This week's Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing the PS4 version of Death Stranding via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.
This game is a bit of an enigma. it's not new, and yet the podcasts i listen to haven't spoiled the story. many haven't really explained what you do in the game beyond the simple delivering and building routes. I do know that it's fairly cinematic with a decent amount of cutscenes so i was very curious as to how it would work as a game being played from the cloud.
In this video, the connection to the cloud does get rough a couple of times. in the first half, there were a couple of moments when we got a very brief bit of Stream Tearing, where grey appears on screen. the second half got a little rougher with more Stream Tearing and a couple of instances of Macro Blocking. Overall, it didn't get in the way of gameplay, but they were noticeable because of how good and real world the game looks.
Very early on it was clear that there are a lot of cinematics. i saw no suggestion of an autosave which isn't reassuring. you can press Option and end the cutscene, but if it's your first time like it is for me then that's not an option you want to take. The issue with skipping, so far with just Part 1, is that there doesn't seem to be an option anywhere to watch the skipped cutscene.
PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service is a platform that will only give you a 20 second heads up before they terminate the connection. with the cutscenes being skippable it's good but what's great is that there is a manual save option when pressing Option. The save is fast, too. So the game does have ways around the limitations of the platforms.
But if i'm unable to catch up with cutscenes and the story that's told, then it may not be the best way to play the game for the first time. There are still things in-game that i don't have access to so it might be possible that option does exist. But for now, playing Death Stranding in the Cloud is a decent option.
