Evening fellow duders and dudetters, So, MGS games, great stuff but goddamn do I feel sorry for the people who try to play MGS4 without playing through the previous games. Does the same apply for Peace Walker as well? Ive finished MGS3 back in the day but I haven't even touched Portable Ops, so I don't know if I will be missing anything important.

I am maybe 10 hours into Peace Walker and so far there has been absolutely no mention of anything in Portable Ops. If you want to know the basics of the story, Gametrailers did a retrospective of the series back when MGS4 came out. Watch the MGS3 episode and the final episode and you should be caught up on the Portable Ops story and anything you may have forgotten from Snake Eater. But again, so far Peace Walker seems to pretend like Portable Ops never happened. No mention of any of the events as far as I can tell other than starting Snake off as being in charge of the Army Without Borders and not really introducing Master. But if you know your MGS fiction at least decently well you shouldn't have any trouble following what is going on. I should also note that the story so far seems to be a much smaller element than in previous games. It reveals the origins of Metal Gear but there are no lengthy cutscenes so far and you often go quite a long time without any major story elements appearing.

It ranges from "Not Very" to "Not At All."