Both in Afghanistan and Africa. Like you have a bunch of camps on the world map and thats it there is literally nothing else in the world. And like 95% the missions are go to camp X and either extract or kill Y and you end up extracting them anyways cause the game rewards you for it. Even MB feels empty you cant enter any buildings they look cool but there isnt anything specific about them. Like the combat platform would have been cool to see an actual boot camp with soldiers doing exercises but no it just looks like an oil rig platform everywhere. anyways im maybe crazy or jaded i just didnt like the game at all, and i didnt even talk about the story yet.

Hey man it's no biggie, not every game is for everyone.

I don't mind it. The world kind of has to be designed like that to give the player somewhere to escape to. Kinda reminds me of Far Cry 2's brand of sandbox where Ubisoft have found the blueprint without cramming it into a large world that now feels compact and strangling. Definitely agree with you on Mother Base. That place doesn't look fit for purpose. There is one cell that functions as a brig for the entire facility. One bed in medical and no Doctors. R&D has one scientist.

Yes, kind of like real life Afghanistan and Africa.

@bigboss1911: you've been to those places? i find this remark borderline racist.

a country isnt a race.

ive always read the middle east and africa had a lot of open spaces.

a lot of places have empty open spaces but the way he said was with a negative connotation on africa and afghanistan.

There seems to have overall some confusion regarding MGS5's nature as an open-world game.
The game isn't meant to be GTA: MGS5.
It's meant to be the stealth gameplay of MGS set in an open-world context. The whole point of the open-world was to give the player their own ways of reaching bases and infiltrating them. I do wish that they had something similar to the whole two factions fighting each other in MGS4 though. It's a shame that for whatever reason that didn't happen.

Yeah, not really.

In any case, keep in mind the areas we have access are occupied combat zones.

They are rural warzones in the middle of the desert and rain forest, all the villages were decimated and nothing but PF and rebel groups left.

He probably said it because that's where the game takes place. I think you're really reading something into what he said that he clearly didn't intend.

Let's just move past it and get back on topic.

sure but you dont even see any rebels just a bunch of soviet camps protecting dirt..and after infiltrating nth camp it gets repetitive

Some of the camps do feel a bit samey but whatever. At some point concessions need to be made since they're making a game.

I agree. The open-world feels limited due to the objectives and game structure. Going to the same camps repeatedly makes the world feel smaller than it should. Not only do you revisit the same camps, but you do the same things at those camps for the most part. The camps rarely change in terms of items, weapons, or soldier placement, and you can reuse the same methods of entry that you have every time. As a result of all of this, the world feels smaller.

Honestly, I'm glad. So many open world games try to stuff a bunch of filler ass side activities into the game with no narrative or mechanical justification for their existence. Ubisoft is the worst offender for confusing filler with "fun." MGSV is a stealth game through and through, and the open world design was settled on to give the player an incredible amount of diversity in both loadout and approach for infiltration. Stop thinking of it as a traditional open world and think of it as a stealth sandbox, and the reason for it being "empty" is a lot clearer.

Of course this is all predicated on you liking stealth games. As a life long fan of the genre I'm just glad that there's a real, honest to God stealth game on the market right now.

There's no denying that the world is pretty barren outside of the camps.

Better than invisible walls around each base though.

I mostly agree and see what you're saying. This game isn't open world as much as it's providing an illusion of being open world. It's a series of camps loosely interconnected by a series of roads, with numerous impassable objects such as cliffs in between them. Toss in one or two smaller camps and checkpoints between each larger outpost, and that's more or less the entire "open" world.

A lot of the variety in this game comes from the different ways in which the player can choose to approach situations, be that stealth vs loud, at night or during the day, using a different buddy or wildly different equipment, restrictions such as Total Stealth or No Reflex, things like that. Which, I'm totally fine with. I think MGSV is fantastic, but calling it an open world game in the traditional sense of the term may be a bit of a stretch.

I mostly agree. I hate that I did a mission along the lines of "blow up this stuff to help the rebels with their counterattack" while there wasn't a single rebel soldier to be seen. Like, where are all these prisoners coming from? Am I to believe they're just their own soldiers getting locked up for some reason. It's not enough to hurt my experience with the game, and it is mostly justified, but it is something that gets really noticeable after doing so many side-ops.

I don't think civilians would have made the game more enjoyable, but having different factions actually interacting might have. Like maybe that could even play a role in the base building? Like extracting a bunch of guys from opposing factions could end up with people fighting on your base and end up putting them in the brig or medical quarters?

Also, being able to explore the base a little more would be nice, but that's sort of a hollow ask. Like, "it'd be great if this game looked better." Of course it would, but I don't have any sort of reason to count that against the game.

It's probably all engine limitations, as well as being forced to make the game for last gen as well. You can tell on pc that a lot of the textures are blurry close up as well even though it looks amazing all taken in at once.I think the game is amazing probably game of the year for me, even with all the concessions they made to get the game working on ps3 and 360.

