E3 Death Stranding Trailer Showcases Environment and Some Game Mechanics

Through several cinematic trailers, we have seen Norman Reedus' character watch his coworkers perish, and appear on a beach where everything around him has gone through a cycle of death and rebirth, while attached at a baby in Kojima's new project Death Stranding. Still unsure what it all means as the creator loves to play with his audience, and the game will be the first release to the new Kojima Productions, the mystery around Death Stranding game play is something the company with keep close to the vest dropping clues until they are ready for a release date.

E3 2018 showed a new type of trailer where we see a different side of our character who we have learned is possibly named Sam Porter Bridges. While the badges on the weather proof suit worn by Sam, we see badges both saying Porter and Bridges which from another trailer, seems to reference the new United States present in this game.

Does the naming convention of this new world contain both your job and that you are a citizen of the Bridges? Clearly Sam is a porter of types, and spends the trailer traversing the types of landscapes moving freight with the aid of droids to other settlements.

What Sam is transporting seems to be any sorts of supplies, and clearly even a body- and he comes across a woman that seems to be of a rival transporting company as well but she seems to be an ally.

When Sam drops his photo of what appears to be his family in the Time Fall Rain, it ages a spot on his hand and fades the face of a woman in the photo that appears to show up later in the trailer but some have suggested the positioning of the photo looks like the Oval Office. Was Sam part of the government previously?

Seen in a previous Death Stranding trailer video, the rain is the great enemy. Does it call the invisible monsters leaving the footprints? Or have something to do with the ghostly entities that Sam is able to sense are out there?

If killed by the monsters or the Time Fall Rain, which rapidly ages exposed skin that has been out in the elements for too long too the point of death, it leaves a lot of questions of its true purpose.

While Sam covers up and sneaks around, using a device that seems to be associated with his baby in the tank to keep out of the rain, it is known that you don't really die in Death Stranding and similar to other games you end in a sort of purgatory near your body where you can pick up your items again and respawn, but every time you die it seems to add another ghostly hand print to your skin.

We see the Time Fall Rain rapidly kill and regrow plant life only to end its life again during a rain cycle in a beautiful circle of life and death, but what impact will it have on the player when they die? Is the purpose to carrying around the baby to have them rapidly age to the same age where a player died to resume Sam's role? When you die you don't seem to have a baby in the tank when you respawn.

Since the first trailer, all scenes in Death Stranding has focused on threads attached to sky entities that seem to be invisible most of the time until they are ready to attack Sam.

What are these things? There seems to be no clear explanation, but they are growing in number and seem to be associated with the rain. Sam claims that he can sense them to whoever he is talking to on the walkie talkie, saying that he can see them and is waiting for cover to move outside.

With segments of Death Stranding said to be about online game play, it makes one wonder if some of the sky beings and the strands are related to other players dying on the same server that are come across.

Are the beings even former humans? Are they something be something beyond?

Do they control the Time Fall Rain?

How does Sam know so much about Time Fall Rain? Does it go back to his possible connection to Bridges or just experience of others dying in this environment? Are the flashback we see of the woman and the photo he drops connected to the rain?

How are other colonies surviving the rain? Is this why Sam is one of the few equip to be a porter moving supplies to other colonies?

Since the first Death Stranding trailer with a naked Norman Reedus staring as Sam Porter Bridges on a beach surrounded by the death of sea life, we have seen the first glimpse of the baby.

In the first trailer Sam clings to the child and tearfully embraces that only thing alive in the environment where he currently finds himself. In later trailers, the baby is seen in tanks being ported and awakened when there is a type of extension turbine that spins and seems to be either signalling for the change in winds or rain, or maybe the movements of the invisible creatures as Sam crouches moves about with his tank baby at the ready.

But is the baby a clone of Sam and does one need to be at the ready to be able to respawn if Sam is killed? Every seen where we seem Sam emerge from the watery purgatory, the baby is no longer in the tank, but at the beginning of the newest trailer we see that Sam connects himself to the tank with some sort of IV needle that then produces the baby in the tank.

It also seems in some scenes that the baby is already inside of Sam.

So does Sam need to keep alive and perhaps find supplies along the way to make sure that he always has a clone on tap in the case that he is starting to die? Does the baby serve another purpose.

Why in the scenes when they are scanning for the invisible monster making the footprints and the sky entities, did the baby seem to be searching for it as if it could sense the disturbance before the adults?

Does the woman at the end of the trailer have anything to do with the babies?

We expect much more to be revealed by the time of Death Stranding being released sometime in 2019.