So I'm just gonna ramble (nothing new there) about why I've been spending as much of my free time on this as possible. Especially when I struggled so much to get through MGS4.
I struggled to get through MGS4 mainly because of the cutscenes. They were cool and all, but when I felt like playing the game, I wanted to PLAY the game, as opposed to watching the game play itself for an hour, and then being allowed to play. I still very much enjoyed it, but it took me a lot longer than you would expect to bring myself to return to it, due to the movie-like aspect.
MGSV is the exact opposite. It brings the same brand of Metal Gear insanity (minus David Hayter, which upsets me to no end) but does away with a large portion of the cutscenes - instead relegating the overly long story to cassette tapes I can listen to as I wander around, randomly completing side ops. Not a perfect solution, but it allowed me to play when I wanted, and to interact with the world while portions of the plot unfolded - without resorting to the dreaded quick time event trap.
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| I don't much care for your poly count, young lady! |
The gameplay absolutely shines, though. Usually I'm quite critical of open world games - they tend to be usually made of a large nondescript world where I'll get lost, not actually care about any of the locations, and collect a bunch of random crap - none of which actually matters. Or very little matter anyway.
"B-b-but emergent gameplay!" No. In Skyrim, I just threw fireballs at things until they stopped attacking me, took their stuff, and moved on (though I actually rather liked Skyrim - but not for its map, though at least it wasn't a collectathon). In Farcry 3 and 4 I pretty much did a bunch of random stuff, eventually got bored and mainlined the story (and the less said about Farcry 2 the better). And in pretty much any open world game, I couldn't tell you a single thing about specific locations in the world, because they all feel the same to me.
Metal Gear V manages to sidestep my main issue here. Can I tell you about the exact section of the world I was in when I did my shenanigans? Well, while I can't tell you by name (those names are far too long for me to actually memorize), or by the part of the map, I can tell you the facility I was in when I got annoyed with my mission and instead decided to just Fulton everyone in the base before moving on (the mines in Africa, for the record).
Speaking of Fulton. What. The. Fuck.
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| Baaaaaaaa! |
Why is such a silly game mechanic my favourite thing ever? Well, that's pretty easy to answer, actually. Precisely because its silly. And for some reason, I cannot help but attempt to Fulton pretty much anything that isn't bolted down. I'm certain I have far too many sheep on base to keep, yet I keep capturing more. And if I ever see a bear, you can be damn sure I'm going out of my way to balloon that sucker.
Oh, and of course, the slightly more useful/thematic heavy machine gun emplacements, and strong soldiers. And tanks. Every. Damn. Time.
You want to see emergent gameplay? How about the time I attempted to infiltrate a mansion, but set off a landmine? This resulted in many rocket punch and sleep grenade shenanigans in an attempt to not get caught - which held them off me for another good 20 minutes or so, until I eventually slipped up badly enough for the game to go all out combat on me, which ended in my death. None of what I'd done had stuck, which was annoying, but hey, I'd learned how to better use the rocket punch as a result!
Yes, that video was me.
Yes, that video was me.
I don't quite understand why I love this game so much - it has many elements I find banal about gaming nowadays (overly large maps, arbitrary limitations on some things, most annoying fast travel system ever invented) but MGSV just... understands me, I guess.
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