The wait for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is killing me. The hype is strong, and local retailer Datablitz has yet to open a pre-order (seriously DB, I’ve given up on the various editions, I just need you to have the game on release day) despite the game’s popularity and status, and like everybody else who weren’t able to go to Gamescom 2015 for the hands-on experience, I had to settle with demo videos and a few tidbits of information here and there.
The gameplay seems to be as good as advertised. The focus on an “open” style of play means that you get to make your opportunities as opposed to just going from point A to point B on a map. We had a very small taste of it in Ground Zeroes: shooting out lights to keep an area dark, marking guards to improve your tactical awareness and ability to devise tactics on the fly. We understood the difference between night ops (Ground Zeroes mission) and day missions (Eliminate the Renegade Threat and Destroy the Anti-Air Emplacements side ops) as well as the different tactical advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
The most recent gameplay video shows the improved Mother Base mechanic from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Unlike the portable game, this Mother Base is an actual location you can visit to enrich your micro-managing experience and prove your leadership acumen. You, as Big Boss, will have to be more involved in building your army rather than just assigning staff to various teams (which you will still have to do). How often you visit, how involved you are in Mother base activities, will affect your army’s morale. Let it fall too low and your men will grow disillusioned and leave. Invest time and GMP (the in-game currency) into your organization and you will be able to develop a much stronger entity than the one you lost in Ground Zeroes.
The Mother Base mechanic is at the core of the whole gameplay experience in The Phantom Pain, even more so than in Peace Walker. In the latter, the Mother Base goes hand in hand with the natural progression of the game and its development is dependent on your willingness to replay missions to extract personnel. But in Phantom Pain, you also need to explore the massive locations, searching for blue-prints, recruiting staff and material, all in an open-world setting. Assuming that all mechanics connected to the Mother Base get unlocked early on, you will be left with a pretty heavy responsibility throughout your playthrough. In the gameplay videos we’ve seen so far, there is the impression that upgrading Mother Base to enable development of items useful during gameplay is of paramount importance. For sure, you can complete missions without the fancy gear, but Snake is against a regular army, whose soldiers will adapt to your tactics, and who will call on reinforcements riding armored personnel carriers. Even with the highly scripted nature of the “A Hero’s Way” mission demos, things can go south pretty fast.
The game is set with “revenge” being a dominant theme. Accordingly, an aggressive approach to a mission is now set as a viable alternative to the traditional sneaking because revenge, in the context of super-soldiers and armies, can be very violent. While the series first accepted armed conflict in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots as a viable course of action, it did so reluctantly, and the game constantly chides you about it whenever your body count reaches a certain number. This time, the game lets you make the choice if you feel like fighting a tank after that armored personnel carrier you just wasted. Oh, and the reinforcements may arrive in armor or bullet-proof shields depending on whether you made a ruckus on their part of the map first.
That last part highlights Hideo Kojima’s version of a sandbox: your enemies actually respond to your tactics by developing countermeasures. Too many head-shots and they start wearing helmets. Getting beat by heavy fire-power and headquarters will issue bullet-proof shields (resembling riot shields) to improve defense. High level soldiers get to wear fancier gear like armor, giving them supreme protection in the battlefield. Your actions seem to affect what happens in missions and that’s a big deal. There are a lot of open-world games out there but only a few features effects to your actions. I’m fairly sure we would eventually recognize a pattern or exploit in the mechanic (this is still just a game after all), but so far, so good.
Of course a Metal Gear Solid game isn’t a Metal Gear solid game without the story. Despite the numerous gameplay videos, little has been revealed about the story outside of this game being Big Boss’ fall from hero to villain. There are numerous indications that the game will bring the arc of Big Boss into full circle with Solid Snake’s. Revolver Ocelot is now the western gunslinger he was in Metal Gear Solid, Master Miller has started using “Benedict” as his name, and Big Boss has embraced his role as the Boss. But that’s about it concerning the story. Perhaps Kojima wanted to showcase the gameplay while keeping the story as his trump card. In my opinion, this is a sound strategy, but one that has spawned numerous theories concerning “plot twists”.
