@barnodian: I quickly filled my entire Mother Base to the brim and became far more capable of going loud without feeling guilty about stunting my growth. I was all about extracting every person and figured I would remain that way, but in the end it wound up being unnecessary.
As for different styles, I really went reductive to save from typing paragraphs and paragraphs, but I honestly can't think of another game that gives you so many possible approaches to each mission. Even if you limit yourself to non-lethal play, I was still discovering creative ways to handle guards even 50 hours into the game. Did you know that most buildings have rooftop vents that you can lob sleep grenades into? Or how about the fact that you can play the tape of that guy shitting while hiding in a toilet on your speaker enabled iDroid to stop guards from checking your hiding spot?
Sure, at the end of the day, you can boil it all down to two paths: either you neutralize all the guards, or you don't, plain and simple. But it's the sheer breadth of viable tools that blows me away. Far Cry gives you basically nothing but guns and a rock. Like MGSV, you can use them to kill people quietly or loudly, and you can distract guards. But MGSV lets you slap C4 onto a guy's ass, wait until he meets his commander, and then blow the whole party up.
It also doesn't fail you when you kill the guy you are supposed to tail, and instead provides many opportunities to improvise success in your mission. One mission, I stumbled onto a tank battalion that I needed to blow up before I even found the intel file which would give me their route. I took them out and the mission was done, no worries about sequence breaking. In another, I needed to destroy the comms equipment, but I already did that while in a side op beforehand, so the game just automatically treated it as a victory, unique cutscene and all. Instead of making your first encounter with the Skulls a scripted failure if you get caught, they let me kill them by placing C-4 and luring them to jump on it. There are very, very few instant failures in this game, and often it's at its best when you screw up what you are supposed to be doing, and are forced to improvise. That's why they're raving about MGSV. It's the freedom of it all.
The story is hurt by a lack of memorable characters who create those moments you are talking about, on that we agree. There's no Cobra Unit, no Dead Cell, no FOXHOUND to square off against. This Metal Gear is much more about the build up, which rubbed some people the wrong way, as they didn't feel they got the payoff for all of that work. It's what makes Silent Snake such a divisive thing; either you're going to be ok with it by the end, or you'll feel like a lot of time was wasted for no real reason, or that the reason wasn't worth it. But I agree, outside of a few memorable moments (the scramble to save my MB staff will stick with me for a good amount of time), that first Chapter could have used fewer generic Russian officers as targets.
But I have to disagree; I'm pretty sure this is the game that Kojima has always wanted to make. He's talked endlessly about making characters with a more nuanced performance, one that says what they feel without saying anything, using facial capture to convey emotions. On the gameplay side, he laid the foundation with Peace Walker, and this is just its logical conclusion. It's possible that he would have made some changes with unlimited time and an unlimited budget, but overall, I think he's pretty happy with the game he created. And most people seem to agree.
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