Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes/The Phantom Pain

[FoRiZon]

To be honest, I'll be very okay if its a nifty add on for MGS 5.

A spin-off would be okay. But at a full 30 dollars? No way.

 

[Godarm]

 

[prisonermonkeys]

Why exactly would they be fultoning whatever those things are anyway?

The tactical Fulton was used on a sheep. The sheep strayed into its path and was launched into the air, and its bleating attracted the attention of the nearby zombies. It would have worked very well in the main game.

 

[JR98]

So Konami released a teaser trailer for the "Definitive Experience" version of MGSV yesterday



One thing I really don't like about this is that they're marketing it as 3 games when it's really not. At a stretch it could maybe be called 2 games in 1 but they really shouldn't be saying MGO is it's own game when it was included for free in the standard version of MGSV.

 

[Liquid]

Can I just go on a tangent about the vocal parasites? The very idea of exterminating or at least extirpating a language is quite possibly the most ludicrously edgy thing in all MGS games. Even within the context of MGS' sometimes liberal application of reality and logic, the very idea of an organism matching itself to a pre-programmed vocalisation pattern was so horrible that I nearly gave myself a concussion when I threw my head into the back of my chair.

I really do hope it's not just me being pretentious but I'd like to think that anybody who has even taking a casual glance at linguistics, or has studied a new language, found this entire scenario to be completely baseless in reality. Take a look at the IPA, how many languages share a common sound, even if in use for different letters? I'll even give you an extremely rare sound; the voiceless lateral fricative (ɬ) is common in native American languages but extremely rare elsewhere. Never mind the near infinite number of languages that share common vowels such as æ, ə or ɪ, parasites hear ɬ and are pre-programmed to know that this incredibly rare sound is Navajo and not Welsh?

And that's before you even begin to think about people's accents; if you're trying to exterminate the English language a South African will pronounce the word light differently to someone from Canada, as would someone from England or Bulgaria.

Skull Face, he wants to exterminate the English language. He's from Hungary and had his language taken away from him. By... the British? No, by the Soviets. If anything, he should want to exterminate the Russian language. I actually have some sympathy for the idea that English is expanding too globally and is threatening native languages but this just didn't make sense at all. At no point did an English speaking country take away his birthright or native language.

That's not even the part which irritated me the most; Skull Face is annoyed that the English language is invading territories and wiping out native languages. He's from Hungary, a country with a long, long, long history of oppressing the native languages of the countries it invaded and occupied. I'd know because I live in one. Slovakia went through 500 years of forced Magyarisation.

The irony of Skull Face being Hungarian, which would have gone some way to making the story beliveable in a "villain is a hypocrite" kind of way, was most certainly not evident in MGS V. It would have made more sense for the villain to be Welsh, Irish or even Dutch.

From the above, "This scenario is completely baseless in reality". Yes, I know MGS plays fast and loose with the sliding scale of realism vs supernatural but it really did bring the game to a crashing halt for me.

I won't even begin to go on about Tretnij Rebok or Eli or several MGS 3 characters being changed for the worst.
Not today, anyway...

 

[Castrol96]

Can I just go on a tangent about the vocal parasites? The very idea of exterminating or at least extirpating a language is quite possibly the most ludicrously edgy thing in all MGS games. Even within the context of MGS' sometimes liberal application of reality and logic, the very idea of an organism matching itself to a pre-programmed vocalisation pattern was so horrible that I nearly gave myself a concussion when I threw my head into the back of my chair.

I really do hope it's not just me being pretentious but I'd like to think that anybody who has even taking a casual glance at linguistics, or has studied a new language, found this entire scenario to be completely baseless in reality. Take a look at the IPA, how many languages share a common sound, even if in use for different letters? I'll even give you an extremely rare sound; the voiceless lateral fricative (ɬ) is common in native American languages but extremely rare elsewhere. Never mind the near infinite number of languages that share common vowels such as æ, ə or ɪ, parasites hear ɬ and are pre-programmed to know that this incredibly rare sound is Navajo and not Welsh?

And that's before you even begin to think about people's accents; if you're trying to exterminate the English language a South African will pronounce the word light differently to someone from Canada, as would someone from England or Bulgaria.

Skull Face, he wants to exterminate the English language. He's from Hungary and had his language taken away from him. By... the British? No, by the Soviets. If anything, he should want to exterminate the Russian language. I actually have some sympathy for the idea that English is expanding too globally and is threatening native languages but this just didn't make sense at all. At no point did an English speaking country take away his birthright or native language.

