MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby KleinerKiller » Tue Oct 20, 2015 3:07 pm

My greatest regret during my playthrough is not spending enough time in the Side Ops to acquire all of the crazy equipment and upgrades that are popping up throughout this thread. The highest-leveled non-story-critical thing I ever developed was the silenced M2000 sniper rifle, and I didn't even reach my real target of the silenced rifle that fires tranquilizers.

Then again, I managed to beat the whole game mostly with a basic silenced assault rifle, a tier-two tranquilizer pistol, and the basic abilities of my buddies, so...

i r moar l33t then u lol n00bz #420
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby LaChaise » Tue Oct 20, 2015 3:12 pm

I've been throwing the "tactical espionage" aspect of the game through the window outside of main missions since I developed my grenade launcher. Seriously, this is so fun.
Need a distraction? Launch a grenade.
Need a shielded guy with a helmet on top of a watchtower taken care of? Launch a grenade. Goodbye watchtower.
Need to open a door? Launch a grenade.
Getting bored? LAUNCH A GRENADE MOTHERFUCKER, THIS NEVER GETS BORING.

Just... avoid taking D-Dog with you when you do that. Playing fetch with grenades is only fun when you're playing with soviet soldiers. Poor dog.
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby skrotkanon » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:04 pm

I always bring a heavy machine gun for similar reasons.

"ALRIGHT I'M DONE PLAYING, RAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!" *EVERYTHING EXPLODES*
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby skrotkanon » Sun Oct 25, 2015 7:16 am

Dear god, this game is enourmous. I'm a bit disappointed over the amount of playable areas but none can claim there's not enough shit to do. At 50% now and I haven't even reached rank 4 weapons. Anyone here gotten lvl 60 R&D yet for example?
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Wed Oct 28, 2015 12:59 am

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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby phunkyfish » Wed Oct 28, 2015 2:20 pm

I wish I could give this more than one thumbs up. I literally lol'd.

Did I just say "lol"? Please shoot me now....
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:39 am

So has anyone gotten to the ending yet? I've been waiting a while to discuss this. I'm really interested to hear peoples' opinions.

Full spoilers follow. Don't click it until you've beaten Mission 46 if you know what's good for you:

Spoiler: show
I really, really like the Venom Snake / Medic twist. I regrettably had the central element spoiled for me (DAMN YOU, TV TROPES!), but its execution was good enough to make an impact on me anyway. Not only does it give Venom his own fleshed-out identity, but it also solves the one niggling plot hole that was always in my memory of the Metal Gear chronology -- Big Boss seemingly coming back to life in Zanzibarland. Makes the first victory a whole lot more bittersweet, too.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on the Internet as to Big Boss / Venom Snake's roles throughout the rest of the series. A lot of people appear to have assumed that the real Big Boss just fucks off to live on a beach or something and leaves Venom Snake to pull off everything up to the post-credits death in MGS4. These people clearly didn't read the credits timeline, for whatever reason. Venom Snake, the one you play as in this game, is the seemingly tyrannical "Big Boss" Solid Snake kills at Outer Heaven in the original Metal Gear. Outer Heaven was a ploy to keep the Patriots distracted while Big Boss erected the bigger and better Zanzibarland. That's also why his motives in that game seem more simplistically monstrous than MG2 Big Boss's -- Venom was just giving Solid and crew a basic motive to believe as ordered by Big Boss. It fits with the series' overall theme of soldiers being pawns in the war economy game, and it grants both of the silly original games a deal of emotional resonance to fit in with the rest of the canon.

So I do very much like that twist.

What I don't like is what preceded it. Yes, I get the idea behind it -- revisiting the hospital sequence with the player's new knowledge that Ishmael is Big Boss and you're playing the surgically altered medic from Ground Zeroes, and thus seeing things with new eyes. But we could have done that ourselves by playing the opening again! Being forced to play through the entire sequence again, unchanged, cutscenes and tutorial prompts and everything up to Ishmael's van crashing, feels incredibly lazy. I strongly believe that this was a result of Kojima not being allowed to finish the game in time and thus not being able to design and produce the alterations to the hospital sequence, but as it stands in the form that was delivered to us, it sucks as a final level. It turned what I felt was the best game opening in a long time into a boring slog toward the glimmering hope of fresh content.

Sucks about there being no conclusion to Eli / Liquid's arc, too, but at least we can see how it would have turned out through the partially intact cutscenes on the special edition (and on YouTube).
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby KleinerKiller » Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:06 am

I had to necro the thread once again and share this, in case fellow players aren't aware: Stefanie Joosten, the actress responsible for portraying Quiet, began streaming her own playthrough of the game a while back. She offers a unique perspective on her character and shares quite a few amusing stories from her time working at Kojima Productions, and the fact that she is already an avid gamer and series fan who only knows what went on in her scenes means she still gets surprised by the many twists and weird-ass events. She's also funny in her own right, and surprisingly good at playing (though, ironically, she has a hard time sniping). Here's her YouTube channel, where the Twitch streams are compiled.

