Metal Gear

You guys remember how MGSV had a marketing tie in motorcycle? You can't even ride a motorcycle in the game.
For fuck's sake, I've seen Sons of Anarchy having better motorcycle techniques than in MSGV.
 
Why anyone fondly remembers it's barebones "gameplay" is beyond me. No camo system. No survival viewer. No animals really beyond a few thing
The survival viewer was effectively pointless menu management that didn't add anything to the gameplay, especially since the ONE game it appeared in threw materials at you by the truckload.

The game definitely has a camo system? You just can't switch them on the fly, but you get distinct bonuses for wearing different camo in different environments. There could be more animals, sure, but they are there and they're a fun collectible.

The moment to moment infiltration and gameplay is shittons of fun, maybe not for everyone, but I've put six hundred hours into the game and the sheer breadth of options for each mission and interaction are absolutely phenomenal. It's the best stealth merc simulator ever, nothing else comes close.
You can say that an extra two years could have allowed Kojima to add better bases/NPCs/missions, but the better question is why werent they just good from the start?
Mostly a tech issue from what I gather. The 360 and PS3 ports neutered a lot of the potential, which sucks ass.

I definitely think the hollow and unfinished feeling was manufactured, 'bad on purpose' like a lot of those Japanese auteurs like to justify their shitty game design with.
 
I also remember they said we could customize mother base to our liking and chat with Ocelot, Kaz "KKK" Miller etc off mission.
damn, MGSV piss me off with all the bad parts, but I love the good shit so much!
I seem to recall them saying we could at least choose positions for each platform of motherbase and each individual platforms color. This was a major thing to me because I thought it would be cool to color code the medical platform, command platform, support platform, etc. etc. And to possibly place them in a way that was reminiscent of how Outer Heaven was structured in the original MG.

I heard this in a showcase like...right before release too. Then it came out and you could only change the entire mother bases color and not manipulate the platforms position at all. I don't think you could even do this for FOB's either.

Also, the 360/PS3 versions weren't ports. The PS4/Xbone version were ports. The game was always designed around 360/PS3. This is why I say no matter how much more time they could have given him, the game would have felt inherently "dated" anyways. But I also don't believe the awful map design had anything to do with the 360/PS3 hardware and was just a dumb design decision from someone who doesn't understand open world as we saw the same exact shit with Death Stranding.
 
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Replaying through 4 and my God, issues between Kojima and Konami aside, how could he drop the ball so hard with 5?
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Replaying through 4 and my God, issues between Kojima and Konami aside, how could he drop the ball so hard with 5?
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I also wish I could be straddled to death by psycho supermodel soldiers. I guess I'll just have to do looking at Quiet's ass in the chopper.

I do think a fair few mechanics were dropped that could have been worked in and I won't fucking cope about it: Kojima got lazy. You really don't need any camo besides the sneaking suit because after enough missions the PFs are gonna be wearing NVGs or Thermal's which fuck any negligible help trying to match your clothes to the environment. On the other hand, the day/night cycle helps paper over that fault somewhat until you can afford it, but it really stood out to me in my first playthrough. I think we could have had it and it wouldn't have detracted from the game.

And inb4 anyone tries the "it was the 1980's, technology wasn't advanced enough for octocamo", there are giant robots and superpowered symbiotes "parasites", realism is really not a thing MGS cares about.
 
So a couple more things I noticed about the Big Shell. These couldn't be more pointless but I've been dogtag hunting and playing through the game on V. Easy is so dull I would have gone catatonic if I hadn't thought about literally anything else.

We are repeatedly told that the two Shells lie on a north-south axis. Campbell even tells the player to take the north door from Strut D to get to Shell 2. This is also consistent with the radar. However, it is not consistent with the sun, which rises somewhat in the direction of Strut I and sets in the direction of Strut F. I freely admit this is an odd thing to sperg about, but then again it's an odd thing to get wrong. I guess they really wanted to have Emma silhouetted against the sun on the oil fence? Why not just align the Shells east-west, then?

