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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain |OT2| A Franchise Robbed Of Its Future

Why the hell does it take so long to boot up this game ... I mean every time with the agreements. It shouldn't take this long, ugh.

So on Chapter 2 and you just have to do side ops right ?
 

Hasney

Member
Man it's ridiculously impossible for an invader to successfully invade a highly upgraded FOB with max security settings.

Mwahahaha. And you get free resources everytime they fail.

Like I said though, one guy did. Out of over 30 so far, that one guy played me like a damn fiddle.
 

Jintor

Member
Episode 10 is the first one where I really had to restart to checkpoint again and again. The supply depot simply has a ton of guards in a very close proximity, huge open sightlines, and the paths they follow are surprisingly long. I'd stealthily do away with 4-6 guards and think I had the space to operate and get the prisoners out, but then some guard I didn't know of from halfway across the depot would come ambling into the room.

I basically ended up just finishing it in a zany shooting spree. Will have to come back to it at some point and see how I could do it better.

Encountered Quiet a little while later. Not super happy about it spoilers below:
The battle at first seems to be setup like a sniper battle ie. MGS3's The End, but a big difference here was that it felt like I didn't have as many options against Quiet. I tried sneaking up on her a few times, but it seemed completely impossible to the point where I'm pretty sure it is impossible. If true it'd be a big change from The End where sneaking up on him was one of the better strategies. I'm pretty disappointed by this because it feels like Quiet is "breaking the rules" of the game. There's definitely a few situations in MGS where you're in permanent alert and sneaking doesn't work, but normally, you can always sneak, and you can always use whatever strategy against whatever enemy.

As well at this point in the game I don't have a tranquilizer sniper rifle because the requirements for unlocking it are a high med bay staff and at this point in the game I pretty much just got a med bay. As a result I left and am going to come back later as the game encouraged me to do. Due to the fact that Quiet always knows where you are, and I can't surprise her, it's not going to be a very interesting sniper battle, more of a twitch battle.

I don't know am I totally wrong here or did anyone else find this weird?

You can totally sneak up
on her, but annoyingly she (and some other boss enemies) don't have any unique cqc takedowns or hold ups)

But I took her out just with my traq pistol and punching her in the face
,
 
If someone goes full Rambo on your FOB, yes those Soldiers and staff are lost. It is possible to be attacked even though you aren't online at the time, meaning you have no chance to join the effort and help your security team. As far as I know on consoles there is no way to avoid staffing a FOB once you build one. On PC you could block the game from getting online through a firewall, at the cost of the daily logins.

What I've done is opted to support a bunch of random people with larger FOBs, and in return some have supported me too. Ups the odds that if you get invaded, someone might be around to take the time to help your FOB defend itself. Plus its a great way to make GMP if you successfully help people defend. For example one defense I helped win netted approx. 800K GMP!

That's a great idea. There should be a Gaf support group
 
Reposting for new page:

What do I need for this mission ?

metalgearsolidv_thephj9qot.jpg
 

JimPanzer

Member
The preview for
chapter two
got me really hyped yesterday, can't wait to play it later.

sarcasm? with all those negative spoiler threads popping up I feel exactly the opposite. I'm up to episode
26
and looove pretty much everything about the game, but the negativity towards chapter 2 influences me no matter what.
 
sarcasm? with all those negative spoiler threads popping up I feel exactly the opposite. I'm up to episode
26
and looove pretty much everything about the game, but the negativity towards chapter 2 influences me no matter what.

Yeah, but that's the reason those threads suck ass.

Someone said you need to faulton a tank

I read that, but the logos are identical and the game doesn't tell you what exact thank you need.
 
Autosave is just strange in this game. I've had a couple missions where it saved while I was in a very dangerous position, costing me a few retries to try and get out of the mess I put myself in. I also had missions where I do things nearly perfect, hit up the main objective, go on to secure a secondary objective before leaving, die, and have to start all the way over, listening to the same BS on the chopper ride down.
 

Tiktaalik

Member
I jumped from mission 8 to that one and only had the starter Sniper Rifle and it worked. Great battle for me, didn't try to sneak but I did call the chopper and she destroyed it.

if you kill her with a regular sniper rifle is she dead for real for the whole game or do you "win the battle" and you get to recruit her anyway?
 

eso76

Member
The way I was thinking about it last night I came to the conclusion that MGSV feels like the best pure gameplay I've ever played wrapped in a metric fuckton of systems and extras designed to ruin that fun. Which leaves me not knowing if the game is amazing or frustrating. I don't know how to separate all of the dull or disappointing moments and elements from the transcendent ones.

i'm very early in the game, but i think i can share a lot of the same feelings.
Except for the story complaints, because I have no idea where this is going yet (minus a few guesses from the prologue, but those could be nothing and/or completely wrong).