Also, I finally finished my comprehensive review of the game, if anyone's curious to read an exorbitant amount of a rambling, sleep-deprived 17-year-old's thoughts on a game he finished months ago. No spoilers, but be aware that there is a section where I address the controversy that popped up earlier in this thread and several of the points I made during that time.
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby skrotkanon » Fri Dec 11, 2015 3:41 am

I just stopped playing the game shortly after beating the last mission. Even if there wasn't much story it was still something to look forward to and without that it was just an endless grind towards marginally better gear. I mean, I love the game, it's still easily a GOTY-contender for me but I sort of got bored.

Spoiler: show
It also didn't help that the last mission with Quiet was the dumbest fucking mission in the entire game. Tank after tank after freakin tank, a helicopter and enemies everywhere and Quiet wasn't much use. It took me five hours to beat it, not exaggerating...


Mechanically it's a goddamn masterpiece but I never cared about any of the characters or the story in general. It wasn't awful, Ocelot was cool as hell and I liked the big twist at the end. The story was occasionally great but there was just so much filler and the fact that you had to listen to the tapes while sitting in the helicopter instead of while side-questing was just terrible design. It really didn't feel like a Metal Gear Solid game. Possibly the best stealth-experience ever made, just not a MGS...
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby KleinerKiller » Fri Dec 11, 2015 5:51 am

skrotkanon wrote:I just stopped playing the game shortly after beating the last mission. Even if there wasn't much story it was still something to look forward to and without that it was just an endless grind towards marginally better gear. I mean, I love the game, it's still easily a GOTY-contender for me but I sort of got bored.

Spoiler: show
It also didn't help that the last mission with Quiet was the dumbest fucking mission in the entire game. Tank after tank after freakin tank, a helicopter and enemies everywhere and Quiet wasn't much use. It took me five hours to beat it, not exaggerating...


Mechanically it's a goddamn masterpiece but I never cared about any of the characters or the story in general. It wasn't awful, Ocelot was cool as hell and I liked the big twist at the end. The story was occasionally great but there was just so much filler and the fact that you had to listen to the tapes while sitting in the helicopter instead of while side-questing was just terrible design. It really didn't feel like a Metal Gear Solid game. Possibly the best stealth-experience ever made, just not a MGS...


Spoiler: show
Even though I love Quiet and the ending to her arc, yeah, I have to completely agree about the gameplay of the mission. Of the nearly twelve hours I spent finishing the game up in one go, a little under six were spent just trying to read the patterns of the tanks and trial-and-error up a strategy that remotely worked (with breaks for dining and restraining myself from smashing the coffee table in pure rage). Not helped by the fact that the mission's buildup seems like it'll be a quiet (pun fully intended) character introspective with a bit of stealth instead of an all-out assault that needs to be prepped for, or that the RPG you automatically get is the weakest one in the game. That the idea of fighting off TANKS AND HELICOPTERS with your SNIPER appealed to enough people to get through without significant changes just baffles me.

Yet despite all that, I hated it marginally less than retreading the hospital.


The tapes apparently were supposed to silence critics who'd made the hour-long cutscenes into a joke, but there were numerous better ways to do it. As for characters, I liked a lot of them (the obvious aside, I really enjoyed Miller and loved to hate Huey), but Skull Face really fell flat as a villain. He wasn't in nearly enough, he wasn't developed enough, he just didn't do enough, and so his hamminess and theatricality didn't really play well with me the way similarly bombastic villains like Liquid and Volgin did, so while he looked all sorts of badass, there just wasn't enough to him.

Spoiler: show
Plus the lack of the traditional fistfight final boss encounter really didn't sit well with me, especially given that he was supposed to be a master soldier and assassin on equal or even higher ground than Snake. Kojima justifies it by saying that he wanted to communicate meaning in a way that a traditional boss fight could never do, but... well, one only has to look to The Boss's battle to see him subverting his own philosophy.

Come to think of it, that's something else this one really lacked: awesome bosses. Skull Face is an interactive cutscene at most, the Man On Fire's arc ended with a symbolic cutscene instead of a bigger and better version of the earlier battle, Psycho Mantis was only fought by proxy, Eli's big finale got cut for time... pre-recruit Quiet was a serious challenge and Sahelanthropus had scale and atmosphere, but all in all, the lack of bosses in a series partly made famous for having fucking amazing bosses is a sore point. Much in the same way as it was in Batman: Arkham Knight earlier this year. Why are games starting to go out of their way to deny us this?
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby skrotkanon » Fri Dec 11, 2015 7:54 pm

I know about the tapes and I liked them mostly, but I wanted them to be like the radio-talk in the other games, not staring at the bottom at the screen for thirty minutes.

