When did this game click for you?

Hey gang,

I've tried to play MGSV a few times now, and I always get bored after a couple of missions. Something about the hyper non-linear fashion and open world, and complete divergence from the previous games just never sat quite right for me.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it like a rogue like where I just need to unlock a bunch of stuff for it to be fun?

I've heard the fun comes from exploring the world, exploring your tools, and seeing the different ways you can tackle a mission, which is probably why the game didn't click for me. I mean, aside from choking out dudes to Hall & Oates.

If you're not having fun in the first few hours, I don't think any of the upgrades will make it significantly more enjoyable for you. The appeal for me is the open world freeform stealth gameplay along with just how great it plays. To me, in terms of game feel, it's one of the best games out there. If you don't like it, you don't like it.

As for "complete divergence", a lot of the game's structure builds off of Peace Walker, which builds off of Portable Ops. It's not without precendent in the series, it's just iterating on the more obscure titles.

I'll continue on this tangent while I'm here: I consider the core series to be made up of three trilogies grouped by the focus of the gameplay. Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid are puzzle games; MGS2, 3 and 4 are narrative action games. Portable Ops, Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain are defined by the mission-based structure where you're collecting soldiers like Pokemon and building a home base.

for what it's worth, i played it in 2020 and found parts of it entertaining but the majority was very monotonous for me.

you get a lot of flexibility in your approach, but ultimately i found the mission design to grow stale very quickly.

I'm trying to think if that's early enough for the buddies to enter the fray. I think the game becomes a lot more palatable when you get an extra pair of eyes on the field.

Play Ground Zeroes first. If that game doesn't pull you in then it's unlikely MGSV will.

I found the core gameplay to be very entertaining. The controls and a sneaking around to take out enemies and then the capturing and base building all worked really well for me. I loved it, even though it's a clearly unfinished game with a stupid story.

Maybe you just don't like it.

It clicked with me basically instantly. The open world and forgiving nature of being seen just made it one of the most fun Metal Gears to play for me. Played it for a month solid with the grind of gathering people and working on equipment. But the story was easily the worst of the series. I would say if the actual gameplay from the start is not working for you, its probably not going to be fun at all. Because even the grind that kept me playing itself isn't really that fun. Just a good excuse to keep playing the game.

I was incredibly disappointed by Phantom Pain and it never clicked for me. It has amazing sim qualities and logistics and planning and... almost nothing interesting to do with it but to slap balloons on dudes? There is almost no story, no gravitas or weight to anything. It feels like a AA game sometimes.

There are some insane youtube videos of guys doing flawless speed runs of certain levels though and it looks like you're watching Jason Bourne/Jack Bauer at work which is pretty impressive. The tools are totally handed to the player but those missions and worlds are just... boring to me.

I'm happy that a lot of the gameplay ideas I enjoyed in Phantom Pain resurfaced in Death Stranding - one could argue that their is a similar dearth of emergence and activity in their open worlds but for whatever reason I find the traversal in Death Stranding to be of the most satisfying gaming I've ever done; I'm also an avid expeditioner of the North and East Arctic IRL of which a lot of the landscapes are inspired by so I've no doubt some considerable bias.

I just like load out screens where I have to pick gear and supplies and vehicles to logistically manage and weigh the pros and cons for specific missions/adventures. Its something I'd love to see fleshed out/simmed out in a lot more games with the budget to visually represent before you. Let me see those extra rations/ammo packs/plot devices strapped to my characters +2 Super Satchel Backpack Add On I farmed half an hour for.

Anywho I've de-railed myself.

TLDR; There is a lot I wanted to like with Phantom Pain but it never clicked for me. Good luck!

I don't really know what to say, i know it's not helpful but MGS5 is one of the best playing third person shooter/stealth action games ever, so if it's not clicking it never will.

What made me start to like MGSV in terms of the gameplay was how I was able to infiltrate different enemy camps and take my time in taking out the enemies. The game gives you all kinds of ways you can do this and it was very fun for me. And little things, like how some camps had a soldier listening to a classic 80s song, and you being able to collect them was a nice touch. It's always the little things.

I guess it’s not really a thread for me, since the game never clicked with me, but I wish it would’ve. The story was boring drivel, but it played well and looked nice…just that the world was incredibly dull for me. It made me think of Red Faction: Guerrilla and how some people love that game, while for me the brown world sucked all the fun out of the wanton destruction you can do in it.

It clicked with me during Ground Zeroes. There are maybe two other games I’ve ever played where I felt like every rule made sense and could be mapped back to a real world analog. I couldn’t help but feel like Snake was an actual person in an actual space, y’know? And then you had detachable rocket hands and what not on top of that.

If the structure of the game is getting you down I’d just give up, honestly, because that aspect of the game is only going to get more bizarre as time goes on.

Sadly never. The tone was too dour, not a very "fun" game to hang out with, if that makes sense.

it doesn't.

Some games aren't fit for open world structure and it's one of those.

@sombre: IMO, do yourself a favor and watch a Let's Play of the story if you want to see it.

@giant_gamer said:

To me this means you would like the game if it wasn't open world. Like "This would be a good game, if only it had less freedom." But "it doesn't" implies you didn't like the game at all. Are you a big fan of Ground Zeroes or Peace Walker?

Could you elaborate? I just can't imagine someone saying the thing that ruins this game is the structure of the gameplay.

I liked it a lot but the intro was... also a lot. I'd start a new game if I could skip that...

I was hooked the moment I started the game up. Loved every metal gear game, and this one was my favorite to play even if the story wasn't as good. I enjoyed the stealth gameplay in this better than the rest.

May just not be for you, nothing wrong with that.

I can't speak for @giant_gamer, but MGSV would be better if it had far less freedom. The reason I dropped off is there just wasn't any tension in anything you were doing. In the older MGS games, the areas were pretty limited and you generally had to make your way through them by sneaking. If you got spotted, you generally had to find a place to hide. If I recall, enemies would spawn in endlessly until you "got away" and cleared the alert.

In MGSV, there is no such tension. The game gives you all these systems, but you almost never need to engage with any of them. For example, the research tree. It's massive, and has a ton of stuff, but outside a few weapons and the sneaking suit, I'd say very little of it actually mattered or felt like a meaningful upgrade. Because the areas were so massive and enemies would generally stop chasing you after a very short time, the best "tech" in the game was usually just running away.

This is what made Ground Zeroes more entertaining in my mind. There was no faffing around with equipment and the area was considerably smaller. Because it was basically just a single zone, it really wasn't an option to just run outside an arbitrary area to stop guys from chasing you. It ended up being much closer to the original MGS experience than V.

@therealturk: That makes sense, but also that's how I've played every Metal Gear game. There are a hundred ways to do things, but I generally only ever use one. If I get spotted, I run away to a different area.

I loved the gameplay from hour 1 and had a lot of fun exploring different ways of tackling the missions. It sounds like this game isn't your thing but you could at least play until you get the dog. Maybe it will click once you get more gameplay options thanks to him? At least you have someone to pet during missions.

I tapped out once the game became a pokemon-esque collect-athon where nothing else matters besides collecting all the best guys. I hate this mechanic - the game quickly devolves into [scan for highest level guys - acquire them - run to exit marker] with absolutely nothing in terms of story, dialogue, cutscenes, etc. to make you give a shit about any of it.

There are apparently lots of people out there who can be persuaded to play a game for 50 or more hours simply because it controls well, but I require a game to make me care about its world and characters in order to make that kind of commitment. A game like this one which fails to do that, in spite of the fact that you can blast Billy Idolfrom your chopper during a tense mission extraction, is a special kind of failure.