Yet, i'm hooked to the game. If you scrutinize each feature, a lot of things seem to be poorly handled. And yet, the ensemble works so well that i keep going back and sinking hours in this, and enjoying most of it.
And contrary to MGS2, 3 and 4 which i played solely for cutscenes and story, Ramboing towards the next cinematic, MGSV has me hooked on gameplay alone, something that hasn't happened in years.
Of course, there's still the mirage of a long and spectacular cutscene being triggered at some point that keeps you going, but while i'm still early (story mission 10) i already know nothing at all is happening until i complete the next bunch of 3/5 missions (which is going to take me 2/3 days) and even then it's not going to be anything truly remarkable.
 

Hasney

Member
they didnt say that you can protect friends base?

If you get lucky and see a friends ID show up in the random list of people you can support, you can. But unless I'm missing something (and it's quite possible, the interface does suck), you can't pick specific people.
 
Reposting for new page:

Pretty sure you can pick one up in mission 10 (I think). "Angels with Broken Wings" in Afghanistan.
It follows the jeep away from the palace.
90% sure that's the type of vehicle you're after.

Reposting for new page:

Does anyone know if you can disable the mobility upgrades for the bionic arm? The new sprinting speed it way too fast.
 

Tiktaalik

Member
You can totally sneak up
on her, but annoyingly she (and some other boss enemies) don't have any unique cqc takedowns or hold ups)

But I took her out just with my traq pistol and punching her in the face
,

Oh really that's really surprising to me. So you can do it but it's just absurdly difficult? When I say sneak up I mean she wouldn't know where you were at all so you could hold her up or grab her or something?

Another thing that weirded me out about that battle was that a few times when she was out in the open I tried just running up to her and CQCing her, but I feel like the controls glitched or I just whiffed her and it was a bit baffling to me. I wasn't sure if I messed up and it was a coincidence or if the game actually didn't let you grab her.
 

Bungie's

Member
Pretty sure you can pick one up in mission 10 (I think). "Angels with Broken Wings" in Afghanistan.
It follows the jeep away from the palace.
90% sure that's the type of vehicle you're after.

Reposting for new page:

Does anyone know if you can disable the mobility upgrades for the bionic arm? The new sprinting speed it way too fast.

Mission 31
has 2 tanks I extracted both of them and it worked for me.
 

Toa TAK

Banned
Hey I know this'll add to the whole confusion, but I just unlocked mission 46 naturally. So I dunno what's up. For what it's worth I unlocked it just after
Huey's exile.
 
Just listening to the OST (though trying not to see the track list cos of spoilers) and it's utterly sensational stuff. "V has come to" is phenomenal especially. Some of the best music of the series is in this game.

Yeah. This game has the best OST since MGS3, definitely. Especially including all of the 80s Pop/Rock/Electro music and 80s inspired music on the Tapes.

V Has Come To is a powerful tune though, you're right. I also like
Allegiance Defined, OKB Zero, A Factory of Death, Ground Zeroes, Camp Omega, Metal Gear Online, Metallic Archaea and You Can Call Me Ishmael.
I think when all is said and done, this game will have the most underrated OST in the series.
 

Sotha_Sil

Member
The way I was thinking about it last night I came to the conclusion that MGSV feels like the best pure gameplay I've ever played wrapped in a metric fuckton of systems and extras designed to ruin that fun. Which leaves me not knowing if the game is amazing or frustrating. I don't know how to separate all of the dull or disappointing moments and elements from the transcendent ones.

Problems:
1. Menu overkill and micromanagement. Between development, combat ops, FOBs - you spend way too much time fiddling around in menus in this game with stuff that isn't actually gameplay (with the exception of missions that remove enemy equipment - which are cool). It's not like you can screw this stuff up, it's just required for you to keep getting materials and clicking the 'develop' button so that you're well equipped. It adds nothing to the game. Strip it all out and the game would be better. The single worst moment of this is (very late game spoilers)
when the major challenge of the final boss of chapter 1 is calling in supplies rather than anything else. Yeah. The menus are the hardest part of the main boss.