The most famous of these theories is that we won’t play as Big Boss at all but Frank Jaeger, aka Gray Fox, a fan favorite. Despite being unlikely, hours and hours of “analysis” videos litter around You Tube. Most of the proofs presented are freak coincidences at best, taken out of context at worst and on par with Ancient Aliens‘ information gathering. The nadir of the analysis videos is the one where he takes issue with Venom Snake’s pony-tail, saying that Big Boss never had a pony tail. I mean, come on, does Big Boss have no right to change hairstyles every now and then? It’s not that I am opposed to the idea of playing as someone other than Big Boss, but Gray Fox seemed a little “out there”, not to mention it would cause a massive continuity problem for the series. Their videos are extremely entertaining though, I’d give them that.
The Phantom Pain will also feature two online mechanics: the Forward Operating Base, where you invade the bases of other players, and Metal Gear Online. I’m not much of an online player, but the FOB at least, seems pretty enticing. As you develop Mother Base, you will eventually have the option of developing FOBs which can be invaded by another player. An alert will activate whenever an invasion is happening and you will have to organize defensive positions as well as participate in apprehending the guilty party. Should any of your staff are taken prisoner, or your resources successfully taken, you have the option of rescuing them before they are turned. You can then proceed to invade the guilty party’s own base for some payback.
An interesting and very welcome development is the confirmation that the content in all systems is the same. There was a worry that the last generation ports of the game will have significant parts removed due to space. Thankfully, that was addressed and those getting the game on the PS3 and Xbox 360 should rest assured that you won’t have a severely truncated experience similar to Shadows of Mordor. The most obvious difference is in the resolution: last generation consoles will get 720p and 30 fps while current gen will go 1080p on PS4 and 900p on Xbox One while both will run at 60fps. The PC version will have the best visuals of them all. Personally, I can live with 720p and 30 fps on my games just as long as the whole experience does not suffer. While the death of the PS3 and Xbox 360 is all but certain, games like Phantom Pain and GTA V only reinforce the idea that last gen can still handle major games if the developer knows what it is doing.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is shaping to be not just a ground-breaking game on PC and current gen consoles, it is also most likely one of the last – if not THE last – major title coming out for PS3 and Xbox 360. The NBA 2K series for last gen are now mere copies of 2K14 with added animations and roster updates. EA Sports and Ubisoft and Square Enix have all ditched the last gen (although Rise of the Tomb Raider will still be released on Xbox 360, it won’t on the PS3 even after the timed exclusivity deal expires). I’m all set for the Phantom Pain – money has been set aside, leaves applied and approved. Now, all I need is that damn pre-order or assurance that there will be stocks in Datablitz come September 1.
5 Comments
Only game I am looking forward to at all, Props to NVIDIA bundling it with GPU’s as well, they couldn’t of picked a better game.
Man with all the drama behind this game’s development it better be the bomb. And yeah, gotta love NVIDIA’s consistent game bundles these days. They’re absolutely sweet games.
I do agree I hope it does, But theres a reason Why I never played anything but the actual series since a kid, I won’t touch MG Rising, NTY! But honestly, even though Ground Zero’s was good, it was too short and I feel like they shoulda added more, I was still pleased, so with this I think we can be busy for a bit, still too hyped atm to play it regardless.
I actually never played MGS4 till the end so I’m looking forward to doing that should it ever hit playstation 4 or PC but that looks pretty bleak with Kojima out of the picture. Rising was a fun Devil May Cry alternative but yeah, aside from funny dialogs and cooky characters, I’m still mostly solid for the original MGS game. Played it in emulator a few weeks ago, it was so hard not being able to use the analog sticks for view. That’s how far we’ve come in the pad interaction of games.
hahaha shet, mukhang madedelay pa laro ko niyan. Wasak ang mobo (akala ko PSU) mukhang kelangan mag B2Wealthy muna 😛 Same here, nood youtube lang for MGS4 (MGS3 pinaka last nalaro)