@Th3solution I was going to finish off two road sections while the earth was quaking and the tar was baking, like, important story event can wait, I have a road to build, but one paver was across a bit of a tiny, wee canyon, and at the point I was going to manually ladder across and carry the materials I thought "what am I doing, the plot is calling me" so I parked the van stuffed with material and went into the unknown.

Ah, good to know. The set-up being exactly like Cliff and his kill squad was a good tip-off 😅 hopefully I have my level 2 shotguns, but I suspect I didn't actually come prepared for a fight. I do have a save to go back to, if need be where I could just stock up on smoke grenades (I think being unseen might help), explodey grenades, grenade pistols and massive shotguns and brute force my way through.

That crafty bugger, Kojima, made me think I was only going to deal with one solitary BT to test my new blood boomerang 💀

@Ravix You’re probably fine, as the game has a way of giving you plenty of enemy drops just in case you didn’t come in prepared. But you’ll only get the bare necessities that way — guns and a few health cryptobiotes, and so yeah, having the full array of cool gizmos like smoke grenades or decoys would have definitely helped me. I always forget about Dollman too. I think he can distract an enemy if you throw him at them, but I’ve never tried that. Like I said, it always just deteriorates into a shoot-out for me and I just go full attack-mode from there.

In the MGS games I always preferred stealth and was able to avoid open conflict for most encounters. But boss fights are a different animal.

The other tricky part with Death Stranding is that if you want to stockpile all the equipment and weapon options then you’re going to have to be sneaking around with a ton of cargo on your back and so then it makes it difficult to hide when you’ve effectively doubled your size. Probably a good tactic in retrospect if one were to want to be a little sneaky is offloading most of the packages and just carry around the few weapons and items that are essential so you can be more light-footed and a smaller more concealable frame. For this particular interaction though I can’t remember if the game immediately cuts away and advances out of the area after delivering the final blow, in which case any items left behind might be lost. I’m not sure because I hauled around my full allotment of cargo for the entire interaction 😅. Definitely put me at a disadvantage.

@Th3solution Ahhh, I just remembered they gave me a new suit and I forgot to wear it, too. The specific urban stealth gear 😅 I think I may go back and then I can enter with the loadout I want and get watch the cutscene again as a bonus (if that observatory lets me change suits, anyway) I suppose I could fully tune my backpack for ammo and grenades to keep my packaging boxes down to pouch size, too. Currently it just has lots of cool patches, some ammo or grenade pouches and two chiral weight-reduction devices as standard and I never really change it up as I like being able to carry the absolute maximum and beyond so I never fall over while looking stylish!

Ah, fighting while carrying a load of unnecessary packages is half the fun, and one death isn't too bad. Cliff Unger runbacks/replays still give me nightmares 😭 I don't even know how bad it was, but in my memory it feels like it was a pain.