That's not even the part which irritated me the most; Skull Face is annoyed that the English language is invading territories and wiping out native languages. He's from Hungary, a country with a long, long, long history of oppressing the native languages of the countries it invaded and occupied. I'd know because I live in one. Slovakia went through 500 years of forced Magyarisation.

The irony of Skull Face being Hungarian, which would have gone some way to making the story beliveable in a "villain is a hypocrite" kind of way, was most certainly not evident in MGS V. It would have made more sense for the villain to be Welsh, Irish or even Dutch.

From the above, "This scenario is completely baseless in reality". Yes, I know MGS plays fast and loose with the sliding scale of realism vs supernatural but it really did bring the game to a crashing halt for me.

I won't even begin to go on about Tretnij Rebok or Eli or several MGS 3 characters being changed for the worst.
Not today, anyway...

Only if the game was complete everything would've been better rather than having rubbish and highlights of the story into cassettetapes.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

I really do hope it's not just me being pretentious

I think the story is banking on there being enough people dying that everyone realises that English is not safe to speak and stopping out of fear.

Skull Face, he wants to exterminate the English language. He's from Hungary and had his language taken away from him. By... the British? No, by the Soviets. If anything, he should want to exterminate the Russian language.

It came up in Ground Zeroes if you collected a few of the obscure tape recordings. Although he speaks some Hungarian, it's meaningless to him because he loses his culture at a young age. With no culture to connect to, they're just words. That's what he's trying to do by exterminating the English language - he wants to isolate and protect individual cultures.

At no point did an English speaking country take away his birthright or native language.

True, but when he describes the bombing of the rapeseed oil plant on suspicion of being a weapons manufactory, he suggests that it was completely justified because those suspicions were correct. But more importantly, it set up the idea of culture wars in his mind. That's what MGSV is really trying to address - the way that the Cold War spilled over from traditional or conventional warfare and into the realm of culture because the Cold War was a war of influence.

I agree, most of it is pretty silly, but I am willing to overlook it because at least Kojima was trying to do something different.

 

[Liquid]

I agree, most of it is pretty silly, but I am willing to overlook it because at least Kojima was trying to do something different.

I just could not suspend my disbelief with the story. Like you I also agree that it's interesting that Kojima tried something different but this story was very futuristic; it would have gone great in a story set after MGS4 or rising.

But it didn't. It came in an interquel and interquels almost always suffer from trying to balance the latest technology to create the actual game with the technology available at that point in the canon. After Peace Walker and MGSV gave us rather fluid bipedal Metal Gears with tails as well as PW's ridiculously advanced Chrysalis and Pupas, Metal Gears in MG, MG2 and MGS become rather crappy looking despite being set in the future and with more technology and resources available to them. And the bosses somehow become less supernatural over the same games.

Different designers? Yes... but that's a stretch where, inversely, the fanon is handwaving the canon. Venom took down Sahelanthropus but then when he starts Outer Heaven his own TX-55 is no better than a space hopper with a gun sellotaped to it.

Like I said, interquels are notoriously hard to do, to maintain that balance. Thanks to the sophistication of the technology MGSV seemed to be a post-MGS4 story with the Big Boss fanwank sticker slapped onto it. Thoroughly enjoyable but just a little out of place.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

I just could not suspend my disbelief with the story.

If you look at the individual parts of the story, it's not great. Between the vocal chord parasites, Skull-Face's confusing plan, the metallic archaea, the Skulls, and a Metal Gear with a gatling gun for a penis, Kojima finally went over the cliff. But if you take a step back and look at the whole - the culture wars, the idea of legacies and fighting for a place in history - it's a really interesting, compelling idea.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

I've been binging on Ghost Recon Wildlands for a while now, but decided to revisit The Phantom Pain, and to be totally honest, Ghost Recon Wildlands is a much better game.

 

[Jawehawk]

Everything I've seen from Wildlands gives me the impression that it is just another generic 3rd person shooter. The weapons have no punch to them (although, to be fair, that is true for MGS V too), the AI is nonexistent as per usual, and I wouldn't trust Ubisoft to write even a half decent story. I very much like the idea of an open world game where you have control over a special forces squad, but Wildlands just looks like trash to me.

Give me the squad AI and command system of SOCOM 2: US Navy Seals, and combine that with the dynamic enemy AI of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (when not scripted, the AI in that game is quite amazing). Then take the level design of MGS Ground Zeroes, and the gun feel and general audio design of The Last of Us. Additionally, the game should be playable in both splitscreen or multiplayer coop. Perfect game.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

I very much like the idea of an open world game where you have control over a special forces squad, but Wildlands just looks like trash to me.