And about the bosses. Like I said, it's not much of a MGS anymore. Kojima didn't really want to do more Metal Gear games, maybe that's why it feels more like a western free-roam action game.
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Sat Dec 12, 2015 3:04 am

Wait until you get the coveted "Hamburgers of Kazuhira Miller" tapes.
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby NotCIAAgent » Sun Dec 13, 2015 5:49 pm

Image

Image

Edit:

Spoiler: show
Image


That's kinda mean.
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby Marcuse » Fri Aug 11, 2017 9:59 pm

I'm always late to the party, but I've played up until the end of mission 32 and I have absolutely no desire to keep on playing this game. I'm sorry, but it's a complete mess.

I'll start on the positives, because I don't want to be unfair. Generally, the movement, shooting and driving all feels great. Travelling around the sandboxes is easy enough and I rarely got lost. The wackiness in the game is definitely in keeping with the Metal Gear franchise, and I didn't mind it at all. Fultoning everything doesn't really ever get old, especially when it's the optimal tactic 99% of the time. The side ops, while a little samey after a while, are plentiful and don't get old. I love that there's licensed music from the 80s in there.

But, really, aside from those things the game is a poorly designed, poorly laid out mess.

Let's start from the beginning, with the GMP/Mother Base/FOB system. First of all, fuck a game that forces you to be online lest you lose about 80% of your starting resources. That's a mean trick to get people involved in the bullshit online play. I've never played metal gear for anything other than the story and the single player gameplay, and being heavily restricted in my ability to play that because I took it offline is incredibly annoying.

The GMP system sounds like a great idea, but just ends up being a boring burden requiring you to grind all the time. I saw no reason to upgrade things like the helicopter because it has no use to you and costs seven times the GMP to call it in every time with the first engine upgrade. Given how between command posts there's a vast wasteland with nothing to threaten it, there's no reason to waste your GMP at all. The very fact that basic things like having the helicopter come and pick you up costs so much really makes the game more of a calculation game than anything else, and it doesn't add anything for me. I come for the shooting, sneaking and bonkers story. I didn't need book keeping adding in to that, thanks.

Mother Base is just numbers, really. They fob off all the actual day to day management of the base to your subordinates, who do everything without asking you. All you do is grab new peeps, order new platforms and punch the staff when you do turn up. The only reason you do turn up is to shower because it makes reflex mode a little longer. The whole of Mother Base is a bland expanse with nothing interesting in it, and I saw no reason to go visiting the other platforms. No, throwing rough diamonds about the new platforms for no reason isn't enough of a draw for me to spend a fucking hour travelling to each platform to look about, find nothing to interact with, then go do somethings.

The bit where you have to manually select everyone who speaks Kikongo to quarantine them is shit and awful and has no place in any stealth action game. Ever.

The buddy system is bizarre. They make a huge thing about how you're not doing solo infiltration any more and have backup and stuff, then make all your comrades mute. Then they make only two of them truly useful for sneaking at all. D-Horse isn't awful, but the first thing you do when you infiltrate something is leave him behind. D-Dog is utterly game breakingly good, and removes any need to scout or view a base before diving right in. I won't comment on Quiet because she's bullshit fanservice and I killed her in mission 7 to avoid having to explain to my wife who she is. By the way, doing that makes none of the plot make sense. D-Walker is nothing to do with sneaking at all, and is just a weapon platform. There's no way to sneak on it, and it sucks except in the mission where you have to fight the Skulls. D-Dog regularly alerts guards to your presence, and walks into your sights when you're sniping.

So now we've reached the characters, let's go through them.

Venom Snake is a silent protagonist, for some reason. Why doesn't he even try to question Skull Face on their little jeep journey? Why does he say nothing to Code Talker? Why doesn't this guy speak? They hired freaking Kiefer Sutherland to voice him, and the only way to get that acting is if you sit through hours of tapes? What the fuck is that? When was that Metal Gear?

Miller is unfathomable to me. He seems to be some author self-insert character, given way more prominence than the actual contribution to the plot that the character makes. I'm all for continuity, but I really found myself repelled by the violent, angry and generally unpleasant manner they gave the character. It didn't remotely resemble the "Master Miller" character I remember from MGS1 and it didn't appeal at all.