2. 'The continuous-shot scene'. I'm not talking about cutscenes here, I'm talking about Snake. Why do we have to see him going back to mother base every time, why do we have to call ourselves a chopper, get in the air, get high enough to become an 'ACC', then choose a mission, then spend a whole minute flying to our target? Why can't we just select a mission and go? So much useless wasted time for what seems to be a stylistic choice.

3. The mission structure. It just doesn't work a lot of the time. Four biggest sins are the credits spoiling what's going to happen, the dull monotony of every mission starting the same way (coming in on heli to a position 1km outside the target), the fact that when things get interesting (later game spoilers)
the mission structure breaks down with the ludicrous 'to be continued' breaks
, and
having to replay missions as part of the main story.
Not only that but over half the missions do not have any kind of integral story beat in them, but are just extracting random officers etc to get you closer to your actual target. The benefit is that the ranking system is a lot of fun. In the end I feel being a slave to this overall structure hurt the game way more than it helped it.

4. The open world. There has to be a reason for an open world rather than level structure to make an open world worthwhile rather than a waste of a player's time traversing it. In GTAV it's two reasons: The immersiveness and enjoyment of driving around a real city/countryside along with the emergent chaos you can cause at any point of the map. In the Witcher 3 it's because of, again, the immersiveness of being lost in a fully realised fantasy world, and secondly the joy of stumbling upon some interesting character or story somewhere you would never have expected. What is MGS's reason? The world isn't real or fully realised. There are no civilians and it is clearly a bunch of interconnected levels where the missions happen. There's really no emergent gameplay that happens outside of the bases bar maybe getting pounced on by a jackal. There's nothing special to find out there - anything good is a sideop, and even sideops are selected from your iDroid (though you can stumble into them, you still get a 'mission started'-esque announcement).

What the open world ends up meaning here is that
a) you spend a quarter of your time sprinting between the (wonderfully designed) bases themselves, and
b) those bases are restricted to two areas, instead of potentially having been in interesting locations all over the world,
c) we're expected to believe that all of these huge events are happening in this relatively tiny theatre of war, which greatly restricts what they can do with the story and setting.

5. Mother Base. The actual physical place is just a waste of your time. Confusing layout, massive bridges, 100s of closed doors... what is the point of bringing you here so often? It feels like it was designed merely to facilitate multiplayer mode. But even there, sneaking up the base vertically isn't much fun since the camera system makes stealth much more fun when the enemies are laid out mostly ahead of you rather than directly above you. I did not enjoy Mother Base.

6. The Plot and Characters. I'm not quite finished and this isn't the place to talk about the details, but... wow. The thought I had in my mind as I began to see where it was going was that I hadn't seen a storyteller fall from grace in this way since M. Night Shyamalan. That's really the best analogy I can draw, and tells you what I think of where Kojima went with the narrative in Peace Walker and then V. If you'd told me the story would have been worse than Peace Walker's, I could never have believed you. But it's far, far worse, and pretty much an utter disaster.

And yet, despite that, for over 50% of my time spent with this game it feels like it's either the greatest game ever made or at least one of them. How do you reconcile that?

(I haven't even mentioned microtransactions because a) they haven't affected me yet, and b) I'll get angry.)

Excellent post. That's a lot of amazing things about this game, but I can't help but be disappointed by a lot of things, too. It certainly does not re-write the rules to open-world design. If anything, it tells us what not to do.

I think the game would have been much better with a Dishonored-style (or Ground Zeroes, for that matter!) system of open-ended levels. The game already somewhat works like that when you're penciled into an area, but the inclusion of free roam and side ops ruins it. I've infiltrated almost every area multiple times now, it's weird having to go back repeatedly. It's starting to feel a little bloated, and I'm nowhere near the end yet.

It'll be one of my contenders for GOTY, but Bloodborne, Pillars of Eternity, and Witcher 3 are all ahead of it right now (for me). We'll see how things change as I progress further, could be for the better. If I were to score it now, it would be somewhere between 85-90.
 

omonimo

Banned
I really like the game BUT some gameplay stuff seems completely useless and unnecessary to me. MotherBase customization for example, it's a huge side game almost annoying for the excessive stuff put on it. And what about the long travesity in Afghanistan and in the same Motherbase ... I don't get it. Those parts, the checkpoint save system. Ugh. I mean they worked on it a lot of time, I'm surprise to see such imperfections.
 

Symphonia

Banned
I've just started Mission 11.