The opening province alone feels bigger than either of the maps in The Phantom Pain. Most of the major locations are very well-designed, and there's a real diversity in the environments.

the AI is nonexistent as per usual,

I hardly think the AI in The Phantom Pain was ground-breaking.

I wouldn't trust Ubisoft to write even a half decent story

It's not bad. Each province has its own little story to tell, although sometimes it doesn't really feel like you're having any actual impact. Taking down the production operation carries so much more weight than taking down the influence operation.

The real merit of the story lies in the way Santa Blanca is analogous to ISIS. Both of them are the bitter aftertaste of a war for a popular cause, both worship a violent ideology and both of them have such a stranglehold over the population that serious questions have to be asked about what happens when they're finally gone. It might not have the philosophical or metaphysical themes that Kojima explored, but it's grounded in very current themes.

Everything I've seen from Wildlands gives me the impression that it is just another generic 3rd person shooter.

It's a good way to get yourself killed. The AI might not be brilliant, but they more than make up for it in numbers. I often felt super-powered in The Phantom Pain, but even with a squad behind me, I really have to concentrate in Ghost Recon Wildlands.

If it's not for you, it's not for you, and I doubt there's anything that I could say to convince you otherwise. But it's got something that The Phantom Pain doesn't have: replay value.

 

[sesselpupser]

@prisonermonkeys: the short version of my opinion on this is MGS V is an open world Metal Gear and GR:W is a serious take on Just Cause with squad-based tactical gameplay.

They've borrowed some elements from MGS V, but they're very far from being comparable enough to say one is objectively better than the other, in my opinion, they're about as similar as GTA races (as in the mode that lets you use weapons) and Forza Horizon 3 multiplayer.

But it's got something that The Phantom Pain doesn't have: replay value.

That depends on your definition of replay value, MGS V technically has infinite replay value in FOB invasions because you can never actually complete that. Even if you disregard that, you could replay it to beat your scores or to unlock better gear in the campaign missions.

 

[Silver Arrows]

If you look at the individual parts of the story, it's not great. Between the vocal chord parasites, Skull-Face's confusing plan, the metallic archaea, the Skulls, and a Metal Gear with a gatling gun for a penis, Kojima finally went over the cliff. But if you take a step back and look at the whole - the culture wars, the idea of legacies and fighting for a place in history - it's a really interesting, compelling idea.

so pretty much every Kojima story ever. interesting commentary, but done by a man with the penchant for the excess and shoving his head so far up his own ass he can smell his own farts.

 

[Jawehawk]

The opening province alone feels bigger than either of the maps in The Phantom Pain. Most of the major locations are very well-designed, and there's a real diversity in the environments..

I'm not a massive fan of the level design in Phantom Pain. It has some interesting places, but overall, it falls way behind what can be found in Ground Zeroes, which to me, is as close to perfection as any game has ever gotten in the design of its gameplay area. It felt alive and changed according to the mission you played, while offering so many options on how to approach the objective. Just wish the interior of the buildings were available. Phantom pains open world really doesn't help the game much if any, and it feels hopelessly underpopulated outside of actual missions (seriously, where the hell is the Mujahideen!). This is especially evident when visiting places such as the Soviet Base Camp in free room, where it lacks the large concentration of forces that it ought to have. Open worlds can be awesome, but I feel that the obsession with them in the past five years or so has had a negative effect on the games that feature them. They lack focus and polish.

I hardly think the AI in The Phantom Pain was ground-breaking.

It sure wasn't groundbreaking, but it wasn't horrible either. Enemies made good use of all their equipment, ranging from small arms, to mortars and AA guns. Only thing missing was a better use of vehicles, and a better representation of squad fighting, with the AI acting as individuals, more so than a unit. I found their response to sniper threats to be quite good.

I don't know if you've ever played any of the PS2 SOCOM games, but the squad AI in those was and still is amazing.
How independent and effective is the friendly AI in Wildlands?

It's not bad. Each province has its own little story to tell, although sometimes it doesn't really feel like you're having any actual impact. Taking down the production operation carries so much more weight than taking down the influence operation.

The real merit of the story lies in the way Santa Blanca is analogous to ISIS. Both of them are the bitter aftertaste of a war for a popular cause, both worship a violent ideology and both of them have such a stranglehold over the population that serious questions have to be asked about what happens when they're finally gone. It might not have the philosophical or metaphysical themes that Kojima explored, but it's grounded in very current themes.

