should have saved a few out of the hundreds of emails I got. I feel bad making fun of those people, but it was really pathetic. So much of their lives was dependent on MGS4 being PS3 exclusive. They HATED Xbox users more than anything else in the world. They didn't want Xbox 360 to have any good games, especially not MGS4. I would get emails almost every day that read like, "Please, please, PLEASE RYAN, please confirm that MGS4 will NEVER come to the Xbox 360 and will FOREVER stay on PS3! This is serious. Stop ignoring us! We are the TRUE fans blah blah. P.S. Tell Cliffy that Gears of War sucks."
Walking around Roppongi listening to 1UP Yours, Luke vs. Shane, and the constant static of the console wars, I felt like I was one of the guys on the frontline. It's funny to look back on, but at the time, it was annoying and distracting. (I remember one angry phone call I got from Sony when they caught wind of a rumor that MGS4 360 was real.) Thankfully now it feels like all consoles users are banding together to combat evil F2P, social games, slot-machine mechanics, Zynga, etc. That's all good, as far as I'm concerned.
Obviously it's hard to collectively blame a company, it's almost certainly not your fault, but there were decisions made that deliberately stoked the console warriors from KojiPro without question. That initial trailer that shows a clip of the Killzone trailer mentions the PS3 CPU and how it's key to winning the console war or something similar. Even really strange statements like Kojima claiming 50GB wasn't enough for MGS4 despite it ultimately being in the mid-thirties.
I do think it would have been cool to see it go to 360 and PC (the ultimate irony being the series actually started on MS's MSX). It's also kind of cool that it's basically the final huge third party exclusive we'll probably ever see (assuming Versus isn't). Thematically the game has a number of allusions it being a dinosaur in the gaming environment, an aging weapon dragged back into the existence to support a platform.
Until I played it, it seemed a very strange decision, but it feels like a game that was actually written with it's exclusivity in mind, bizarrely.
My biggest learning from MGS4 was don't answer every question about your fiction. That was the greatest disservice we could have done. I remember peeking into the TUS forums a month after MGS4 shipped and saw the damage we did -- there was no more discussion, no more debates, no more passion. Whether or not people liked all the answers, we explained every mystery and subsequently smothered the fun of our crazy fiction. Never again.
It certainly did. Trying to parse the story of SoL was a constant debate for many years, and while there are still questions from that game, anything that needed to be addressed was. It's a difficult decision though, what people want, and what they believe/claim they want, are often misaligned, but it's also a question of what the creator wants.
We have seen another MGS since, and we have Rising early next year, but we might be about to see the real next entry in the series in a couple of weeks, and if completely flushing out the loose-ends in MGS4 has allowed for a complete refresh of the series with 5, I think it'll have been well worth it.
I do believe we should have seen Snake die, the series has a compulsion of resurrecting characters randomly, there are story justifications, Ocelot's dad was psychic, Big Boss was rebuilt with cloned bits and bobs, etc, but it's irrelevant, because all it really does is nullify the importance of death. While I don't think it will happen, within a game, you could easily undo Snake's impending death, make him young again, but it would be the worst the thing. The series until that point need to completely be cleaned up to allow for something altogether new. I just hope that's what's happening.
No doubt. Although I like the wedding scene, if only because we had my mom scan her Bible at the last minute, which became the model used by Ed in the scene.
I don't understand the wedding scene actually, I don't get why it's out of the back of the nomad, you even have Snake at a graveyard, quite possibly near a church, wearing a suit. It was really strange not to have those events linked geographically.