160 hours in and i'm just now starting to feel stuff getting repetitive after i finished the game lol.

I definitely miss the classic MGS set pieces. The first 3 MGS games all felt like an evolution on 2d game design(in a really good way), a bunch of small/medium sized areas connected by doors(in the video game sense of the word). MGS4 removed the doors mostly and had much larger areas. V takes that to the extreme and has no doors and just a big ass open area. I wouldn't even call it open world just real big. I think the older games having smaller areas meant kojima could cram an insane level of detail in them the bigger they got the less attention could be paid on detail per square foot.

I hope that kojima can move onto doing something like Snatcher or Poliecenauts using all hes learned making MGS all these years.

I like it, no occupying force could possibly cover that much ground, you take the important bits and try to make choke points. Its not perfect, but it makes sense.

Honestly I would have liked maybe a few more vehicles going between bases at regular intervals to mess with, but honestly if you want to get down to it... it makes some sense. I mean these places are under hard military occupation and this isn't the game to have villagers.... so they obviously focus their forces on the key points, not holding down every single path at every inch of the map.

I would have maybe liked a little bit more stuff though out there, just a touch more. Or a bit more of a reason to wander. Honestly at a point in the game I was just spamming the helicopter to warp me places, I think that is my biggest mechanical game design problem, is it just made too much sense to do that and there wasn't enough to encourage random wandering or even wandering much from mission to mission.

Given the context of the game, where you're in war zones after the fighting has died down, I think the areas being mostly empty makes sense. The idea is that any civilians have either been driven away, killed, or captured, and there's not really much logical reason for enemy soldiers to be out in the middle of nowhere. But, they occasionally are in side ops too!

That said, I do think the game could have used a few more patrols and the like between outposts, for sure.

@Mike: I think it's an "open world stealth game" as in, a separate category from typical open world games. The same way GTA V lacks the detail of an open world like Witcher 3, which has plenty of interiors and caves and such, it makes up for it in scope because that is a lot more important to it's gameplay as you're usually in a fast moving vehicle. So if we treat all these games as different open world experiences, open world action game, open world rpg, open world stealth game, then each description is appropriate.

But honestly thats just semantics.

In all honesty if each mission in MGS V was the helicopter landing in the "mission area" we see outlined on the map, and there was no open world outside of it you would never feel know the difference from the way it plays now. The whole game could have been a series of such levels and in a way they would have been a lot more detailed and meticulously designed. You would just lose out on the side-ops, which are kind of filler either way.

I love the game, but all in all, the "open world" is fairly unnecessary.

I don't know what you expect - it's a war zone, so there's no room for civilians. There's a few big camps that are more lively, but I didn't feel it was too sparse.

Big thing that people overlook on this subject I think: last thing you want is some random animal or whatever coming in and fucking up your plan and set up in this game. Like there's a limited possibility for this to happen already in this game with things likes the wolves and the one time that a wolf attack fucked up my stealthy approach to a mission it was infuriating.

There is probably things they could have done but the usual Far Cry type stuff in between missions is not he answer. It would've had to be something else.

Like @mooseymcman and others said tho, I do think "more patrols" would have been easy to add. I think they way those work, limited as they are, in the game now are fun.

@ch3burashka: It's not so much that there are no civilians in the world. The way the missions and side ops are laid out, there's really no incentive to travel from one location to another on foot except to listen to the cassettes. Having played a fair chunk of the side ops, they really are just a list of return to X location and kill/extract X number of targets. Even the physical world feels like a bunch of locations connected by canyons, and you barely run into patrols or helicopters or anything else to really interact with except for the small outposts.

just think of it like mgs3 or something but with no load screens/breaks between different areas of the same map. the way the gameplay works is basically the same, except now you have a helicopter to pick you up and quickly take you from one end of the map to the other, or another map entirely.

i'm glad there's not a lot of typical open world time sink filler, there could be a bit more dynamic side missions, like maybe you spot a jeep and it's got a prisoner in it, and it starts a side op right there to rescue them, but it would probably be over in 3 seconds because you could just shoot the tire, tranq the soldiers, and fulton everything.

Pretty much nailed how I feel about the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Phantom Pain, but if the rest of the world was a bit more populated it would be nice. It doesn't even have to be a lot, either. Hell...just give me some more random patrols that consist of anywhere from 2-12 guys, maybe an APC or a couple of Jeeps or something like that. Have them just randomly driving around patrolling the area, or perhaps looking for something, anything really.

I think it's closed-minded to say that having the world be more full/interesting would make the game worse. Given enough time and thought, I think a game developer could come up with a lush, interesting world that still had rock solid stealth gameplay.

The sparseness didn't really bother me much. If I had to wish for something, maybe it might have been cool to stumble into the middle of a firefight between two sides, sort of like how MGS4 opened.

I actually love the dead space. Allows me to fly through the dunes on a jeep blasting Gloria without a care.

It's worth noting I've come to despise how busy open worlds are these days, see Dragon Age and Assassin's Creed recently. So yeah, maybe if you are fatigued with standard open worlds a more sparse one like this will appeal to you. Was a nice change of pace after Witcher 3 also.

