mgs phantom pain

[asdfen]

do not buy this game if you want to see good stealth along the lines of MGS Ground Zeroes. This game is nothing like it.

All it has is extremly bland gray open world, AI that patrols the player instead of bases (think roughly farcry 3 AI and subtract brains). The drop points for mission can be miles away from target making the player go through train track wide road with mountains on either side sprinked with check point outposts ever 5 steps. Tutorial mission is unskipable and an hour long...

The reviewers that give it high scores probably have not played the game.

 

[Pseudonym]

do not buy this game if you want to see good stealth along the lines of MGS Ground Zeroes. This game is nothing like it.

Excuse me? Good stealth in ground zeroes? That game where you get several seconds to kill someone when he sees you and where you can just run around quickscoping everyone with the sniper rifle? That is what I did, and it worked. And who plays metal gear solid for the gameplay anyway? I always assumed that people liked the experimentation with form and the ridiculous over the top storylines.

The reviewers that give it high scores probably have not played the game.

I'm not exactly the biggest MGS fan around but when faced with the two possibilities that either reviewers liked a game that I didn't or that they are collectively lying about playing it at all I find the former to be vastly more likely.

 

[EternallyBored]

do not buy this game if you want to see good stealth along the lines of MGS Ground Zeroes. This game is nothing like it.

Excuse me? Good stealth in ground zeroes? That game where you get several seconds to kill someone when he sees you and where you can just run around quickscoping everyone with the sniper rifle? That is what I did, and it worked. And who plays metal gear solid for the gameplay anyway? I always assumed that people liked the experimentation with form and the ridiculous over the top storylines.

None of the MGS games have ever had really good stealth by necessity anyway, unless you play on the option where alerts give automatic game overs, and even then the AI has always been easy to exploit to tranq chain them. I've been watching MGS streams over the last few days, and even on the hardest difficulty it is easy to cheese the AI in a lot of areas, i.e. tranq spamming to knock out one guard then eliminate whole groups when they arrive to investigate.

Lethal options have also always made the MGS games a cakewalk, that's why killing enemies tends to nuke your score so much. I remember getting bored on replays of MGS 1 and just running through whole areas with spamming the FAMAS, it nukes your ranking but nothing in the game stops you from doing it.

I agree though, MGS is all about the experimentation, the odd interplay of mechanics, and trying things to see how they work, the system has always been easy to break, but the fun generally comes from seeing how far you can push it before it does. Just using a rocket launcher on a patrolling vehicle or sniping the driver will likely always be the easy and quick option in TPP, but people generally like that you can do zany things like making it spin out with horse poop and fultoning the entire thing with people inside it. I've seen some of the TPP streams out there, and other than the open world, it seems to be similar stealth mechanics from all the previous MGS games, flaws and all.

On a final note, there is an option in Ground Zeroes (and presumably TPP) to turn reflex mode off, it even gives you a score bonus for it. Which is good, because reflex mode is cool but it really made Ground Zeroes too easy.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

do not buy this game if you want to see good stealth along the lines of MGS Ground Zeroes. This game is nothing like it.

All it has is extremly bland gray open world, AI that patrols the player instead of bases (think roughly farcry 3 AI and subtract brains). The drop points for mission can be miles away from target making the player go through train track wide road with mountains on either side sprinked with check point outposts ever 5 steps. Tutorial mission is unskipable and an hour long...

The reviewers that give it high scores probably have not played the game.

How would know this even though the game is not out yet?

 

[Pappytech]

I mean, I can't comment much on the enemy patrolling the player vs the base, and I'll admit to being disappointed that Africa and Afghanistan are (so far as I've heard) the only two playable regions. But everything else about the OP seems to be pretty in-line for what I expected from Phantom Pain.

The sheer size of the levels is a definite plus, with buddies like D-Horse, D-Walker, and various vehicles there to make traversing the wilderness easier. Being able to approach an outpost from any direction I like is definitely a great way to shake up the MGS formula, as well as the day/night cycle and weather changing up enemy patrols and sneaking conditions. And as for the tutorial mission being long, well, so was the Tanker Incident in MGS2 and the Virtuous Mission in MGS3. I would've been a little disappointed if there wasn't an intro level.

And I'm definitely going to agree with Pseudonym and EternallyBored about "stealth" not being the main draw in MGS. Sure, it's fun sneaking along trying not to be seen, tranq-ing everyone that gets too close, but going all Rambo with a machine gun or picking everyone off with a sniper rifle's fun too. The other MGS games have been about a lot more than just not being seen, and I have no problem with Phantom Pain going even further in that direction.

How would know this even though the game is not out yet?

Some copies of the game got leaked early, it looks like, and lucky owners started streaming their gameplay online. It happens.

 

[gigastar]

Ground Zeroes had terrible stealth. The entire fundamentals of it was knecapped by the reflex thing and if you managed to fuck that up then you had no way to hide until the alert dies down due to no cardboard box.

And i know for a fact that reviewers had to attend Konami-run 9 till 5 boot camps where they would play through the game under supervision.

So yeah, just gonna ignore that advice.

 

[Zetatrain]

do not buy this game if you want to see good stealth along the lines of MGS Ground Zeroes. This game is nothing like it.

All it has is extremly bland gray open world, AI that patrols the player instead of bases (think roughly farcry 3 AI and subtract brains). The drop points for mission can be miles away from target making the player go through train track wide road with mountains on either side sprinked with check point outposts ever 5 steps. Tutorial mission is unskipable and an hour long...

The reviewers that give it high scores probably have not played the game.

How would know this even though the game is not out yet?

I've heard that there are some people in the UK who got their copies early though I have no idea if its true or not.

