It would have been good, but Hayter and Kojima seem to legitimately dislike each other now. It's easy to see how both took what happened personally.
I can actually see it from Kojima's perspective - he had this opportunity to work with a movie star, from TV and films he's really liked, of course he'll do whatever it takes! Then when Hayter got all mad about it publicly and aired his dirty laundry, Kojima was likely incredibly upset. That was some class A bridge burning right there.
At the same time, Hayter was likely equally unhappy with Kojima's lies about it. Kojima kept insisting Big Boss needed a new voice actor, but kept the same voice in Japanese. He was transparently starfucking and Hayter was the one to lose out because of it and Kojima wouldn't even be honest about it.
Also I think Hayter's comparison of MGS5 as "New Coke" might have been scarily accurate.
It does suck that he got screwed out of the role because of Hollywood boner.
Sometimes when I'm asleep, I have dreams about MGS5, instead it was a linear game like the other numbered games (1,2,3, 4) but still let you approach infiltration in different ways like in Ground Zeroes (why wasn't TPP like Ground Zeroes, would have loved if the missions just flowed together like all the other games instead of having to hear chopper blades and sprint across wasteland for 1/4 of my playthrough), It was also the best game ever as it had a awesome mind blowing story that wasn't a disjointed mess like how it actually turned out in 5.
I don't really give MGS5 bonus points or anything for having enjoyable gameplay, mainly because I expect both that and very intriguing/interesting story based on my experience with the previous games in the series. So much of the dialogue in the game is wasted on missions featuring random npcs that you have to kill/extract, as opposed to being focused around the central story, which was given much less attention.
I can only imagine the previous games with stuff like "ok, now go assassinate this random arms dealer. Finished? Ok now extract this random prisoner, blow up some rebel s, none of this is related to the story of the game in any way, shape or form, but we decided to put random quests as main missions so that the segregation between Mission List and Side Ops is kind of pointless.
So many of the main missions have absolutely nothing to do with the main story, seriously. Only a few directly deal with the central conflict. There are way too many filler main missions. People who think you can only have either story or gameplay but not both should play some of the previous games in the series.
I would have loved it if the game was actually a combination of the hospital, Ground Zeroes style base infiltrations with no bullshit chopper blades and empty wasteland, the medical facility mission and last Quiet mission levels of feels. Take all of that and multiply it by 10x with ample story stuff to boot and I probably would have died in the process of playing this game because it would have been soo good.
At least we have MGO3.
