Quick Look: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

@kevin_cogneto: It's a joke for longtime series fans. The opening is very similar to how the original Metal Gear Solid opened, with almost the exact same line about age not having slowed him down one bit. Since this is a prequel and Naked Snake is the father of sorts to Solid Snake it is sort of referencing a "like father like son" thing, and also implying that this game will be as major a departure from previous games as Metal Gear Solid was to the previous Metal Gear games at the time. It's silly, but for long time fans of the series it is a funny little callback. That's not to disagree with your overall assessment of the series, but in this case I thought the line was used well.

Also, I don't get why people are acting like the Ground Zeroes mission is the only mission in this game. So you can beat the main story in a couple of hours. That's why there are another five missions to play through. They could have done with a bigger base, but I don't think the total number of missions are the problem. Peace Walker was pretty short without the Side Ops stuff as well. It's honestly kind of silly to judge the length of this type of game only by its story mission. If I did that then I would think that The Elder Scrolls games were only 20 hours long not the 200+ that many people spend on them. Yea this is short. But on the same token, I feel like if this wasn't called Metal Gear Solid and was just advertised by some indie developer as their first attempt at a stealth game people would not be having this reaction.

This guy gets it.

This appeals to me in a way previous Metal Gears have not. I wish other developers would be willing to put out short games like this at a lower price every once in a while. Not everything has to be triple A, even in a triple A series.

I love how they were trying to justify the price at the end. It's not worth $30.

Sake.

So nice to see console games looking really nice for a change. Hooray for improved technology!

I'm so easily pleased...

Sure are a lot of dismissive comments from people who could not give less of a shit nor are interested in giving a shit about the series. Then again, outside of the odd Persona 4 and Dark Souls, seems like a lot of people on Giantbomb generally hate all things Japanese unless it's something they can appreciate ironically. Yeah, Metal Gear Rising was a great game that was painfully self aware. That's why even Metal Gear haters love it. But if the entire series were that tone, I would not care as much about MGS as I did pre-MGS4.You wanna know why I'm excited for MGSV even though MGS4 was my Mass Effect 3? It's because it's not afraid to take itself seriously. That's why it's so much more fun to speculate plot points in a Metal Gear game than any other series. Self awareness and irony can be funny, but it's also a sign of cowardice and lack of confidence in your own lore. Not that the Metal Gear series is lacking in self awareness, people just choose to ignore it when it fits their argument.

I can see how you feel but it is too bad you feel the need to generalize. I did mention that I am a huge fan of that first game. But honestly, with all the goofy ass shit that they put in there and the story and how much it twists and turns and how Kojima feels the need to have everyone coincidentally be tied together, it feels stupid. But it might be different, at least for me if it was a little selfaware, instead you do get a presentation of grandeur, that this is an modern epic. So simply put, you have goofy stuff like ghosts, guys made of bees, a fat guy on roller skates, Volgin checking balls, sci fi tech in the 1960's, for some reason the need to tell us Vamp is bisexual?, Otacon has to cry in every fucking game next to serious tone of OH MY GOD, the world is at stake and Kojima's incessant need to have a message at the end of each game. I wish I could feel that sense of wanting to know what is next in the story but all that goofy stuff in there while the developer asks you to take the story seriously is just hard for me to do. I have to ask, which is it? Is it a ridiculous story or is it some serious narrative? I am thinking the latter since they have fucking child soldiers in the trailer for Phantom Pain! And I think the lore would be much better without the goofy stuff. Super powers do not make a character unique.

Buncha crybaby bitches whining about voice actor this and too-up-its-own ass that. I like what I've played here and look forward to phantom pain.

There is some really weak voice acting in this game even by Japanese-to-English standards.

I've played it and it is pretty good. I feel like it's a lot slower and clunkier than the old games, but maybe it is just the fact that it being at night makes it harder to see guys and shoot them, as well it not being anywhere near as easy to understand the layout of a level and properly move through it, it just feels like I am constantly caught off guard, and the new tagging system does nothing for me.

In addition, the removal of proper items and the old menu (as in the weapon and items on the shoulder buttons as quick select) bum me out. Not only does the removal of the various items make the game drastically less fun play, but the d-pad item select is much slower and clunkier than the series standard. If MGS5 is just this gameplay but with much more story and bigger levels/worlds, I'll really need some convincing because this was a good way of telling me that they are making a really...weird game, but not in the ways it has before. Just sort of bolting on these design ideas onto the game and it just doesn't feel fun. It just makes me want to look up the cutscenes on youtube, which has never happened before. Really bummed me out. I definitely wasn't left wanting more on the gameplay end.

