood weapons drain health, but you can carry a crap ton of auto-healing bloodbags that it is a non issue.

By comparison the equipment and walking mechanics are pretty in depth but also slightly ruined by all the handholding abilities like mechanical legs or the 'auto sort' function which honestly should've been Easy-only imo.

Played it some more. In Chapter 5 now iirc.

The exploration really is fantastic and it's a lot of fun to just, after having done work etc. to just sit down, pack my stuff in game, plan out a route and relaxingly walk to my goal. Using ladders and platforming to circumvent combat, all very neat and enjoyable.

Combat is showing more nuance but also seems insanely dull at times. There's a lot of details to it like being able to smack enemies with cargo, throwing cargo at them, distracting them with cargo, there's dash-attacks, regular attacks, you can smoke grenade them etc. But the Bola is just a straight up OHKO that I've decided not to use anymore. But with how relentless they can be, you practically need it. Feel that the timing windows on things are also insanely wide. Parrying a sensor-sweep or using the Strand to counter attacks feels like having a 1-2 second parry window which is nuts (especially since the latter is an OHKO).

Combat with BTs is more interesting, though it too just boils down fast into "stand still, detect them, nuke them hard". It starts out really interesting with the Piss Grenades being a method of scaring them away while the Shit Grenades lure them to a specific location away from you. The second you get Blood grenades they are just a nuisance so far which sucks.

It is slightly balanced by these items being decently heavy cargo, so bringing them takes a bit out of you but...yeah.

The online is fun, building roads and stuff and farming likes. But then you find out things you build break down over time and I just lost interest in it.

Finished Deathstranding yesterday. All in all a good experience. Complete Kojima but also without a good editor. Story could probably have been told in 10% of the time with far greater ambiguity. Really disliked how every mystery was immediately destroyed by a 10 minute long expose on what just happened. Not a big fan of the shots either, mostly just actors looking at the camera, makes me fear for the time he makes an actual film, won't go too well.

Ending was way too hinted at imo, ruining those reveals.

That said, it is unique, especially in today's climate of 'mature storytelling' i.e. trash. Though not a fan of the use of actors, Jenkins' and Mads performance was pretty nicely done, the technology really has gone a long way. Daryl's acting is the level of a pornstar at best.

Gameplay was fantastic generally speaking. Combat didn't have the attention to detail I'd have liked, as most of the utility tools were either gotten way too late or rarely (EX2, slipgrenades etc.) compared to the massive nukes. BTs became laughable once you got grenades and Mules were never a threat to begin with. Later bosses seem to only pose a challenge due to their healthbar. Biggest fun for me was the exploration, walking, inventory management etc. Online system was pretty novel as well, helping others out with buildings and such. Do feel the auto-sort should've been disabled on Hard and also should've made enviromental effects matter more on that setting i.e. strong wind or that steep cliffs require you to use your hands to climb.

Is it replayable at all?

Very, just started a new run and it is a lot of fun to max reputation out and toy with the online, contributing to the overall world. It's also just very relaxing and slightly addicting to play. Challenge runs are possible but mostly in terms of making it more 'realistic' or just forcing yourself to only use utility items like slip-grenades and smoke as opposed to grenades and rocket launchers.

Fact that inventory management and routing plays such an important role would make replays pretty fun too. You can really make for interesting runs if you go the long way around for example.

Still playing this game on and off. The combat is interesting but it is just so relaxing to play. Walk around, manage inventory, take in the sights, take a break, do some building of structures - just a fantastic experience.

Might be my game of the generation.

This remains me it's time for me to go back to the game just to repair structures for other porters. Really wish they will introduce the photo mode to PS4 someday too.

PS4 already has PhotoMode, they added it a while back: https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2020/03/death_stranding_gets_photo_mode_on_ps4_with_patch_1_12_available_now

It was in patch 1.12

Got it for $29 in a Black Friday sale. Won't get to it for a while though.

Wow.

I'm glad I waited for a sale on this.

It's just totally unenjoyable to me.

Yeah it really is a love or hate it game I feel. How far did you get into it?

I definitely don't hate it. And there's stuff I like about it.

Didn't get too far. Had to go to some place to deliver something to a nearby facility. It was after the corpse disposal facility.

Managing movement isn't fun. Don't really care for inventory management either. Stealth with BTs was boring.

I know you get more tools later. I've seen them. But I just dont feel motivated to continue. Might be one of those games I come back to later.

To be frank though, that's really it. The only thing to add is combat against Mules where you can tinker more with certain toys and setups (the meat of the combat). But a solid 90% of the game is what you've just mentioned, with all the alternatives being methods of skipping said gameplay i.e. ziplines that replace walking or bloodweapons that negate BT encounters.

Personally the movement and inventory is what drives the game for me with its little details. Do you take a set of grenades with you incase you run into B.T.s? Or will you improvise? Do you take the long way around risking rain-damage to your cargo? Or go through enemy territory? Do you pack an extra set of boots? Or travel light? So many microdecisions that help.

The game has many shortcomings though, even in its niche (lack of enviromental effects, too openworldy etc.).

>Personally the movement

Seems you're talking about planning a route, which I don't mind at all. By movement I meant the balancing thing. I'm always having to press something. Just annoyed me.

As soon as I was free I found there were undelivered packages everywhere. It's like a cargo plan exploded and rained them down. Do these matter? Are they worth wasting my time? Would it be better to keep following the main story until I get the bike or something? I feel I'd have more fun zipping packages around than slipping over rocks.

>Do you pack an extra set of boots?

I noticed mine are level 1. How fast do they wear out? How do you improve them?

The movement ties into that imo, it's how you walk, where you go, do you emphasize speed? Do you risk tumbling over etc. You can for instance 'stumble' on purpose for a speedboost, but at the risk of falling.

> lost packages
They are randomly generated. Deliver them to increase your rank at said destination. Most buildings unlock new toys at level 2 and 4, while level 5 gives you a nice star for your trouble. You can also use them as weapons later-on if you want (throw them around, use as melee weapon). Or can be used for the online component.

> following the story
The games gives you a single bike in the starting area pretty fast, but basically until the end of the game you'll be dripfed new things. Ziplines need to be put down though, so they allow you to make already trecked areas skippable. You still have to traverse, though you can use machines like bikes and trucks if you wish.

> slipping over rocks
Try to hold your balance with the shoulder buttons when you go over Yellow terrain (use the scanner).

> level 1 boots
You can get higher level ones as the game continues on. Some higher level gear is locked behind getting a higher rating at a certain building/post/whatever you wanna call it.

What I might do is just go through the story as fast as possible. Then I'll look into boosting area ratings and stuff.