stroopwafel said:
MGS5 is exceptionally good to a degree. It's the best open world stealth game by far and the supremely polished gameplay and obsessive eye for detail makes it stand even further apart. However, the gameplay is stuck in a very repetitive loop and the bland and empty open world also does little to pull you in. After a while the formulaic approach makes the game stumble and the extremely repetitive missions make it even worse. The fidgety menus and cumbersome mission structure also does little to remedy this. Had this game been semi-open world and mixed with the scripted level of the game's opening than MGS5 would have been phenomenal.
Its open world literally makes it objectively worse, and I can resonate with some of the pointsyou put forward. But whatever we got the open world made it worse in every possible way. If you tookaway the open world, it would be an
objectively better game because you would have taken away everything negative that you speak of... and in my opinion, a hell of a lot more that you're charitably not talking about.
Collectaphon bullshit, story delivered through cassette tapes, and aspects of the game that the open world shoots itself in the foot. Bullshit missions and optional missions. Like saving Kaz ... I got Kaz out and I went in a different direction than directly to the extraction zone planning to do in the first place, and then these teleporting dickheads appeared. I hit an invisible wall/terrain thing that the game magically determined I couldn't cross while carrying Kaz, and thus forced me to just power through all the enemies I was attempting to evade in the first place.
It
felt stupid. Like, I felt embarassed by this super-soldier I'm supposed to be playing, and in turn because I have to be an accessory in their actions
felt stupid in tandem.
The game gave me all these options to infiltrate in the first place ... but then told meto not implement it on the way out. Which is a bit annoying when I did all the hardyards scoping the place out and decided on my exfiltration route by the time I got in before scripted event decided to basically remove me of it. Why have an open world if you're not going to use it? It gives you an open world and then yanks on your leash, without you having much of any idea how long that leash is.
Moreover, its multiple maps, the fact that Kiefer Sutherland is
expensive so little if any avatar interaction with it, and all the forced travel bullshit annoys me. It feels like 3 hours of content
spread out over potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay. And you have to suffer all of it if you want to know all the background bullshit.
The last Metal Gear game I liked was MGS3, and that's precisely because
fuck the over-arcing story. Sure, if you like the mythos garbagethat is nonsense and awfully written, there's stuff in there that only you and others similarly invested will get, but there's decent narratives of sacrifice, duty, and passing the torch character narratives in the game that are self-contained to it on its own. Mix that with interesting environments, great boss battles, inventive mechanics and you have a good game.
MGS3 challenged me to find new ways to stealthily (or not) approach a myriad of new situations with every map. All while organically creating well-scripted events over each 'map' as you encountered them. MGSV offered you a whole lot of choice, but no real reason to exercise it. MGSV annoyed me with its tedium, repetitiveness, and low reward to investment. I can't imagine how it might have felt for someone
sincerely invested in all the MGS background arcing-story stuff that you had to
suffer it to get them.
As much as I disliked MGS4 (and I'm going to be honest, I skipped as many cutscenes as I could and just created the story in my head because
I know by now that story will make more sense(at least to me)), those maps it gave you felt
bigger and
with better stuff than all the
actual stuff of MGSV smushed together. And it's not necessarily a quality or quantity of having stuff to simply do.
I fucking love Breath of the Wild.
Its environments truly hit notes of sadness, but also a new beginning. As you wonder the nature-reclaimed kingdom of Hyrule and pass by burnt and broken ruins, and pristine tracts of wildlands, or ancient battlefields full of wrecked automatons, to archaic mysteries built in a quickly decaying world of yesteryear. How you pass by people who make a living scavenging from the past, or people simply adventuring together to find a vry specific flower in a broken world to give them some sense of longing for purpose in a world that is otherwise inimical to their existence. But it's not all doomand gloom ... the inhabitants creating tent settlements in the wild, and a handful of villages or steadfast communities being carved out of the hostile wilderness, or actively enduring, punctuate an idea of recovery no matter how slow or how large the threat.
When playing Breath of the Wild, you'll mark out a spot you want to go to, and get lost trying to get there. You'll find another atmospheric piece of the world you want to go and investigate just trying to get to that place you marked before.
MGSV you see a place you want to go, try to get there as fast as you can, and that's that. In other MGS games I could do that by just completing that minimap section and I'm there already. Facing another puzzle of patrolling guards, environmental set pieces, and other hurdles to traverse.
MGSV didn't feel like that. It just felt like a slog. Its experiences
just like the 30 other ones I went through. The open world was
just padding that was stuffed into a game to make it seem as if giving the players options when in truth it was just
negating stuff to experience or feel.
Let's call it a problematic aspect of 'economy of agency' ... how much
work do I need to invest to get something new in return? A feeling of immersion, a thrill of battle, a sense of alienation, the purpose through discovery...
Good open world gamesneednot necessarily have to deliver all 4, they could deliver one or two and still be
really good (IMO). If they don't deliver any of them, or wear out the welcome of that work paid, the'open world' will be compared disfavourably. This is particularly true when it's a game in a series where it had delivered these feelings, and is suffering delivering them again
because of that open world.
'Open world' is pretty hard to define in the first place. Like, does Bloodborne count?
I feel like it's less open world games will just be the status quo, and more and more big releases with big budgets are going to blur the lines of providingever more interactive and indepth worlds that aren't so constrained by storage mediums of the past.