What the fuck happened to Ocelot? In Snake Eater he was a cocky asshole triple agent. Now, the closest to contribution he makes is torture and dog training. He...can't be out doing things while I'm out doing things? He can't be getting intel for me that helps me with missions? He just turns up in weird half hearted cutscenes and tells us stuff. Given he's supposed to be in on the whole "venom snake ain't big boss" thing, I feel like they could have played that up more.

On that note, what the hell with the "here's how Big Boss went bad, nah not really" shit? Charting someone's downfall from heroic soldier to callous villain would be genuinely interesting. But they never portray anything they're doing as bad, not really. I know there's the one mission where you kill some faceless mooks you recruited, but that's not evil more than it's just necessary. Even so, none of it actually affects Big Boss himself, because you're not playing him. I would have been interested to see a game put you in the position where circumstances force you, the player, to choose a path that would make you seem evil. Remember in MGS3 when you were confronted by the ghosts of everyone you ever killed in the game? That kind of thing? Nothing remotely that powerful happens here.

What the hell was Skull Face? He has no presence, no backstory, no motivation, no purpose. His plan makes no sense. He wants to...get rid of English because of a slightly racist point that only 5% of the world speaks it but it's called a lingua franca at the UN. He wants to proliferate nuclear weapons...for no reason and it's quickly forgotten. He also wants to unleash Sehelanthropus on the world...because the game needs a walking mech with a dick gun that makes monkey sounds I guess.

The Man on Fire was a huge crock. He's just The Fury from MGS3 but with no reason to be like that. He's never a real threat and he just commits suicide because the Psycho Kid tells him to. Psycho kid never speaks and has no reason to be doing anything. Nothing he does makes any sense, and it's not remotely interesting anyway. I like his aesthetic, and his connection with Eli, but there's not enough there to make him a compelling villain.

Dafuq was the Skulls unit? It made no sense, and just annoyed every time it appeared.

But on to gamplay gripes. The big one for me is that there's no real way to plan what equipment you're going to bring. Often, the "reactive" system allows the enemy to correct for your player habits. Cool beans, but you don't get any sense of the enemy force disposition aside from one mission where it recommends you bring a rocket launcher. Why isn't that part of a briefing you get before each mission? Why not make that Ocelot's job? Why am I taking a tranq sniper rifle to free a prisoner from three heavily armoured guys on walker gears? Because I had no fucking clue I was going to be facing them. Why did I bring lethal weapons to the child soldier level? Because until I got onto the level I had no idea that I had to face them alone and a lethal weapon would be effectively useless. At least in the Nuclear Warhead Storage Building, my weapons were only temporarily disabled. The fact all that shit makes you waste your GMP on dropping in weapons to compensate for the fact you basically head in blind is even more galling.

The mission design is just awful. Some of the missions are incredibly easy, and I completed them in five minutes. Others were so extremely difficult that I nearly threw my controller across the room. Now I'm on the same missions but even harder, I have no incentive to carry on. Chapter 2 is just bullshit through and through. It's a half finished project with none of the design polish I would expect from a Metal Gear game. A lot of the missions rely on stealthing on a timer, lest you get to take on a harder challenge, lose prisoners, or have to hot foot it several hundred meters to find your target again. The idea of stealth conflicts with timed missions so much that it becomes really frustrating, because often you're hiding while the game tells you how you're failing. The mission to follow the Afrikaans interpreter is done way more easily by running everywhere at a sprint and just beating the clock. The recommended method to S rank the mission Skull Face is to drive a tank all the way through the castle and run up the stairs before anyone can kill you. When your game is designed to reward that, something's wrong.

But that's the problem here. The game can't decide if it's a military game, or a stealth game. It's really hard, in this stealth game, to get silenced weapons. But you have a generous complement of grenade launchers, bombs, C4 and missile launchers.

Overall, I found the casual completion of side missions fun and interesting. I could do them at my own pace with whatever equipment I chose to use. I couldn't just walk in and kill everyone but I could take them out if I needed to and was careful. The main missions are almost all either boring or not fun to play through. I haven't had as much fun as I thought I would have, and I think that's because of the wafer thin story, the bullshit base management, and the poor design choices in terms of missions and equipment. It's a shame, because I really want to like it, but it's become too much for me. Maybe I'll have a break from it and come back later, but there doesn't seem to be much worth doing in the replay missions in chapter 2.
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Re: MGS5: Dog-enhanced Espionage Action

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:26 am

Marcuse wrote: D-Dog is utterly game breakingly good, and removes any need to scout or view a base before diving right in.


Oh man, you thought the dog was OP and never used Quiet? Spoiler: you can actually get her to an ability where she just snipes everybody herself unless they manage to shoot her (which they never do). I've literally cleared multiple bases by just incap'ing the ones I wanted to recruit and then just letting her murder the rest while I sat back and read a novel or something.
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