Death Stranding: How Long Does It REALLY Take To Beat?

The world of Death Stranding is unlike anything else in gaming. A hauntingly beautiful, post-apocalyptic America, fractured and isolated by a cataclysmic event, becomes your playground as Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus. As a porter, you’re tasked with reconnecting the scattered remnants of civilization, one precarious delivery at a time. Navigating treacherous landscapes, battling BTs (Beached Things), and carefully balancing cargo makes for a unique and often demanding experience.

But one of the most common questions potential players have before embarking on this journey is simple: Death Stranding, how long to beat? The answer, as you might expect, is not so simple. Completion time can vary wildly depending on your play style, your approach to the game’s challenges, and whether you’re a story-focused player or a completionist aiming for percent. On average, a straightforward playthrough focusing primarily on the main story could take around thirty to forty hours. However, delving into side quests, exploring the world, and striving for percent completion can easily extend that playtime to eighty, one hundred, or even more hours.

The Main Thread: Focusing on the Core Story

If your primary goal is to experience the central narrative of Death Stranding, you can expect to dedicate a significant amount of time to the game, but not an overwhelming amount. Sticking to the critical path, accepting only the orders necessary to advance the story, and minimizing distractions will allow you to reach the ending in a relatively timely manner. Remember, this assumes a degree of efficiency and a willingness to forgo the game’s many optional activities.

Several factors can influence the duration of your story-focused playthrough. The chosen difficulty setting plays a crucial role. While Death Stranding isn’t primarily a combat-focused game, higher difficulty levels will increase the challenge of enemy encounters and resource management. This means you’ll need to be more careful with your planning, more efficient with your supplies, and more skilled in combat situations, all of which can add to your overall playtime.

The game’s narrative is conveyed through a series of often lengthy cutscenes. These cinematics are integral to understanding the story, world, and characters of Death Stranding. While they can be skipped, doing so will significantly diminish your appreciation for the game’s lore and emotional impact. These cutscenes contribute considerably to the overall playtime, so if you are someone who skips cutscenes, you will be able to beat the game sooner.

Another major factor is the challenging terrain. Navigating the game’s rugged and unforgiving landscape is a core gameplay mechanic. Successfully traversing mountains, rivers, and BT-infested zones requires careful planning, strategic use of equipment, and a degree of patience. Mastering the art of balance, learning to utilize vehicles effectively, and understanding the optimal routes for different types of cargo can significantly reduce travel time and expedite your progress through the story.

To hasten your journey through the story, prioritize main story orders. These contracts are the engine of the main narrative. Second, try to optimize your delivery routes. Plan your paths to minimize distance and difficulty. Finally, utilize online structures created by other players. The game is connected and lets players use structures that other players build such as roads and bridges.

Beyond the Beaten Path: Side Content and the World of Death Stranding

Death Stranding offers a wealth of side content and optional activities that can greatly enhance the overall experience. These include accepting standard orders from various facilities, exploring hidden locations, and building structures to improve the network and facilitate travel for yourself and other players. Engaging with this content can provide valuable rewards, deepen your understanding of the game’s world, and add significant playtime to your overall completion.

The time investment required to fully explore and complete a significant portion of the side content can be substantial. Dedicating yourself to accepting and fulfilling a large number of standard orders, upgrading your equipment, and constructing elaborate structures can easily add another twenty to thirty hours to your playtime, if not more. It comes down to the player’s desire to connect with the game and the world around them.

Engaging with side content will bring significant advantages. By fulfilling standard orders and building relationships with different facilities, you can unlock new equipment, upgrade your character’s stats, and gain access to valuable resources. Furthermore, exploring the world and uncovering hidden locations can reveal secrets, unlock new storylines, and provide a deeper understanding of the game’s lore and characters. This content enhances the game play experience and makes the player feel more connected to the world around them.

While enriching your experience, engaging with side content can also have drawbacks. Some players may find certain tasks repetitive or grindy, particularly those involving the collection of resources or the completion of multiple deliveries to the same location. Additionally, focusing too heavily on side content can delay your progress through the main story and potentially disrupt the narrative flow. It is important to strike a balance between pursuing optional activities and advancing the core storyline.

The Ultimate Delivery: Aiming for Percent Completion

For those seeking the ultimate challenge, achieving percent completion in Death Stranding represents a truly monumental undertaking. This involves unlocking all achievements or trophies, completing all orders (both standard and premium), reaching maximum connection level with all facilities, and constructing all possible structures. This pursuit is not for the faint of heart, requiring an immense time commitment and a high degree of dedication.

Estimating the time required for percent completion is challenging, as it depends heavily on individual skill, efficiency, and tolerance for repetition. However, most players agree that achieving this milestone can easily take eighty, one hundred, or even more hours. This represents a substantial investment of time and effort, and requires a genuine love for the game and its mechanics.

Achieving percent completion presents several significant challenges. Many of the tasks involved are inherently grindy, requiring players to repeat the same activities multiple times to achieve the desired results. Completing certain Premium orders, which require meeting specific criteria for delivery time, cargo condition, and other factors, can be particularly difficult. Perhaps the greatest challenge is the sheer time commitment required. Spending countless hours traversing the same landscapes, fulfilling repetitive tasks, and optimizing every aspect of your gameplay can be mentally and physically exhausting.

Speedrunning Sam: The Race to Reconnect

For those with a competitive spirit and a desire to push the limits of the game, speedrunning Death Stranding offers a unique and compelling challenge. Speedrunning involves completing the game as quickly as possible, using various techniques and strategies to optimize your route, skip unnecessary content, and exploit game mechanics.

The fastest known completion times for Death Stranding are truly impressive, showcasing the skill and ingenuity of dedicated speedrunners. Researching the current world record times for different speedrunning categories, such as Any% (completing the game as quickly as possible, regardless of completion rate) and Main Story (completing the main story objectives with minimal detours), can provide a fascinating glimpse into the world of competitive Death Stranding. As of now, record setting runs take roughly five hours, however, depending on the category, this can shift.

Speedrunners employ a variety of techniques and strategies to minimize their completion time. These include meticulously planning their routes, utilizing vehicles strategically, exploiting glitches or bugs in the game, and skipping non-essential cutscenes and dialogue. They use all available resources to move across the map quickly. They will optimize deliveries to skip unneeded side content. This type of efficiency has brought about some amazing runs.

Delivering the Verdict: Time Well Spent?

So, Death Stranding, how long to beat? The answer, as we’ve seen, is multifaceted. A straightforward playthrough focusing on the main story can take around thirty to forty hours. Exploring side content can extend that playtime to sixty to seventy hours, while aiming for percent completion can easily require eighty hours or more. Speedrunners have demonstrated that the game can be completed in a fraction of that time, showcasing the potential for optimizing and exploiting the game’s mechanics.

Ultimately, the length of your Death Stranding experience will depend on your individual play style, your goals, and your level of dedication. Whether you’re a completionist striving for percent, a story-focused player eager to unravel the mysteries of the world, or a speedrunner seeking to conquer the game in record time, Death Stranding offers a unique and engaging experience. The game invites you to immerse yourself in its hauntingly beautiful world, connect with its complex characters, and embrace the challenge of reconnecting a fragmented society. In the end, it’s not just about how long it takes to beat Death Stranding, but about the journey you take along the way. The time invested will leave you thinking about the world and the characters you encountered long after the credits roll. The world needs to be reconnected, but at what cost?