The Death Stranding fan base is made up of 80% Kojima nutsackgobblers and 20% those to whom peak game design is just an interactable movie
There's definitely promise to DS, it was definitely rough first entry but the idea of a game about navigating rough terrain is interesting especially with how tools work but Death Stranding 2 needs to address a couple core issues.
1. Ziplines and roads are far too efficient in a game that rewards time and safety above all else. No matter how much you're carrying the moment you hop onto a motorcycle none of it matters and the roads carry you instantly to your destination removing the entire point of playing the game. You need to be forced to transition to other movement methods either through terrain like mud that stops construction of ziplines and vehicles just can't function in or through dead zones where certain tech can't work for whatever reason.
2. Terrain needs to be more varied, we have flat, hill, steep hill, water, medium water then hills that are too steep and water that's too steep. There's also snow but we need more sort of status bearing environments that require you to plan your movement differently.
3. A bit more tool variety and to actually require their usage. Because they don't want you to get soft locked you never need to use tools even basic stuff like ladders and ropes and the few areas they are needed will always generate them for you if you're online, which brings us to...
4. The crowd sourced multiplayer is a total lie the game has pre-set structures it gives you and it generates cargo at random for you to pickup, it exists purely for narrative reasons there's no reason it shouldn't function the same way offline because of how deceitful it is. Your roads get a ton of resources but almost never seem to finish just so you can top em off. The random cargo can be in multiple people's games and even be delivered but then that begs the question what happens if you reload a save and re-deliver it? Of course the answer is all multiplayer elements are a facade that's used for thematic purposes before gameplay.
5. Being able to save and load in a game that has a revive system on failure and locks you out of repeating deliveries for a set period of real world time makes no sense. The whole point is that if you fail a delivery or get an undesirable rank you're not supposed to be able to just redo it instantly instead the game autosaves at the beginning and end of every delivery so you can just ignore these mechanics entirely and you're encouraged to do so.
6. minor gripe but there needs to be more antagonist areas, BT zones and mules are just far too easy to just ride a bike through or totally avoid.
I'd also like to see real multiplayer where you invite players as escorts to assist in deliveries but that'll never happen. But overall I want to see more decision making in the process, while you can use many alternate methods of travel the ranking requirements being so time restrictive discourages it and invalidates mechanics entirely like resting part way through or walking with multiple carts chained together or taking more than 1 trip for large loads (which again defaults you to vehicles because theyre the only tool that can carry excessive amounts of cargo) because you'll never hit par times actually engaging with those mechanics which in some ways defeats the point of the game. Time should be almost exclusive to the special "time sensitive" deliveries and the most important factor should be cargo damage otherwise. Ultimately they need to address complacency and at the very least not incentivize it.
