Death Stranding Director’s Cut For PS5 Might Make Life Too Easy

Kojima Productions showed off more of the add-ons and enhancements coming to Death Stranding Director’s Cut and they all look like they will help ease your pain and make delivering packages across the game’s grueling, ghostly world easier. In other words, they seem to miss the point.

Death Stranding Director’s Cut, out September 24, is the version of the game optimized for PS5. It doesn’t just have better graphics and load times though. It has a bunch of new mechanics, systems, and modes that practically make it look like another game altogether.

Here’s all the new stuff that Kojima Productions revealed during Gamescom: Opening Night Live stream:

• Rig stabilizers that help you glide down from high-up areas.
• Cargo launchers to fire your packages over long distances and escort them via drone.
• A Buddy Bot who will carry your precious deliveries for you.
• AI navigation that will carry the player themselves wherever.
• New weapons like the mazer gun to stun enemies.
• A firing range for testing them out and competing for high scores against other players.
• Motorcycle time trials against other players around the world compliments of a new race track.
• New missions.

A lot of this stuff is what you might expect from bonus DLC or a Game of the Year edition, but some of it, like the thruster pack and cargo launcher, look like they fundamentally change the feeling of the world and how you relate to it.

Read More: Death Stranding: The Kotaku Review

Death Stranding’s post-apocalyptic depiction of a United States where humanity is beat down and isolated to lonely pockets was grim and difficult to explore. It was so successful in establishing this mood that the eventual arrival of the covid-19 pandemic and government-enforced quarantines made the whole thing end up feeling eerily prescient. Death Stranding elevated the mundane drudgery of safely delivering packages undamaged by the elements into an irresistibly tense existential crisis. Drones are fun, but I’m not sure how cutting through obstacles by delivering cargo via remote control plays into that.

The Buddy Bot looks even more hilariously incongruent. It has two legs and will transport you or your packages vast distances without you having to lift a finger. A fun reward for seasoned players perhaps, but it really throws off the ratio of Metal Gear-to-walking-sim in my book. I’m sure the game’s community will have all kinds of fun using the Bot and other gadgets to do ridiculous stuff, but it seems increasingly clear that what made Death Stranding stand out was all of the things director Hideo Kojima wasn’t able to add during the initial rush to ship it.

Shortly after it was announced, Kojima tweeted that he didn’t really like the name Director’s Cut for the PS5 version. “A director’s cut in a movie is an additional edit to a shortened version that was either released reluctantly because the director did not have the right to edit it, or because the running time had to be shortened,” he wrote. Instead, he preferred to think of Death Stranding for PS5 as a “Director’s Plus.” After today’s reveal there is certainly no doubt about that.