How Long Is Death Stranding?

Depending on how you choose to play Death Stranding, the playtime can either be a long, sweeping open-world journey or the length of your standard action-adventure video game. Do you care about doing extra side-missions and being the best delivery man in the entire UCA? Or are you mainly interested in getting through the story? Here’s how long it takes to beat Death Stranding no matter how you want to experience it. (No spoilers!)

As far as we know, Sony hasn’t published any official statements on how long Death Stranding is, but based on several GameSpot editors’ time with the game pre-launch, we have some numbers that might be useful to you. Please note these are not official numbers, just some basic calculations based on how long it took us here in the GameSpot office. For more Death Stranding features, check out our in-depth beginner’s guide and our gallery highlighting all the most significant celebrity cameos we’ve found in the game so far.

Main Story

• 50 hours (standard)

• 100 hours (completionist)

We took the average of several GameSpot editors’ completed playtimes with Death Stranding to get the standard game completion rate. This is if you play Death Stranding at a pretty normal pace, balancing “main story” missions with the optional standard deliveries that help you build out reputation and increase your connection level with various NPCs in the game. Playing at this rate also means spending a decent amount of time building structures for other players and yourself: filling out the landscape connected to the chiral network with generators and watchtowers, delivering materials to bridges and road pavers to make travel more efficient, and so on. It also means spending some time delivering lost packages for other players and raking in the likes. If you’re not in an urgent rush to beat Death Stranding, but you’re also not walking around in circles slamming back Monster Energy drinks, you can get through the main game story in about 40-60 hours. (Of course, those little moments matter too.) One of our editors completed the game in 45 hours at this pace, but ended up focusing more on efficiency in the latter episodes to speed up the playthrough.

One of our editors was dedicated to maxing out his connection level with all NPCs in the game, such as preppers and Bridges distribution center workers, and he got 99.9% of the way there. Doing so required him to take on a ton of extra standard orders and deliver as much lost cargo as he could across several cities and waystations. This is as close to a completionist run as anyone at GameSpot has gotten so far, and it took about 100 hours, including getting through the main game story. Depending on how much you love helping out your fellow porter, you could probably double that number before you even get halfway through the game, but that’d be entirely optional.

The more broadly community-sourced site HowLongToBeat.com (so far) has about 63 hours for “main + extras,” about 50 hours for a “rushed” pace, and 76 hours for a more leisurely playthrough.

Episodes

Death Stranding has a total of 14 story episodes, or chapters. These episodes vary in length, with Episode 3 comprising a huge portion of the early game due to the vastness of the map and the amount of orders available for Sam to complete.

If you’re looking to get through Death Stranding quickly or just need some help along the way, check out our Death Stranding episode walkthroughs below.

• Death Stranding – Episode 1 Guide
• Death Stranding – Episode 2 Guide
• Death Stranding – Episode 3 Guide

We hope this has given you a better sense of how long it takes to beat Death Stranding. No matter your approach to Death Stranding, we have you covered with tons of guides to help you get started and successfully reconnect the UCA, including a general Death Stranding walkthrough, a BT survival guide, and a guide on how to get your first vehicle. Be sure to also read our Death Stranding review, which gave it a 9/10 and praised it for its “remarkable” exploration of “the sheer power and purpose we can find in human connection.”

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-long-is-death-stranding/1100-6471233/