[PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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It's quite the achievement that the game makes you want to record practically every second of it. It's for games like this that the share button was created.
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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Me taking down some armored vehicles - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOC4om8vgfk

Once again, the game provides another mission rich with the possibility for awesome. I just love the idea of Big Boss riding up on a tank on his horse and running circles on it while blowing it apart with his grenade launcher. Makes you wonder at the rumors that must be spreading about him among the Soviets.
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain GOTY Confirmed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubfaL5VCvrs

A bit of silliness that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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This is that rare open world game that actually makes you want to play through all of the side-op content. Minus the target practice missions, of course.
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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Finally got hit by the directed open-world bug. It was the first face to face confrontation with the new Metal Gear after having picked up Huey from the Afghan Base. Your support chopper can't land because the Metal Gear will blow it out of the sky, so you got to make it to the new rendezvous point down the road. So I grabbed Huey, threw him into the nearby truck, got in, and floored it out of there. I managed to get away, but I could still see the head of the Metal Gear lumbering after me in the distance. I was following the road, trying to figure out where the chopper was supposed to pick us up, when all of a sudden a warning pops up saying that I was leaving the mission zone. Sure enough, I hit the edge, and Ocelot comes on the radio saying that we're aborting the mission. Screen fades to black. When it fades back in, Huey is mysteriously absent from the truck, the Metal Gear is no longer following me, and I have to do the mission all over again from the beginning.

Trucking it out of there was obviously not the right way to go, but why should it have reset the mission? Does that behavior in any way indicate that I wanted to abort? Isn't that a natural response to having a giant metal beast lumbering after you? All I'd needed to do was call in the chopper somewhere further down the road. Unfortunately, the game didn't anticipate that behavior and interpreted my flight as a mission abort request.
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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I played through the mission again, and of course, the way you are intended to play it is to stay in the area with your support chopper, even though there's a metal behemoth stomping around looking for you. You can't tell the chopper to go pick you up somewhere else, because otherwise, if it picked you up somewhere that was actually safe, you wouldn't be able to shoot at the Metal Gear from the chopper in a cool little scripted sequence. Still, there's no explanation for why the Metal Gear doesn't just shoot down the chopper immediately on sight. I even heard Ocelot on the radio saying something like, "Uh oh, Boss. It's spotted the chopper." It wasn't until after we'd gotten in that it actually started shooting at it.
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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I should mention that the game features auto regenerating health.

When playing Ground Zeroes on the hard difficulty, it was comparable to Call of Duty's Veteran setting, and it felt right. But there's no such setting (that I could find) in The Phantom Pain. I rarely die to gunfire. I die far more often to making a jump that was much higher up than I thought it'd be. In practice this means that the enemy can spot you, and shoot you up like crazy while you're running for your life, and more likely than not, you'll be fine just so long as you're not foolishly running around in the open.

But the cool thing about The Phantom Pain is the visible blood and wounds that stay on you after getting shot. It even shows up in the cutscenes. It's a blemish that you'd rather not have, and the only way to get rid of it is to return to Mother Base and take a shower. It's an aesthetic decision that greatly affects how badly you want to avoid being shot. It weighs on me even more than the actual damage I take does!

I like the idea of Snake infiltrating a base to extract a prisoner, and the prisoner seeing him all bloodied and torn up asks, "What happened?" And Snake says, "It got ugly out there."
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christian
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Re: [PC] [VAR] Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

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Just got to the part in the game where the disease starts spreading through Mother Base. Now this was another excellent way of integrating Mother Base management with the rest of the game. It makes Mother Base and its staff feel alive and just as much a part of this world as you are. In the future, if any other game dares to have a subsystem like this while failing to make it feel like anything more than an iPhone mini-game, it ought to blasted for its developers' audacity in grafting refuse to their work and thinking they've done anything worthwhile. Only example I can think of off the top of my head is the Tamagotchi in Super Danganronpa 2.

I also love the urgency in which you have to find what's causing the outbreak and discover a cure, because base functions are shutting down all over the place as staff are either dying or being quarantined. Not to mention it'd be a real shame to lose some of those S-ranked staff over something like this. Or anyone really.
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