Without giving too much away, is it possible to kill Quiet altogether and, if so, how can I avoid doing that? How do I defeat her? I'm somewhat limited arms-wise.
 
Eh, considering this was Kojima Productions first stab at open world, I think they did a good job. They were a development studio used to linear experiences, so this was well out of their comfort zone. Who knows what they could have pulled off with a sequel, streamlined and with a tighter pace/package. As it is, it's a flawed masterpiece, so far, to me. It's pretty obvious that Kojima and his team's priorities weren't in story, but rather in the gameplay. I honestly think that after MGS3, Kojima stopped trying. MGS4 and PW were both terrible and forgettable stories respectively.
 

Griss

Member
I've just started Mission 11.

Without giving too much away, is it possible to kill Quiet altogether and, if so, how can I avoid doing that? How do I defeat her? I'm somewhat limited arms-wise.

No. If you 'kill' her she's just badly wounded but survives.

Eh, considering this was Kojima Productions first stab at open world, I think they did a good job. They were a development studio used to linear experiences, so this was well out of their comfort zone. Who knows what they could have pulled off with a sequel, streamlined and with a tighter pace/package. As it is, it's a flawed masterpiece, so far, to me.

I'd just ask you one question: What do you think this game gains from being open-world rather than a bunch of open levels (like say a base from this game and 200m around it on all sides).
 
Eh, considering this was Kojima Productions first stab at open world, I think they did a good job. They were a development studio used to linear experiences, so this was well out of their comfort zone. Who knows what they could have pulled off with a sequel, streamlined and with a tighter pace/package. As it is, it's a flawed masterpiece, so far, to me.

Yep just like with assassins creed I feel like this team had a flawed first attempt but would have absolutely nailed it if they had a chance to make a sequel.
 

Woodchipper

Member
I've just started Mission 11.

Without giving too much away, is it possible to kill Quiet altogether and, if so, how can I avoid doing that? How do I defeat her? I'm somewhat limited arms-wise.
Easiest way:
Find her, then send a supply drop on her. Two supply drops was enough for me. Then go and extract her.
 

Mass One

Member
Damn, you're so smart. Seriously, I fultoned 4-5 tanks, the image doesn't show what exact tank I need, that's why I asked.

Damn, that response seemed needlessly snide unless he was trolling. By tank, he probably meant the Stout IFV, it's the only tank like thing I have and I just sent them on that mission.
 
Eh, considering this was Kojima Productions first stab at open world, I think they did a good job. They were a development studio used to linear experiences, so this was well out of their comfort zone. Who knows what they could have pulled off with a sequel, streamlined and with a tighter pace/package. As it is, it's a flawed masterpiece, so far, to me. It's pretty obvious that Kojima and his team's priorities weren't in story, but rather in the gameplay. I honestly thin kthat after MGS3, Kojima stopped trying. MGS4 and PW were both terrible and forgettable stories respectively.

I agree. This open world feels good and they did a pretty good job. I just wish they put more outpost like the camp in GZ. Most of the outpost are a level below GZ (there are some pretty good one, like the mission 30)
 

Alo0oy

Banned
Fuck Konami and their servers, I just paid for an FoB base & now I can't connect to the servers, so it's pretty much useless.
 

megalowho

Member
Eh, considering this was Kojima Productions first stab at open world, I think they did a good job. They were a development studio used to linear experiences, so this was well out of their comfort zone. Who knows what they could have pulled off with a sequel, streamlined and with a tighter pace/package. As it is, it's a flawed masterpiece, so far, to me. It's pretty obvious that Kojima and his team's priorities weren't in story, but rather in the gameplay. I honestly think that after MGS3, Kojima stopped trying. MGS4 and PW were both terrible and forgettable stories respectively.
I don't think it's a perfect game but I do consider it a masterpiece, the closest equivalent I can think of is what Resident Evil 4 was for that series. I think it helps that I've never held Kojima's storytelling in high regard and appreciate his unique sensibilities, odd juxtapositions and grand stumblings more than I do the convoluted plot itself.
 

robotrock

Banned
Man holy shit this game is just stressing me out. I might need to put it down for a while.

Some early Chapter 2 Side Ops spoiler around Episode 37 or something:
Those Escaped Children missions were okay, until the THIRD ONE AND HOLY SHIT! That kid is so high up on a building and I don't have child fulton extraction yet because my R&D team is 22 and my support unit is 18. It's really pissing me off and bumming me out. Is there a way to progress the story that isn't doing that mission or doing those replay episodes
 
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