Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

[dunno lah]

I think without Jeremy Blaustein, MGS1's voices and dialogues would've ended up worse (i.e. like all the other MGSes)

 

[gromit]

GZ wasn't classic MGS. It didn't have boss fights or exposition dumps. It's just as bad as Phantom Pain in those regards.

In the context of what I wrote? It most definitely is. Discrete, cordoned areas with just enough breathing room; chokepoints and safe corners designed and placed with an eye for what they reveal and conceal.

It was MGS2-grade pac-stealth glued to MGS3 wiggle room... people ate it up and we've both heard plenty of people say they wish the whole game followed suit. I assume if they made more than one level as a clone with only the dominant memes, there would be bosses and verbal dumps.

The former will try to justify every unusual decision and questionable piece of writing as being part of a greater whole. Something sublime. Imagine if Lyric Suite wrote about Japanese Action Games and apply that to this kind of fan. That kind of fan.

The other accepts the ridiculous nature of the series and appreciates the fact that Metal Gear is one middle-aged Japanese man's grand vision of applying everything he thinks American culture is like as distilled from countless bad action films he's watched; usually with a side serving of whatever pseudoscience he learned about the week before.

I think I agree with you, but these two things aren't mutually exclusive. If I had to break it down to two extremes -- skip the silent, moderate majority -- I'd say "people who go beyond interpretation and into projection," and "people who don't think silliness and pastiche can say or mean anything."

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Too much decline in this thread for me.

 

[Jick Magger]

Think George is pretty much spot on with his review, here.

 

[Talby]

It all makes sense now.

Spoiler

 

[Caim]

It all makes sense now.

Spoiler

Well duh.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Think George is pretty much spot on with his review, here.

Great review.

Despite I think the game have a good story for a MGS game (BUT OCELOT MEEEEOWWWW IS WASTED), it is poorly in terms of narrative. Cassetes are a cool implementation IMO, reminds me the briefing videos of the older games somehow, but aren't enough. The Chapter 2 is a mess in terms of narrative, also is questionable in terms of game design too thanks to the repeated missions whose confuses the player even more. I haven't problems with the "loading" scenes like the chopper when you start a mission, but I agree that a properly fast travel system is needed to the secondary missions. I would like to say that the game is rushed because Konami's fault, but Kojima had a lot of developing time and wasted a lot of money on this. He is the man who sold the world.

Clearly, it is not a perfect game ( plotwist-> There's no perfect games), but it's a great one. Shit, I only played it for 42 hours, too little in comparison with other persons, but those hours were hours of pure joy. Easily my second favorite MGS game.

Too bad nobody will come and continue improving this formula.

 

[KK1001]

There's really not much to improve.

An open world (note: different from an overworld) needs to justify its own existence by:
1. Being packed to the fucking brim with interesting content.
2. Meaningful systems that respond to players actions dynamically.
3. Utterly engrossing the player through great atmosphere, world-building.

I struggle to come up with games that have even done one of these things well. Open world games are just by and large shit. They are inherently more difficult, costly, and time-consuming to do than linear games. The problem with games was never that they were "too linear"; it's that they were fucking boring or badly designed. Open world games, however, almost invariably suffer from being open world.

 

[Echo Mirage]

The best way to justify the open world map, I feel, is if each map had a Shadow Moses, camp omega, Outer heaven or Zanzibar land complex to infiltrate and peel open piece by piece. Whats my only real wish when I look at what could have been with MGS 5's maps.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Anyone has found in youtube the song called "Quiet life" that appears in the game?

 

[Talby]

They should have cut the majority of the open world and made a number of large Camp Omega style bases to infiltrate, but with more details like interiors and underground areas. You could still have some surrounding terrain to allow freedom of approach. Then the final mission is infiltrating and destroying your own HQ that you've been building up. (put it on land instead of in the ocean)

 

[Necroscope]

Even with its nonsensical plot, TPP would have been a much better game if not for the almost non existent narrative. As it is, it seems as if the gameplay and the story are two separate aspects of the game merged together in the final stages of development. The fact that every step of the way in the game is ridiculously prolonged also doesn't help; no matter how good the gameplay is, if you force the player to repeat the same activities over and over again it feels more like working than having fun.

I had a lot of fun with TPP, but after some point I just wanted to be done with it.

Open world games, however, almost invariably suffer from being open world.

If you brownse through any pre-release comments or wish lists one demand is always the most common: bigger world map. Hence when advertising an open world game, devs always bring it up in the first place; "This game is 3x bigger than Skyrim!", "Noob, my game is 10x Skyrim!" I don't know where this retarded notion comes from, hell, I can't even tell which open world game is bigger and I don't care. Sheer size has nothing to do with a game being good or bad.

PS This is very cool:

 

[Utgard-Loki]

sadly an unfinished, albeit enjoyable, mess. kotor2 levels of mess. if this was a blowjob there would be cum and vomit everywhere.

but unlike kotor2, we now live in a world full of DLC and microtransactions. be prepared to buy chapter 3 piecemeal, five bucks a mission.

this is not the kind of world the boss wanted.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

 

[Bigg Boss]

There's really not much to improve.

An open world (note: different from an overworld) needs to justify its own existence by:
1. Being packed to the fucking brim with interesting content.
2. Meaningful systems that respond to players actions dynamically.
3. Utterly engrossing the player through great atmosphere, world-building.

I struggle to come up with games that have even done one of these things well. Open world games are just by and large shit. They are inherently more difficult, costly, and time-consuming to do than linear games. The problem with games was never that they were "too linear"; it's that they were fucking boring or badly designed. Open world games, however, almost invariably suffer from being open world.

I think Red Dead did a decent job.

