Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out this week and… I’m not excited at all.
Me not being excited at the latest big new release is nothing new, of course, but this is Metal Gear we’re talking about. I was a huge fan of both Metal Gear Solid and its sequel Sons of Liberty, but kind of fell off the wagon a bit before Snake Eater came out and have still never even touched Guns of the Patriots despite owning a copy. (I fully intend to play them at some point, I might add; I just haven’t done so yet.)
The Phantom Pain feels a bit different, though. My friend Chris and I have been discussing this recently and trying to pin down exactly what it is that’s bothering us both about it — particularly as we’re both fans of the older Metal Gear Solid games as well as Kojima’s batshit craziness.
I think the best way of summing up my feelings towards The Phantom Pain right now is to simply say that everything I hear about it sounds like almost the exact opposite of what I want from a Metal Gear Solid game. Past games were short, tightly focused, highly linear, well-directed experiences that had the pacing and structure of a (particularly long) movie. They kept you always moving onwards because there weren’t any unnecessary side missions or distractions; sure, there were a few secrets here and there that you could dig up if you wanted to, but for the most part things like Sons of Liberty’s dog tags were largely only there for the completionists; I didn’t care about the stats screen at the end of the game — I just liked enjoying the story, and Kojima’s vision for how that story should be presented.
The Phantom Pain, meanwhile, abandons the tight linearity in favour of an open-world environment and (apparently) upwards of 30 hours of gameplay compared to its predecessors’ 6-10. This set off warning bells as soon as it was first announced, I must confess, and what I’m hearing so far isn’t making me feel much better about it. Open worlds are cool technical achievements when done well, but they also often make for rather drab “gameplay by numbers” as you spend all your time looking for little icons on the map, completing arbitrary objectives and killing the pacing of the story, since open world games never, ever have any sense of urgency about them — they tend to be the very worst examples of “the world needs saving, but Armageddon will wait until you’re good and ready”.
Other things that I’m not a fan of the sound of so far are the microtransactions and the resource-gathering, base-building element. I don’t know much about either, to be honest, and it may well be that neither are particularly intrusive to the gameplay experience as a whole, but I don’t like what I have heard so far. I still believe that microtransactions have absolutely no place in a full-price brand-new triple-A game — if you want to get me to pay extra, provide me with some worthwhile content, not a means of paying to win. As for the resource-gathering element, a friend posted a screenshot on Twitter that looked to all intents and purposes like the message you get when logging into a grind-heavy Facebook or mobile game for the first time each day — yes, it’s a Daily Bonus, with rewards for logging in frequently and so forth. Not exactly what I have in mind when I think of the traditionally single-player, offline, “just you and Kojima” experience that is the previous Metal Gear Solid games, though granted I never delved into Metal Gear Online while it was a thing.
Then there’s the fact that several reviews have mentioned the fact that there’s more gameplay than cutscenes, and that the series’ iconic codec conversations have been replaced by cassette tapes that you can listen to while you’re walking around doing things. To be honest, a lot of things are making it sound more like a Splinter Cell game than a Metal Gear Solid game, and this is enormously offputting — Splinter Cell is one of those series that I respected for what it was doing, but just didn’t enjoy at all, and I always greatly preferred Metal Gear’s distinctly “comic book” approach to military espionage action, with all its supervillains, quasi-supernatural powers and giant walking nuclear warhead-equipped death tanks.
I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll end up playing The Phantom Pain at some point, but that time is not right now; the hype is just too much at the moment, and the things I do hear are offputting. I also want to play Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots (and possibly Peace Walker) before I play The Phantom Pain, too, so I feel it’s going to be a while before I jump into Kojima’s swansong for Konami — if indeed I ever jump in at all.
We’ll see. I’m keeping half an eye on people’s reactions to the game now it’s in the hands of American players, but unfortunately as I’ve said so far, the things I have heard aren’t making me want to dash out and grab it as soon as it hits store shelves.
I’m also kind of bummed that Until Dawn came out last week and is promptly going to be forgotten about amid Metal Gear Solid mania — why the hell didn’t they hold that one back until Halloween? Who knows why these people do anything?
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Oh man. Snake Eater was your last Metal Gear game?! I hate to break it to you, but the franchise has changed since then. A lot.
MGS3 was probably the last Metal Gear of the “conventional” format, and in some ways even that game started the huge shift, as its gameplay is a big adjustment from MGS1 and 2, which were based on the structure of the 2nd MSX game. I’ll guess I’ll try to break down here and describe how the franchise has “evolved” so to speak.
MGS4 Guns Of The Patriots is linear, but diced up into five chapters. Overall it’s about the same length as the previous numbered games but has way more cut scenes which people complained about. Something like 60% of the game time was cut scenes. The controls are also much more western third person shooter-style controls. You can actually play it like a shooter now but it’s still a stealth game with a really cool weapon customization system. Beyond that, MGS4 is laser-targeted at MGS1 fans.
Then you have the PSP games: Portable Ops and Peace Walker, which are the genesis of Phantom Pain’s design. The base building isn’t really base building. It’s really much more like how you recruit soldiers in a strategy RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics or something. You staff them around, there are ways they can level up, and eventually managing all that unlocks weapon upgrades. This system is central to Portable Ops, Peace Walker, and Phantom Pain. In the PSP games the missions are bite-sized in small enclosed areas and you select them from a menu. Peace Walker in particular is a 40-hour experience if you don’st laser focus on the main missions.
Phantom Pain adds the open-world aspects but it doesn’t really operate like Skyrim or GTA at all from what I’ve played so far. You still select missions out of a menu and you can have a helicopter fly you right to them or travel to them the long way. The main missions take place in very large enclosed areas that still feel like they were hand-crafted specifically for those missions, a lot like Crysis 1. Also like that game, you can complete the missions however you want. When doing missions you can pick up random resources, but you’re not gonna see icons all over the map like in Assassin’s Creed. One side mission I just completed as of this writing honestly felt like a lot of the main missions in some other games, but they vary wildly. Microtransactions are not intrusive at all unless you want to engage in one particular online multiplayer mode. The servers have actually been down recently and I don’t feel like that has impacted the main game.