Death Stranding 2 Clutter Sparks Filter Demands

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Hideo Kojima’s latest delivery epic, hit PS5 on June 20, 2025, earning a 9.7/10 from critics for its jaw-dropping visuals and deeper gameplay. Set in a post-apocalyptic Australia and Mexico, players control Sam Porter Bridges, navigating treacherous terrain to deliver cargo and connect outposts via the Chiral Network. The game’s asynchronous multiplayer, a hallmark of the 2019 original, lets players share structures like bridges, zip-lines, and transponders to aid others. While this system fosters community, it’s causing friction.

Fans are frustrated with cluttered landscapes filled with player-built ramps, generators, and signs, which break the lonely, cinematic vibe many loved in the first game. This issue, highlighted in our earlier report, Players Say Death Stranding 2’s Supply Requests Are Ruining the Map, has players begging for new filter options to tame the chaos.

The problem stems from the game sharing more player structures than its predecessor. Where the original balanced isolation with subtle connections, Death Stranding 2’s world can feel like a crowded MMO, with monorails, footprints, and abandoned vehicles littering the horizon. A Reddit user, Mithmorthmin, posted a screenshot on the Death Stranding 2 subreddit, showing a small area packed with four structures, a monorail, seven sets of footprints, and two stray vehicles. This visual noise clashes with the game’s photorealistic deserts and mountains, often mistaken for real-world photos. Social media posts on X echo this, noting how “12 ramps, 16 generators, and 56 player supply requests” spoil the aesthetic. Players can currently reduce shared structures through an in-game setting or play offline to remove them entirely, but both options are blunt tools, cutting out the cooperative spirit Kojima emphasizes.

Mithmorthmin also claims to have seen “much worse instances than this”, which has fans calling for optional toggles or filters that give players more control over what they see.

The community wants granular control, like a toggle to hide supply request signs or limit structures without ditching the “likes” economy, where players earn likes for helpful builds. User FlibbertyGibberts0 suggested a patch to add a supply request filter, a sentiment shared across X and Reddit threads with thousands of upvotes. The game’s Strand Contracts, which prioritize friends’ structures, help but don’t eliminate random clutter.

This issue ties into Kojima’s theme of connection, with some fans theorizing the clutter is intentional, forcing players to question “should we have connected?”—a core narrative thread. Our previous coverage, Death Stranding 2’s Boss Skips Prove Kojima Knows When to Let Go, showed Kojima’s knack for balancing challenge and freedom, but the structure overload feels like a misstep.

Similar cases exist in gaming. No Man’s Sky faced backlash for cluttered player bases early on, leading Hello Games to add visibility toggles in 2020’s Origins update. Fallout 76 also introduced camp filters after players complained about cluttered settlements. These fixes preserved multiplayer while enhancing immersion, a path Death Stranding 2 could follow. Kojima Productions hasn’t confirmed a patch, but their history of post-launch support, like Death Stranding’s 2020 PC updates, suggests a response is likely. The game’s new mechanics, like transponders for fast travel and a skill tree for combat or stealth, add depth, but cluttered vistas distract from the experience.

The Chiral Network’s bandwidth limits how many structures players can build, encouraging reliance on others’ creations, which don’t count toward your cap. Upgrading structures with chiral crystals boosts efficiency, but the sheer volume of shared items—monorails, hot springs, postboxes—overwhelms scenic routes. Some players consider disconnecting from the network entirely, sacrificing likes and shared resources for solitude, though this kills the game’s social core. With Death Stranding 2 topping UK physical charts and hitting a Steam peak for the original, the clamor for filters grows louder, pushing Kojima to balance his vision with player demands.