Death Stranding: Director’s Cut comes to PC, the PlayStation 5 “director’s cut” that expanded Hideo Kojima’s open-world adventure with new story content, challenges and gadgets to try out. Will it work fine on PC? Is it comfortable to transfer saves between versions? Read on to find out.
Is it possible to make a “Director’s Cut” of a game that, by itself, was already everything its director wanted? It seems that yes, since it exists and is called Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. The definitive version of the open world game of Hideo Kojima It finally arrives on PC after its debut on PlayStation 5 last September. A reissue loaded with quality of life improvements, new constructions and gadgets that increase playable possibilities and even with new story missions that expand the background of the adventure. Is it worth checking out again if you already passed the standard version? To be honest, the contents of this “port” are the same as the console version. For this reason, I am not going to spend too much time evaluating each of the new features and detailing how they change the general experience. To do this, I invite you to consult the analysis of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut on PS5 that fellow Carlos Gallego made at the time.
But I will say this: As someone who played Death Stranding in 2019, and put a good 80 hours into the game, returning to the Kojima Productions universe with this version I got the bug to complete it once again, now with all it has to offer. But it’s enough to talk about the past, it’s time to focus on this new version for computers. For the analysis of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut on PC I have used a computer with a CPU AMD Ryzen 5 5600Xa GPU Nvidia RTX 2060 Super and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It is a surplus configuration to play at 1080p, although with a clear bottleneck when playing at 4K, the GPU. Luckily, Death Stranding Director’s Cut PC boasts such a good optimization like its previous version.
Return to Death Stranding
Playing at 1080p there is no problem in reaching 60 FPS in high qualities without the need for DLSS, although it always comes in handy to guarantee constant performance in the most intense moments. At 4K resolution, DLSS works just as well as Nvidia users will be used to: with the mode performance I managed to maintain a constant 57-59 FPS most of the time, with drops to ~45 average FPS in the most graphically loaded situations, with rain, fog and enemies in dense areas; with the mode ultra performance, the game has never dropped below the average 50 FPS for me and there are no noticeable artifacts, or at least not enough to take me out of the experience. I don’t think it’s even necessary to say that this data depends on your configuration, but the important thing here is that, with the same machine, I have experienced the same performance as in the standard version from Death Stranding PC. If the base game ran fine on your computer, you know what you’re in for.
Just as a curiosity, I have also tried Death Stranding: Director’s Cut on Steam Deck and the truth is that it has surprised me. I have not managed to reach 60 FPS at 1280x720p despite messing with the settings, but I have managed to maintain a few 35-40fps in moments of high intensity – such as boss fights – in medium quality. With AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution or Nvidia Image Scalling active you gain a few extra frames at the cost of slightly less sharpness, though you still don’t go above 45 consistently. Therefore, you should have no problem playing it at 30 FPS on Steam’s new portable machine. Of course, you better have good eyes if you want to appreciate something in the interface during the game, outside of the menus.
This version has given me the bug to complete it once againAnother important detail of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut on PC is that, as with the console version, it is necessary to transfer your save data from the “standard” game if you want to continue the game in this new version. To transfer your Death Stranding game saves on PC, you must load the game in the standard version of the game, go to any distribution center or base on the map and open the system menu in front of its mission terminal, scroll down the menu and select the data transfer option. Once this is done, you need to run Death Stranding Director’s Cut PC on the same computer and select the load transfer game option from the main menu.
being totally honest, the process is… uncomfortableI’m not going to lie to you. Mainly, because you have to spend your time installing the entire standard version just to do an operation that barely takes a second, and then load that file from the new version. It’s nice that Death Stranding on PC offers the same experience as consoles, but the inconvenience of transferring data from PS4 to PS5 is something that didn’t need to be recreated, honestly. Oh, and keep in mind that saves can only be transferred from one user profile to the same. That is, if you played Death Stranding with a Steam account, but purchase and run this Director’s Cut with a different account, you will not be able to transfer the data due to the game’s anti-cheat check.
My summary of the Death Stranding: Director’s Cut PC review is as follows: a very well optimized port and with as many configuration options as the standard version, with all the extras of the game on PS5. As I mentioned at the beginning and on a personal note, these additions seem enough to give Hideo Kojima’s adventure a second run, and of course it is the best way to experience this adventure if you haven’t played it yet. But in the end, whether it is worth embarking on again or not will depend on each one.
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