MGS 5: Phantom Pain (and Ground Zeroes I guess)

[Xanthir]

Strange that we don't have a thread for this yet.

Anyway, I love it! I played the hell out of GZ, either A or S-ranking most of the missions before I got too bored. Just started playing PP this week, and man, it's so good. Core gameplay is *wonderful*, and they seem to have improved on enemy AI and sneaking stuff since GZ, too. The enemy's tracking, spotting, and searching ability feels realistic, for the first time ever in MGS, without being punishing - I feel like I'm making reasonable, realistic decisions about how to act and hide and being rewarded for it, rather than getting smacked with magical auto-tracking abilities, or conversely feeling like there's trivial artificial stupidity in how much they can see. And they don't fall out of alert 30 seconds after you kill someone either; a base stays active for a *while*, and sometimes that's good, because the soldiers shift into more predictable movement patterns. Overall it just feels very "real" while still being a good game and not too punishing, and it's amazing as a result.

There's a fun base-building loop that I enjoy; *just* enough resource gathering to mean you have to look out for stuff, but not enough to get boring. Gathering soldiers is fun - I like picking out the one decent-stats soldier from a checkpoint and trying to Fulton him away without anyone else noticing.

[setzer777]

Yeah, I wish there were more unique bosses, but otherwise I've been really loving it.

I suppose another quibble is that one of the buddies you can take on missions seems vastly superior to the others. On the other hand, I suppose the mountain of tools MGS gives you can be more about personal expression than optimized play.

[Xanthir]

Yeah, Quiet's OP as all get-out, but shrug. You choose to play with that or not. I love going in with DD because the quasi-marking is ridiculously useful for sneaking.

I'm at maybe 91% completion right now? Most missions S-ranked, with a handful left at A or B, nearly everything developed, almost all objectives completed. I stopped playing for a bit, but I'm kinda itching to play it again, so I might spend some time on it tomorrow.

You're right that the mountain of tools ends up just encouraging personal expression. My favorite loadout is pure non-lethal and silenced (stun rifle, tranq sniper, my beautiful baby infinite-silencer pistol, and sleep grenades) with enough explosives to do fun stuff to the surroundings (grenade undercarriage on the rifle is necessary for those rare times you can't sneak up on a riot-geared dude).

The one thing I'm unhappy about: I *vastly* prefer playing as a DD soldier instead of Snake, but then you don't have a cool robot arm. ;_;