Even with Raiden as bait, how did Snake sneak onto Arsenal? There's only one door.
 
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I also wish I could be straddled to death by psycho supermodel soldiers. I guess I'll just have to do looking at Quiet's ass in the chopper.

I do think a fair few mechanics were dropped that could have been worked in and I won't fucking cope about it: Kojima got lazy. You really don't need any camo besides the sneaking suit because after enough missions the PFs are gonna be wearing NVGs or Thermal's which fuck any negligible help trying to match your clothes to the environment. On the other hand, the day/night cycle helps paper over that fault somewhat until you can afford it, but it really stood out to me in my first playthrough. I think we could have had it and it wouldn't have detracted from the game.

And inb4 anyone tries the "it was the 1980's, technology wasn't advanced enough for octocamo", there are giant robots and superpowered symbiotes "parasites", realism is really not a thing MGS cares about.
OctoCamo is one of the best concepts in any game as of today, and now that you brought it up I wish for it to be included in MGS5 as well. You have wormhole fulton by the end of the game, as well as Soliton Radar (who was created by Mei Ling in 2005), so why not have the OctoCamo?

Also Quiet is the most boring fucking character, she's great for the coom material, but even then the B&B Unit, Fortune, Sniper Wolf and EVA make for more interesting characters and are smoking hot.

So a couple more things I noticed about the Big Shell. These couldn't be more pointless but I've been dogtag hunting and playing through the game on V. Easy is so dull I would have gone catatonic if I hadn't thought about literally anything else.

We are repeatedly told that the two Shells lie on a north-south axis. Campbell even tells the player to take the north door from Strut D to get to Shell 2. This is also consistent with the radar. However, it is not consistent with the sun, which rises somewhat in the direction of Strut I and sets in the direction of Strut F. I freely admit this is an odd thing to sperg about, but then again it's an odd thing to get wrong. I guess they really wanted to have Emma silhouetted against the sun on the oil fence? Why not just align the Shells east-west, then?

Even with Raiden as bait, how did Snake sneak onto Arsenal? There's only one door.
I love Metal Gear Solid 2 so much. Big Shell is an awesome setting, being "reintroduced" in MGS Peace Walker and then 5 was fine, but there wasn't much to it besides that.

I believe it is a combo of him and/or his team not having any real understanding of how open world games work, and him not giving a fuck about MGS by that point but basically being forced to work on them.
Open world got stale real quick, true.


MGS5 has one of the best trailer the man ever directed though.
 
As father time keeps marching on its ruthless journey into infinity, I'm more and more convinced Kojima is the Ringo Star of video game developers. As a long time fan with 2k hours in MGSV and 200 in Death Stranding (Sad I know) I still think the series peaked with MGS3 and from what I've read after 3 some of the more crucial japs with unpronounceable jap names left Konami and haven't been heard from ever since? Like there's a whole conspiracy theory that those are the real talent behind the series and Kojima is just good with making the cutscenes more cinematic.

If you think about it, it more or less makes sense! 4 is almost embarrasing at some points in the story and Kojima was more preocupied with taking white girl pictures of his meals to post on instagram rather than working on V. I know this is probably going to get me a lot of shit but that whole Konami fucked over Kojima has started to make more sense to me the more I read about it. You have this diva developer who thinks he's better than everyone else burning through your money trying to make "video games are art" faggotry, while the grunts working on braindead mobile games are making you x10 times the money with 1/10 the effort and investment. I mean is it really even a choice at that point?

I think that whole thing of Konami reducing their employees break time and I think reading their emails? And all that stuff Jim Sterling cries incessantly over was probably the corporate people finally bringing the hammer down after 4 years of dinners with Hollywood pedos to get them to finally release something playable. I feel that was more the people who worked under Kojima paying the price for his hubris of thinking he's some avant garde movie director instead of another japanese manlet hired to make a video game.