As well, the game really seems to be balanced around the slo-mo alert thing and in general alerts are handled much differently in this game. In an effort to play without the slo-mo, everything around the alerts are much harsher than I recall, and having the game center around escorting two people out of a boss crawling with guards, this just is not fun at all. Like, dropping Chico or Paz down to clear out an area just is not fun, and not having a big arsenal makes working with just your handgun a mess. I can't switch to a proper pistol, and abandoning your tranq gun in an MGS game is complete madness, it's the most useful thing in the series, but I guess it cannot shoot cameras made of plastic and glass.And of course Keifer cannot two hand guns. Too insane.

Oh and about Keifer - if his voice track was muted throughout the game, I probably wouldn't notice much. It's incredibly pedestrian...then again I have never even begun to care about anything he's done in the past so his attempt at Snake comes off as completely dull and off-putting. It's immensely strange when everyone else is just as they were in the direct prequel too...it just makes it all really jarring and makes me tune out the dialogue. I did like Paz's audiologs though, but her voice is splendid so she has that going for her.

P.S. You can't roll??? The dive is cool looking and fun to do but does not make up for the roll being gone at all.

Yeah, you mean the thing it still is and is even better at?

5... seconds long...?!

ugh just doesnt feel the same without David Hayter

dat 60fps

Awful. I've played all of the mainline MGS games and most of the spin offs. I'll wait for Phantom. Hopefully this isn't the start of a new trend in publishing and will become what the "demo" for GT5 was: an anomaly.

@dan_citi: You can still roll in the game. Although the control scheme to do so is a bit retarded, but its still possible

Seems strange you would invest so much tech into a 2 hour long game? Are they going to make more content for this? This is bizarre.

edit - oh ok its like a glorified tech demo, never mind.

So what if there were 2 bases like this for 60 bucks.

I played through the main mission last night on PS3 in 62 minutes. I didn't play Peace Walker (only the less important Portable Ops) though it makes me want to try it next on PS3 (PSP version on Vita doesn't sound very good). Played and enjoyed MGS2 and MGS4 all the way through, got stuck on MGS1 (GC re-release) and MGS3. But all the same I found it to be very entertaining. It felt like Splinter Cell Blacklist meets The Last of Us in a open area tangentially like Far Cry 3.

And like the new voice of Sam Fisher in Blacklist I got over the missing David Hayter for Snake pretty quick. I've never watched 24 so Kiefer Sutherland's voice isn't known to me.

When the alarm went off trying to enter the underground room I rushed down the stairs. A few steps from the landing four soldiers sprung out and seemed to be taken back in surprise because they were heading up. Reflexively I pulled up my gun and sprayed into the mass of men, knocking all of them down. One of them was still moving, so I reloaded and prayed into the pile of writhing bodies again.

Also, running for my life away from gunfire with a prisoner strewn across my back was amazing. When Snake sprints he's running for his goddamn life.

@thethingaboutmachines said:

While I think that makes some amount of sense, I think people's issue with that line of reasoning is how Solid Snake's voice didn't change even though he got old in MGS4. Also, even Big Boss Young is well into his...late 20s? 30s? And your voice is pretty much developed by that age, and isn't likely to change as dramatically as the difference between the gruff tough guy voice Hayter puts on and the Jack Bauer regular speaking voice that Sutherland is using.

On the other hand, assuming Eli pretty much has to be Liquid, it's totally fine that his voice actor isn't Cam Clarke because Eli is like 13 or 14 at most, it looks like, and wouldn't be guaranteed to have his adult speaking voice.

You pretty much said it all for me here. As batsh*t as MGS2 was, it was still somewhat grounded enough in its own world for me to still be able to recommend it; same with MGS3. MGS4 totally lost me--the obtuse cinematics, nanomachines are in EVERYTHING, etc. I can't play anything Kojima Productions post-MGS3 without eye-rolling 5 minutes in; I quit Rising before the last boss because I couldn't care anymore.

The series got too stupid (and not in a good way) for it's own britches and lost any charm that was keeping me from completely abandoning it earlier.