Maybe so. I don't know the details, so all I can do is speculate based on Ubisoft games in general.

It's a good way to get yourself killed. The AI might not be brilliant, but they more than make up for it in numbers. I often felt super-powered in The Phantom Pain, but even with a squad behind me, I really have to concentrate in Ghost Recon Wildlands.

If it's not for you, it's not for you, and I doubt there's anything that I could say to convince you otherwise. But it's got something that The Phantom Pain doesn't have: replay value.

Phantom Pain has plenty of replay ability? There is a vast array of different weapons and gadgets, as well as ways to challenge yourself, such s going lethal weapons only while still attempting to complete stealth completion. You can opt out of using wormholes and Fulton in favor of only using the helicopter, as was the case in Ground Zeroes. The biggest problem here I think, is the lack of option to go in without equipment at all. It's an oversight that I have a hard time understanding, as the franchise has been all about OSP (on site procurement) for a number of its games. They feature it in a select few duplicate missions, which is just a really dumb way of doing it.

But in terms of overall ways to approach any given task with almost full control over equipment, I think Phantom Pain was brilliant. It's just let down by boring characters, a bad and incoherent plot, abysmal dialogue, and a unnecessary open world. As I haven't actually played Wildlands, a lot of my presumptions on it might very well be wrong. But judging by gameplay videos and presentations, I just don't see the appeal in its actual execution.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

MGS V technically has infinite replay value in FOB invasions because you can never actually complete that.

But there's only a limited number of platforms to invade.

Even if you disregard that, you could replay it to beat your scores or to unlock better gear in the campaign missions.

Snake is pretty much super-powered about halfway through the game. The extra gear just makes an easy game ridiculous.

Phantom pains open world really doesn't help the game much if any, and it feels hopelessly underpopulated outside of actual missions (seriously, where the hell is the Mujahideen!). This is especially evident when visiting places such as the Soviet Base Camp in free room, where it lacks the large concentration of forces that it ought to have.

Every single outpost and base in Wildlands gets repopulated regularly.

How independent and effective is the friendly AI in Wildlands?

They generally won't act until you tell them to or get caught. Once you do, they can be extremely effective. The rebels can be annoying, though - you have no control over them, and they tend to roll up and start shooting at the first sign of trouble.

 

[sesselpupser]

But there's only a limited number of platforms to invade.

True, but players can configure their security differently and you can approach it differently so you'll never have two identical runs through the same platform, not to mention the (probably very unlikely by now) possibility of facing another player who'll have their own way of dealing with you that you can't predict. It might be a reach but it does objectively provide endless replayability because you can never really 'complete' it, until you've beaten the world on the leaderboards and developed everything I suppose.

Snake is pretty much super-powered about halfway through the game. The extra gear just makes an easy game ridiculous.

... If you want it to. There are also some extraordinarily useless things you can waste loadout slots with in MGS V, I mean you can sortie with a double-barreled shotgun, a water pistol, some trousers and a bionic arm and literally nothing else, if you want. In fact even better than that, you can go with the shotgun, water pistol, a pair of Speedos and poor combat skills if you choose a character that isn't Snake.

Alternatively, you can take an assault rifle that shoots rubber bullets with an underslung flashbang grenade launcher, a sniper rifle with an underslung shotgun, a pistol that shoots sleeping gas capsules, a bionic arm that'll grab and teleport enemies to you from up to 30 metres away, several flavours of grenade, a decoy that'll stun the enemy who tries to pop it, a cardboard box that'll turn to smoke if an enemy lifts if off of you, the list goes on... Except you can choose to deploy with all of that stuff, have Quiet watching over you and deploy with a tank.

In Ghost Recon, you can choose between an assault rifle, SMG, sniper rifle, shotgun or LMG, that's almost all you can choose. The rest of the game is quite similar, I mean while Ghost Recon does let you pick your actual approach (i.e. do you parachute? swim across a river and attack from the shore? find a jeep, put an explosive on it and roll it into the outpost? Get a player to snipe for you while you and the others get close?), the game has instant-fail stealth missions which should tell you all you need to know about the key difference between it and MGS V. MGS V does have some potential fail states triggered by being seen, but you can work around them by, say, rescuing the captives before doing anything else.

I'm not saying Wildlands isn't a better game (I mean, it's not, but I'm not arguing that), just that they're not similar enough for it to be a useful comparison to make.