 

[Caim]

Even worse than the Black Tiger I got.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Even worse than the Black Tiger I got.

The frowny face really makes it perfect.

 

[Caim]

The frowny face really makes it perfect.

Oh totally.

How are faces generated in this game, anyway? Do they just grab a face and a haircut, then call it a day? Or do they change skin tone as well?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Oh totally.

How are faces generated in this game, anyway? Do they just grab a face and a haircut, then call it a day? Or do they change skin tone as well?

My guess would be that the game has a selection of different pregenerated parts made with its facegen that are then randomly combined and which have corresponding picture parts for the portrait, since there is definately a connection between a dude's ingame face and their CG portrait.

 

[Talby]

I've seen lots of soldiers with identical faces, down to hair and skin tone. The portraits in the iDroid vary but there are lots of clones. Apparently Zero went a bit crazy with the les enfants terribles project. There are a few unique ones that only appear once though, like some of the Ground Zeroes imported soldiers and the Bionics specialist.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

 

[Caim]

My guess would be that the game has a selection of different pregenerated parts made with its facegen that are then randomly combined and which have corresponding picture parts for the portrait, since there is definately a connection between a dude's ingame face and their CG portrait.

I've seen lots of soldiers with identical faces, down to hair and skin tone. The portraits in the iDroid vary but there are lots of clones. Apparently Zero went a bit crazy with the les enfants terribles project. There are a few unique ones that only appear once though, like some of the Ground Zeroes imported soldiers and the Bionics specialist.

Yeah, there's one face that I keep seeing that looks like the protagonist of Deadly Premonition. Kinda funny to see him in the game.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I've seen lots of soldiers with identical faces, down to hair and skin tone. The portraits in the iDroid vary but there are lots of clones. Apparently Zero went a bit crazy with the les enfants terribles project. There are a few unique ones that only appear once though, like some of the Ground Zeroes imported soldiers and the Bionics specialist.

Yea, there's gotta be some sort of link to the facegen faces the soldiers have, but there's ultimately probably somewhere around a 100 portraits.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Anyway

There's a few things that need to be understood about Metal Gear.

There's two kinds of people, those who take it seriously and those who do not.

The former will try to justify every unusual decision and questionable piece of writing as being part of a greater whole. Something sublime. Imagine if Lyric Suite wrote about Japanese Action Games and apply that to this kind of fan. That kind of fan.

The other accepts the ridiculous nature of the series and appreciates the fact that Metal Gear is one middle-aged Japanese man's grand vision of applying everything he thinks American culture is like as distilled from countless bad action films he's watched; usually with a side serving of whatever pseudoscience he learned about the week before.

If you're the former, one day you will grow out of it and hate Kojima.

If you're the latter, you will forever appreciate him.

Try to play it as the latter. If it doesn't work, don't worry; it's not for everyone.

Spoiler

That being said, MGS1 was really groundbreaking in its cutscenes and voice acting for the time. Yes, having still models bobbing their heads to failure actors pretending to be chain smokers was ground-breaking. Those were crazy times, man.

Well it's a bit more than that.

MGS1 and all the main entries that followed it are part of a very small number of games that have a certain narrative distinction: They are about something, not simply things happening. Very few games enjoy this narrative distinction (ie, Grim Fandango, Planescape: Torment, Dead Money, Legacy of Kain), much less an entire series, and MGS as a series also tends to be much more intelligent than its action movie trappings give away. Heck, MGS2 is a lot smarter than most smart movies. They also possess some of the most succesful uses of metafiction in gaming (such as MGS1's indirect questioning of the player's moral awareness as a controlling agent, or MGS3 altering its fire button for one particular scene), particularly in service of its overarching pacifist theme.

Another thing to note is that when it comes to cinematic elements, there's no one that even approaches comparing to what Kojima and his crew have done with MGS. MGS1 is still head and shoulders above the best other AAA studios have managed to churn out for cutscenes, in no small part due to its script having substance behind it (how many games endings are built out of a Richard Dawkins book?) but especially because they use camera angle, motion, music, color palette, lighting, and pacing in a fully realized cinematic style. Whatever one decides to say about Kojima's place as a creative auteur in comparison to filmmakers (though I think that Korean filmmaker was 100% correct when he said Kojima has been making films of the future all along), but he's the first great pioneer of visual storytelling in video games, so he's more like the medium's Melies.

As for his writing, we do have a bit of a problem in that most of us aren't fluent in Japanese and can't judge his writing beyond its verbosity (which is a very valid criticism) and content (see above). MGS1 in particular has several moments where you can tell there's been a problem with translating something (one of the Otacon calls while first making your way through REX's hangar had a really odd start grammatically). Eloquence is hard to judge through a second-hand source, but we can conclude that Kojima is indeed really fucking long-winded in his exposition.

 

[J_C]

I never thought I will say this about an MGS game, but MGSV is starting to lose me. I knew it that this open world crap will kill it for me, just as it killed The Witcher 3. And it seems it does. I already poured 27 hours into the game, did about a dozen of main missions and some sideops, but the game is still not going anywhere. In previous MGS games, the narrative always pulled me forward, I always knew that I will reveal more and more of the story as I progress. But here I am, 27 hours into the game and NOTHING happened. If we don't look at the intro sequence, I only met Skullface once, but he didn't say anything. And these filler missions are killing me. Why do I have to assassinate 3 commanders for the afghans, why do I have to steal an RPG for them? Why do I have to do crap which doesn't move the story forward? And there is like 50 main missions? What the fuck, I bet only a third of them will have anything to do with the story, the others are just filler. Because you know, you have to litter open world games with stupid missions, side ops, challanges and shit.

I don't know if I have the will to infiltrate the same soviet outposts for 20 more times, just to Fulton out some soldiers.