i mean codecs are a huge part of 1 through 3
some runs i probably spent half the time just reading/listening to codecs
snake barely talks anymore when he does there's super obvious obfuscation of his mouth and face
its like Sutherland was way more expensive per hour so lets not record that much they wont notice oh and no face mocap
so even if you werent somehow attached to the classic voice over the last 15 years you're still getting ripped off solely because Kojima got starstruck
controls are smoother yeah but after an hour any of the old ones are fine and i can do whatever i want with them anyway
I mostly agree with this as far as missing the tone of MGS. Regenerating health, raspberry jam on the screen, a (virtually) silent protagonist, no codecs, etc. But I must say the game plays fucking incredibly. The controls are intuitive and sensible, and it plays like a modern game ought to. All of the gameplay function of the old games made much less cumbersome. Some of the fundamental formula changes we'll probably have to live with i.e. no codec screen and regenerating health, but that's not to say it's all gone. If some of the recent media about the game is to be believed, it still looks like it has a sense of humor and that great MGS camp.
I wouldn't mind the Sutherland issue as much if Snake actually spoke, but in Ground Zeroes and the gameplay we've seen from Phantom Pain he barely talks. A sentence here or a word there. If this is supposed to take us down Big Boss's road to villainy, it may actually take some god damn characterization and dialogue. He's not Link, he's not Gordon Freeman, he's not the Vault Dweller, he's not some blank slate through which the player lives as part of the story. He's a central character and the major catalyst for the whole series and this looks to be a pivotal chapter in his story. And how do you develop a character who feels so detached from the events surrounding him. It's like watching Drive or some other Ryan Gosling movie and the only way we can tell what he's potentially feeling or experiencing emotionally is through the situational context around his stoic ass face (or voice, as it were.) I'm hoping I'm way off base here and we get plenty of talky bits, because if Kojima for the first time in his damn career underwrote a script just so he could hire a big time action star as the voice of Big Boss, then he's no longer fit to run this series.
All that aside, I think Ground Zeroes is so light on story and characterization is because it exists primarily to teach players how to play MGSV so that whenever it comes out, we can jump in with both feet. I can't wait to play that game, especially now that I know how well the Fox engine scales to PCs, especially lower end laptops like mine.
By the way, more on topic, do you think Drew will figure out just how many ways you can play MGS3? There are so many neat little tricks in that game that make me appreciate it that much more, but it's unlikely Drew will discover it on a first playthrough, unless Dan tips him off.
