For me personally, Metal Gear Solid 5 is one of the greatest games ever made. I've played all of the core games in the franchise to death, so when I heard about Metal Gear Survive, I was ready to buy it sight unseen, simply because it was another Metal Gear game. I watched the trailers as they came out, and while it did look very different from all the others games in the series, I was still interested in playing another Metal Gear game, so I went out and bought it within a week of it's initial launch and started playing it....and I've only just stopped playing it within the last few days.
Yes, I've been almost exclusively playing Metal Gear Survive for nearly a year and a half. Mind you I wasn't playing it every day, but it was literally the only game in that time that I played for any real length of time (I bought one of those GBA clone consoles a while back, so I did play Donkey Kong Country GBA for like an hour or two).
Now, I'm one of those really persistent/stubborn kinds of people, so I whenever I play a video game, I usually try to beat it regardless of how bad it is, and that's partly why I kept at it with MGS. The game was/is very, very hard, so at first I'd play it for several hours at a time just to try to make any real progress, and even then it didn't amount to much. Because of how hard it was I ended up only playing it maybe once or twice a week, and it quickly became almost a chore to play it. You always need more materials, there's always more zombies to kill, you always need to level up further to not die, there's always another quick travel point to unlock, the game rarely ever lets up on the amount the things you need to do and keep doing in order to survive, and even after almost fully leveling up my character, crafting and unlocking most of the major weapons/tools and nearly exploring the entirety of the map, I still died many times on almost every main mission and side mission regardless. And still, I kept playing....
I'd say within about the first month of playing I got to the point where you can start growing your own food, and after finally finding some potatoes I quickly built the maximum number of potato farms the game allows and began to wait. To the make the game even more frustrating it takes two real world hour for I believe two potatoes to grow in one farm, so the most you'll ever grow in two hours is six, but if you play the game for two hours you'll actually run out of all of them with about half an hour to spare, so you still more food on top of that. I quickly discovered that each farm will keep growing potatoes for several real world days, so I began to just play the game once a week so that I'd end up with a surplus of over 100 potatoes each week to work off of, thus circumventing one the game's core concepts in order to stand playing it at all.
After a while, I'd go from playing it every week, to almost every week, to a couple times a month, so maybe once or twice every couple of months. My situation at work wasn't the best at the time either, so I tried to avoid any further frustration. Still though, I always kept going back to it, slowly chipping away at it.
The game only has two maps just like MGS5, Afghanistan and Africa, but for some reason the game makes the mission that takes you to Africa sound like it's unbelievably difficult, so I spent I don't how many hours just grinding the same side missions over and over again to level up my character and crafting as many tools and weapons as possible only to find out that when I eventually started that mission it was very, very easy, and I actually ended up beating it after only dying once or twice (and even that was just from getting insta-killed from the boss at the end of the level). Once I got to Africa, I breezed through most of the map and most of the main missions within a matter a weeks, which by that point I was back to playing it a few times a week since I was finally making real progress in a reasonable amount of time.
What almost made me give up in frustration was the mission to reclaim Sahelanthropus. Oh my god, this stupid, stupid mission. It's just another "defend this" sort of mission, but the sheer scale of enemies they throw at you is insane, it's more than triple the number of any other mission in the game up that point and it comes out nowhere, the game doesn't make it seem any more important than any other main mission. I died at least 10 times on that mission, and each time took almost 15 minutes, so I wasted a good few hours just trying to get through this one mission. The only reason I got through it was after looking up some playthroughs on YouTube, which required me to completely change my weapon and item layout and use ones I've never used in the game before that point, and even then I only just barely beat it by the skin of my teeth.
After that ordeal was over, I was able to continue on pretty well, none of the others missions really were that hard or a pain in the neck, but then I got to the final mission of the game...
The final mission of this game is one of the most frustrating parts of a video game I have ever played. It it so hard, so overwhelming, it's just such an onslaught that I don't know you'd ever have a chance of beating it unless you did just about everything in the game like I did, and keep in mind the game doesn't have a level cap on story progression so you could hypothetically make it this far and just not be able to do it.
I tried it, and then I tried it again, then again, and then again after that, and while I made progress each time I still kept dying from some random enemy popping up behind me out of nowhere or just getting stuck in a corner and a bunch of them just hit it at once practically inst-killing me. I think if I went back and kept trying I could've beat it, but the main thing that prevented me from actually doing it was one thing: materials.
I didn't realize until this point in the game that whenever you use resources, be it to craft a weapon or more ammo, or just repair a damaged weapon, either way those materials are permanently used, and if you die on a mission, even if the game restarts you before the mission, those materials are still gone. Within three or four tries I found that I was simply running out of materials, so I couldn't repair any of my weapons, I couldn't craft more ammo for my guns, and I couldn't craft more gates or fences, so I was stuck...and that's what made me give up on this game.
I'm sure that if I went back I could restock all of my supplies and keep trying to beat it, but to get back to where I was supply-wise would probably take me at least another week of playing on and off to maybe get back to where to that point, and honestly, I'm just sick and tired of wasting my time. I've put all this energy and time into this game, and to hit a roadblock this far into the game, especially one this random and pointless....no way, I'm done, I just don't care anymore.
Part of me doesn't feel that great about leaving the game unfinished, but I know that it's the right thing to do, and that I need to move on to different games. To give myself some form of closure I did look up the ending to the game, and even for this game it's pretty stupid, so at least now I'm left wondering about what happens next.
(I should point out that during this time I never once played the multi-player for this game. I don't have an Xbox Live Gold membership, so I've only ever played the single player component of this game.)
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