For all the nitpicks I had with Death Stranding 2 when it was originally released last year, there’s no denying on my part that it was already a gorgeous looking game on my base PlayStation 5, with some of the best visuals in my personal gaming experience, period. Now, having had the opportunity to give it a shot on PC, I’m even more impressed with its performance on my modest system.
As with Sony’s previous PC ports like God of War Ragnarok, Death Stranding 2 runs quite well on my aging setup that includes an i7 processor equipped with 24Gb of RAM and a RTX 3060, the latter of which served as an upgrade a few years ago that gave it a boost of sorts after ten faithful years or service.
There were absolutely no drops in performance whatsoever, at ‘high’ and even ‘ultra settings. I played through the initial opening bits and put some time into its first big open space in Mexico, where a lot of the game’s most impressive weather effects take place, and was positively impressed by how it all went down. It’s worth noting that if you have the adequate display setup that supports it, you can run this in ultra widescreen, which should help make your deliveries as Sam much easier, thanks to the much larger viewing angle around the guy.
Sadly, I was disappointed by some aspects of this transition to PC. Having spent nearly 100 hours playing the game on PS5, it would’ve been nice to be able to carry over my progress to this port, especially with the integration with my PSN ID. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here. But in place of cross progression, there’s cross play, at least, so people on both ends can influence each other’s world with their contraptions regardless of the system they might happen to be playing Death Stranding 2 on, which is not a feature I remember seeing in the original version.
Seeing how well Kojima’s latest effort performs on PC, it’s sad to know that it’ll probably be the last big Sony release to make the transition. Following reports that the company will be ceasing support in favor of strengthening their exclusives on PlayStation 5, it’s likely that for as good as Death Stranding 2 is here, they won’t be changing their mind anytime soon. So no Ghost of Yotei unless you own one of Sony’s goliaths.
Like I commented in the opening, Death Stranding 2 was a flawed experience for me when it came to the original’s biggest strengths, but it’s still an incredibly addictive experience all throughout, thanks to its immersive world and gripping moment-to-moment post apocalyptic delivery gameplay. It’s good that folks with only a PC to play their games on are finally getting a chance to see what all the fuss was about, in even prettier form.