 

[prisonermonkeys]

In fact even better than that, you can go with the shotgun, water pistol, a pair of Speedos and poor combat skills

MGS might have flexibility, but GRW has diversity in its locations. Sure, there's instant-fail stealth missions, but it's usually only one part of a mission.

 

[Sanji Himura]

It is with a sad heart that I report the passing of legendary voice actor John Cygan due to cancer Saturday. As to why it is being posted on this thread instead of a new one, he voiced Solidus Snake in Metal Gear Solid 2.

He was 63.

 

[Rage Racer]

Kinda late, but...

Skull Face, he wants to exterminate the English language. He's from Hungary and had his language taken away from him. By... the British? No, by the Soviets. If anything, he should want to exterminate the Russian language. I actually have some sympathy for the idea that English is expanding too globally and is threatening native languages but this just didn't make sense at all. At no point did an English speaking country take away his birthright or native language.

Uhm, Hungary wasn't a part of the Soviet Union, and even under the communist government, Hungarians still spoke Hungarian. Perhaps they learned Russian in schools, but as a foreign language (like in Eastern Germany).

My assumption is that Skullface could have been forced to move to an English-speaking country (e.g. Canada?) for some reason.

From the above, "This scenario is completely baseless in reality". Yes, I know MGS plays fast and loose with the sliding scale of realism vs supernatural but it really did bring the game to a crashing halt for me.

Well, the Japanese mass culture :censored:s the logic pretty often, and I just take it as a given ("Don't ask why, it's just like this and all, just play/watch it"). MGS is just one of MANY examples.

Also, a little trivia: the Soviet tank in this game is called "T777 Nosorog" (and it looks like a hybrid of T-62 and T-72, but that doesn't matter). "Nosorog" is "Rhino" on Russian. Could be some reference to the Rhino tanks in GTA series...?

 

[sesselpupser]

Could be, but 'Rhino' seems like a pretty obvious name for a tank given their toughness and the horn, even if it is a really big gun rather than an actual horn.

 

[RYAN]

Just recently got into PC gaming in the last two months (Finally) I always wanted to try MGSV/GZ on PC as it is one of my favorite games ever and the modding capability with Snakebite and Infinite Heaven looked incredible. After playing an embarrassing amount on PS4 to pretty much 100%. I am hooked once again. Although as much as it is a legendary game for me, Enjoying it again on PC makes the fact it could have been so much more even worse.

Simle mod makes The Boss Sneaking Suit black, Looks so much better in my opinion.

A few screens in my current playthrough from the Skullface Mission. Snakebite and IH installed (no cheaty stuff though)

All done by just pausing the cutscenes so they are not the best quality, apologies. Still beautiful in my eyes though👍

 

[David]

@RYAN Those screen shots look good. I probably should have gotten it on PC, but I played all the other Metal Gears on Playstations so it seemed wrong to do that. I really should fire up the PS4 and finish the damn game one of these days I think I have over 90 hours played, most side missions and extra stuff done, and was on mission forty something I think... somewhere in the section where you are basically redoing missions with difficulty modifiers.

 

[RYAN]

@RYAN Those screenshots look good. I probably should have gotten it on PC, but I played all the other Metal Gears on Playstations so it seemed wrong to do that. I really should fire up the PS4 and finish the damn game one of these days I think I have over 90 hours played, most side missions and extra stuff done, and was on mission forty something I think... somewhere in the section where you are basically redoing missions with difficulty modifiers.

Don't forget there are still new missions scattered up to and around 50 they are not all Extreme or Subsistence replays of earlier missions so don't give up yet!👍

 

[Veinz]

When I think of unfinished, this is the first game that comes to mind.

 

[Morgoth_666]

When I think of unfinished, this is the first game that comes to mind.

For me it's possibly the most satisfying MGS game to just sit down and play, yet probably the least satisfying MGS game to try to play through.


I picked it up on PC for peanuts. after(actually while) playing endless hours on PS3 and never did start it again. Did all the missions and side-ops until getting lost and bored doing endless platform invasions for not much reason other than earning the last expensive upgrades. Always wanted to play again on PC anyway and kept pretending that if I did I might actually kill people this time... but it still just hasn't happened.

 

[ROAD_DOGG33J]

When I think of unfinished, this is the first game that comes to mind.

Which made all the 10 scores handed out a bit shocking to me, after playing it.

 

[RYAN]

finished my PC playthrough for the most part just a few extreme/subsistence replays to do and then I'm just going after the 100%