To honest what the OP said isn't exactly new since the gameplay videos pretty much show what he described.

 

[Areloch]

Ground Zeroes had terrible stealth. The entire fundamentals of it was knecapped by the reflex thing and if you managed to fuck that up then you had no way to hide until the alert dies down due to no cardboard box.

And i know for a fact that reviewers had to attend Konami-run 9 till 5 boot camps where they would play through the game under supervision.

So yeah, just gonna ignore that advice.

Again, if you found Ground Zeroes too easy, then turn off Reflex Mode. It requires you to be a lot better at the whole stealthing business because you don't get a get-out-of-free card.

And yes, you actually could run and hide, but you needed to be smart about it.

OT, Several people in the main metal gear reddit have gotten a hold of copies apparently and seem to be having a ton of fun with it so I'd be hard-pressed to say that everyone giving it praise so far is lying.

One interesting comment I saw was that "Open World" is not the right way to describe it, but "Open Approach". It gives you a sandbox space, some objectives and says "go at it". It's pretty much entirely built around emergent gameplay outside of the set piece missions, and I can't see that as a bad thing.

It's not a sandbox in the same style as Skyrim or the like, and if that's what you're expecting, you're going to be disappointed.

 

[DEAD34345]

Ground Zeroes had terrible stealth. The entire fundamentals of it was knecapped by the reflex thing and if you managed to fuck that up then you had no way to hide until the alert dies down due to no cardboard box.

And i know for a fact that reviewers had to attend Konami-run 9 till 5 boot camps where they would play through the game under supervision.

So yeah, just gonna ignore that advice.

Just turn reflex mode off. There's a reason that was an option.

I've actually heard that The Phantom Pain is significantly harder than Ground Zeroes, and that reflex mode isn't quite an automatic win any more, but I'll be turning it off again anyway. It does kind of feel like a mulligan when you screw up your stealth, and you already have a second chance by simply evading everyone after the alert or abandoning stealth and blasting your way through. It's just not a very necessary feature.

As for the hiding thing, I don't know what you're talking about. There were tons of places to hide all throughout that military base, you didn't need a cardboard box. Also, you only needed to break sight with the enemies for a moment before they lost track of you and you could try to evade their searches and wait out their alert.

 

[Tohuvabohu]

Ground Zeroes had terrible stealth. The entire fundamentals of it was knecapped by the reflex thing and if you managed to fuck that up then you had no way to hide until the alert dies down due to no cardboard box.

And i know for a fact that reviewers had to attend Konami-run 9 till 5 boot camps where they would play through the game under supervision.

So yeah, just gonna ignore that advice.

Just turn reflex mode off. There's a reason that was an option.

I've actually heard that The Phantom Pain is significantly harder than Ground Zeroes, and that reflex mode isn't quite an automatic win any more, but I'll be turning it off again anyway. It does kind of feel like a mulligan when you screw up your stealth, and you already have a second chance by simply evading everyone after the alert or abandoning stealth and blasting your way through. It's just not a very necessary feature.

As for the hiding thing, I don't know what you're talking about. There were tons of places to hide all throughout that military base, you didn't need a cardboard box. Also, you only needed to break sight with the enemies for a moment before they lost track of you and you could try to evade their searches and wait out their alert.

Came in here to say exactly this. I personally find it amusing that people claim Reflex Mode makes the game too easy, and then offer absolutely zero experience playing the game with Reflex Mode turned off. Makes me doubt these people even played Ground Zeroes to any extent beyond the first mission, or played it at all. Find Reflex mode to make the game easy? Turn it off. Problem solved.

and if you managed to fuck that up then you had no way to hide until the alert dies down due to no cardboard box.

Another statement that makes me doubt you played the game much at all. The dozens of times I've shaken full-blown alerts while surrounded by guards and chased by an armored vehicle, then gone into hiding prove this statement to be absolutely false.

OT: Sorry, OP. But you really don't offer any proof to your complaints beyond the bizarre claim that none of the reviewers played the game. The rest of the complaints seem subjective and incorrect. (Afghanistan with it's mountains, grass, sands, and blue sky don't seem very "gray" to me.)

 

[OrijinalDreamin]

So having never played a single MGS game, I jumped into this blind, and turned off Reflex Mode from the start; gotta say, this game seems to have a high learning curve on stealth, where it's harder than most games, but about on par with the old Splinter Cell games. With all that, what exactly is Reflex Mode, and what am I missing out on?

 

[Tohuvabohu]

So having never played a single MGS game, I jumped into this blind, and turned off Reflex Mode from the start; gotta say, this game seems to have a high learning curve on stealth, where it's harder than most games, but about on par with the old Splinter Cell games. With all that, what exactly is Reflex Mode, and what am I missing out on?

When reflex mode is enabled, you enter a brief Bullet-Time like period whenever you are spotted, where you have a few seconds to either tranq or kill the guard who spotted you, thus preventing a full alert.

With Reflex mode on, you could exploit it by sprinting through the base, purposely getting spotted thus triggering reflex mode, and easily dispatch of guards one by one with a silenced weapon. Or even an unsilenced weapon.

Yeah, reflex mode does make the game pretty easy... But, if you turn Reflex Mode off, that style of play becomes impossible to achieve, and you end up absolutely needing to stealth, or else be swiftly punished by base-wide alerts for getting spotted.

Good on you for actually taking the time to disable Reflex Mode and understanding the necessity of stealth when you play without it. You actually get a pretty hefty bonus for every mission if you play with Reflex Mode disabled. You can even go further into the options and disable marker tagging and enemy presence indicators to make it even more challenging on yourself.

But no, Ground Zeroes has pretty bad stealth u guise. /s