The one thing I think Kojima does that is undisputedly good is his camera work on cutscenes, as retarded and unfinished MGSV was, the one thing that is always interesting to see and actually makes me sit back and watch those cutscenes for the 100th time is how interesting the camera moves and what things it shows and sometimes doesn't. Other than that I 100% agree he needs to have a tard wrangler if not you get Death Stranding with their 1000 mph vomit of exposition that gets repeated 1000 times during the entire fucking game.

That's why I think MGS3 was the peak, he could still try retarded shit but had to keep other peoples opinion in mind and had the corporate overlords cracking the whip when things got too out of hand. Even then tho, if you read about the making of MGS3 and read some rumors on old forums and the such, Konami was still having problems with Kojima wasting time with meaningless shit that never saw the light of day.

TL.DR Kojima was lucky he had a very good team of talented people during his peak with MGS3 and has ridden the wave of success from that, still tricking people he's this great video game artour when he hasn't made a good game in almost 20 years ala George Lucas.
 
His co-writer that nobody knows anything about disappeared off the face of the earth after 3 I think.
Kojima fanboys will tell you that all his co writers wrote was the codec dialogue without even realizing that the codec dialogue was like over half the fucking dialogue in the games and was the thing that completely fleshed out the world of MGS, MGS2 and MGS3.
 
Kojima fanboys will tell you that all his co writers wrote was the codec dialogue without even realizing that the codec dialogue was like over half the fucking dialogue in the games and was the thing that completely fleshed out the world of MGS, MGS2 and MGS3.
I already explained it here, but he wrote the secundary codec calls, as in, not the main story ones, so joke and lore mostly
 
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I love Metal Gear Solid 2 so much. Big Shell is an awesome setting, being "reintroduced" in MGS Peace Walker and then 5 was fine, but there wasn't much to it besides that.
Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, but between the clear skies, striking orange structures, sound of seagulls etc. the Big Shell has such a distinctive aesthetic. I've heard that some people consider the Big Shell just a palette swap of Shadow Moses, but that doesn't do it justice IMO.
 
The game definitely has a camo system? You just can't switch them on the fly, but you get distinct bonuses for wearing different camo in different environments. There could be more animals, sure, but they are there and they're a fun collectible.
Problem is, it's really basic and unintuitive. You have no indication whether you're camouflaged or not in the first place and then the actual check is "do you have the right camo on the right surface or not, yes/no" iirc. You'd figure that the desert sand camo would at least be somewhat effective on rocks, in the same way the wetwork camo would be somewhat effective on grass, but they're not. And since you can't change your camo except by having it dropped or before the mission, there is no fucking point in using any camo other than the basic "grass/desert" camo because that's most of the enviornment you're going to be in. The situational ones make no sense when you can't change it easily. Then you have the completely useless camo, like the "on emplacement" one or the Ocelot one which from what I recall doesn't even work at night like it's advertised to.
 
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Problem is, it's really basic and unintuitive. You have no indication whether you're camouflaged or not in the first place and then the actual check is "do you have the right camo on the right surface or not, yes/no" iirc.
And sadly the writers of MGSV couldn't think of something as simple as that.
 
TL.DR Kojima was lucky he had a very good team of talented people during his peak with MGS3 and has ridden the wave of success from that, still tricking people he's this great video game artour when he hasn't made a good game in almost 20 years ala George Lucas.
I did read about this elsewhere and I have to agree. Kojima always struck me as the eccentric 'try and not break his creative flow' kind of guy. 3 is definitely his magnum opus, 4 is amazing just for being able to run on the PS3 of all consoles, but 5 was so fucking bland and while I liked the fact that they showed some more of Liquid, I hate to say "they fucking retcon the story" but sadly they do it in a nice way for one part, and for the other is just confusing to even think about.

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