Remember that freeware about robot animes Konami tried to sneak into the MGS2 demo box?

That turned out to be one of the most memorable, jarringly frenetic, eye-catching, franchises on PS2.

Why don't they just do that again?

It says completion ratio on the main menu and displays it as a percentage.

Yep!

HOW DOES IT FIT IN WITH THE REVENGEANCE CONTINUITY

I wish they'd say which platform they're playing on in these cross-gen game QLs. Is this PS3 or PS4? I'm sorry to say, I really can't tell.

The way the weapon UI is angled reminds me of RE6. That's not a good thing.

This is the PS4 version. I could have sworn that they mentioned it at some point in the video but either ways he definitely mentioned it on the most recent bombcast. I guess I just kind of assumed it was the PS4 version based on how nice it looked.

I'm pretty sure its PS4. based on how they spoke of the different versions.

so you can play through this in under 6 minutes. hm.

Doesn't sound like Snake at all, sounds off. Not a fan of the new Snake voice.

That said, if they are doing this new voice to differentiate between Naked Snake and Solid Snake, I'd be fine with that.

Looks great visually though.

Agreed. If it's to make it work so that we have Big Boss and Solid Snake be able to be in the same game...then it's worth it.

I agree, and really...it's all dumb. But, if we want to be forgiving...the explanation that I've heard tossed around was that Big Boss didn't smoke cigarettes. He was a cigar smoker smoker, and not a heavy one. Solid Snake seemed pretty addicted to smoking cigarettes, ontop of whatever that does to his rapidly aging body...in some way it could maybe explain away why Solid's voice sounds different from Big Boss.

finally, a reason to get a ps4

So I've played through the main mission part of this now. I finished it in about an hour and a half, or 87 minutes to be exact. This is no kills, all prisoners rescued and a fair bit of "mucking around". I unlocked a couple of missions and a "hard" difficulty setting and the game says I'm 11% complete.

The unlocked missions are pretty cool, and they are a bit more challenging (enemies start at high alert and it's daytime etc). There's lots of replayability here, and those who are interested and fans of the series might get many more hours out of this.

More distracting than Jack Bauer being Snake is Garrus Vakarian being Skullface.

I always found David Hayter's Snake voice kinda... ah.. oh boy... terrible. I love the Metal Gear Solid games, all of them, but it's almost despite of his voice!

Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly iconic by this point, and in many ways very endearing. But like, Kojima keeps claiming he wants his games to be taken seriously. I just can't imagine Hayter's goofy, cartoony gruff voice during these incredibly disturbing scenes from Ground Zeroes (and Phantom Pain, it looks like).

It's terrible. Just an awful voice. Kiefer Sutherland's more grounded voice works for me, not to mention Big Boss had a different voice actor in MGS4, so it seems only natural that they'd start carving out different sounds to these two characters.

Personally, I think Hayter will be in Phantom Pain, possibly as a final post-credit scene, recreating the start of the first Metal Gear, where you would need two different voice actors for the two Snakes. I think his dissatisfied tweets were part of the marketing campaign. Hayter seems like a smart enough guy not to throw a hissy fit on twitter over this.

I'm really enjoying this game, currently up to about 10 hours playtime with 84% completion - completing all of the trials is... well, trying. Getting towards the end of a no checkpoint/reflex/alerts/kills run has me gripping the controller with white knuckles, leaning forward in my seat and scrutinizing every inch of the screen.

I'd have paid double for this, such is the worth I perceive.

I haven't played this, but it looks like something that should be a $15 last gen/$20 current gen digital only release. The $30 retail release for current gen seems very odd.

@rainvillain: hayter being int he end as solid snake would require Kojima to know the english cast and appreciate that people played the game in english before ground zeroes. He's never met any of the english cast in person and the only actor he's personally directed is Kiefer. He's made it apparent during contract negotiation for MGS2 that he has no attachment to any of the english voices and thinks nothing of recasting them, to the point that if Hayter didn't know he was being recast until he saw the kiefer announcement, he probably might not be brought back for Solid Snake either. Not to mention the deja vu mission neither bothers to use hayter or cam clarke for liquid/solid quotes and that Kojima insists on using a Hollywood/western TV star because that's all he trusts to do facial capture, because again as he has said he's made many of the choices in MGSV/Ground Zeroes based on the advice of the same film director's he's been talking to for a while now about an MGS movie.