I'm staggered by the contrast between all the learning, and Vinny trying to "just juice it a little" at 500m/s below 2000m. Just beautiful...
A tiny ergonomics tip: you can click the box next to your maneuver node meter (the one that starts as a red x but [hopefully] turns into a green checkmark) to clear your next maneuver node. The clicking around nodes on the map is so finicky that I appreciate any way to avoid it.
Do you have any gaming experiences where, because you shifted your focus/goals, your experience was greatly improved?
I started playing MGSV in the same way I would approach a typical stealth game in the mold of Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored, etc. I would take a really long time setting up my infiltration route just so, and then would bail out and quickload if something went wrong. The grading at the end of each mission only fueled my own tendencies in this direction, and I found myself not making much progress, and not having much fun.
Then I stopped myself and decided that while I would still carefully set up an infiltration, I would only load when the game forced me to on death or otherwise failing a mission. Even when things went totally pear-shaped, I'd just switch from the tranquilizer to the machine gun and roll with it. I didn't expect this to work; a stealth build in Deus Ex almost always gets mowed down if caught in open combat, after all. But instead MGSV proved to not only be robust to abrupt changes in playstyle, but it thrived in it, showing that its staggering quantity of gameplay systems were matched by a fluidity of movement and interaction between those systems (as a programmer, I'm still shocked that they pulled this off). After making this switch, I had about the most fun I've had with a game this year.
What frustrates me here is that it felt like I was swimming upstream to overcome my existing habits and unlock this experience. I don't blame MGSV for habits I picked up in other games. But I do look at quantitative goals like the post-mission grading and SH:CD's "Beat Sherlock" objective, and wonder whether they guide players toward play, or a more Calvinist sense of work and achievement. In different games like Minecraft or Fallout, I might prefer work, but I wish MGSV had instead known that it is best as play, and had not steered me so hard toward the rat-race.
Thanks for this thoughtful post. I've not been an active player since ~Dec 2013, and haven't really been keeping up on the expansion news. This is pretty depressing to hear, though. I wonder how much of the new emphasis on grind is in response to complaints that there wasn't enough to "do" in the endgame. I fear that difficulty fetishists have won at the expense of those of us who found GW2 to be the perfect MMO-in-small-doses.
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