This topic makes me wonder what people think the definition of an open world is. As useless as any label, but always interesting to see what people think.

I've frequently encountered a random truck, a few times driving into a camp while I'm tranqing everyone and thus liable to fuck it all up. It's a stretch because they have no real autonomy or mission, they seem to be just driving for the sake of it, but it's evidence of some inter-connectivity. In fact, a few times I've seen guys trade posts between camps.

I agree with a lot of you guys. There's not a lot to do in the world but the side ops. I'm at the point where I do a couple close to each other and just 'Return to AC' out of there. I was never one to explore for the sake of exploring anyway. I've been playing a lot of Witcher 3 and they are like night and day. You can make the argument that the typical Metal Gear setting doesn't fit well with the traditional open world game nonsense ,but I don't completely buy it.

All of that would be a negative if I didn't enjoy actually playing MGSV. It plays almost perfectly for me and the world design(camps,outposts,and space between) feels really well done. Always different options for approach or just cool scenarios to combat. Combine that with your ever expanding equipment, your buddy, enemy AI, and all of the other systems and details and its still an immensely enjoyable game.

My main gripe with the game, and this is a bigger problem in Afghanistan than Africa, are the insurmountable areas that take up so much space in the world and make it hard to get certain places quickly. Without the smaller enemy camps this wouldn't annoy me nearly as much, but when I'm looking to have a really productive session of Side Ops I've found it's just a lot easier to jump back out to the helicopter. Every time I come across a camp I can't resist the urge to get out of a vehicle / off D-Horse and round everyone up, and while I still really enjoy doing that after 80 hours it's also hard to ignore how often I'm on my way to do something else and feel this urge to stop and balloon everyone in view.

Contrary to some of the opinions in this thread, I actually wish there were paths you could take in this game that gave you a little LESS to do, and also allow you to get from one end of an area to another faster than the fifteen-ish minutes it can take now even if you're zooming past everything.

At first I did expect some of that with how you hear about the resistance in Afghanistan.

Saying this havent playing it, but this game's design feels closer to what i would want Mad Max's world to be like. I like the desolate feel and the space between landmarks. But yeah maybe a tad bit more going on wouldn't hurt (they do have the forces roving between bases which is appreciated...)

@Mike: Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel about the situation too. It's not necessarily the world itself, but the structure. Everything starts to feel familiar after the 3rd time an area is revisited. It's almost like playing with a bunch of plastic toys. The toys don't change, but you can affect them in different ways. The soldiers are always doing the same things in the same places, but you can mess with them in different ways. I wish they, and the places, changed little aspects of themselves maybe to account for your previous visits or just in general.

Oh god yes! I absolutely hated the afghanistan design. On the map, you're like "Oh yeah, it's right in front of me.". In reality, there are tons of cliffs and slippery slopes that block you or funnel you along on a set path. It would have been way cooler if you could scale those cliffs or climb almost everything. I want to point out that I'm never arguing that the areas are not faithful to how the areas are in real life. I am arguing about how fun something is relative to how fun it could be, or how it could have been done. Instead, to get to some parts of the map, you have to run quite a ways to get there. Nothing interesting happens along the way either (besides musical choices).

Yeah, it's especially jarring when you're doing the Eliminate the Wandering Puppets side ops, and suddenly for some inexplicable reason an area that had soldiers now has eight zombie-like enemies in it. Clear it and then it's full of soldiers again.

I had a similar feeling about the Afghanistan map. It would have been cool if you would run into some Mujahideen or refugees in the mountains or something. It's just weird to have a game take place in Afghanistan and there basically be nobody from the country there. I know the game waves off the issue by saying the Soviets have cracked down on the area but it could have added an interesting dynamic like working with the opposing PMCs in MGS4.

@ichthy: Yeah...I'm just now starting to encounter that myself, and jarring is a good word to describe how it felt. I'm still not quite sure what to make of that, but I just shrugged it off and thought, "Oh well, Metal Gear", and pressed on.

Especially since Miller has been training some of them. Would have been cool to pick up some of that work and help them retake at least part of the map. Link up with them, tell them that you're not a tourist and get some things done. Would have made for interesting side ops or even deployments (e.g. defend a position against waves of enemies, eliminate a sniper harassing an allied outpost, etc...). I feel like watching Rambo III now.

Even though it felt kind of one-note, I really enjoyed the 100+ hours I put into MGSV. The amount of freedom you get in how you can carry out each encounter is worth more to me than having a world full of interesting, but otherwise useless scripted events.

Valid complaints and observations for sure. There where times where i felt very bored traversing the world, and later on i completely stopped doing it. I resorted to the Return to ACC menu after every missions, just so i could get to the next objective faster.

And i agre on Mother Base feeling lifeless and empty, i never went back there unless i had someone tell me to. I felt like i was wasting my time every time i was there outside of it having something related to the story.

@rich666 said:

That's how I feel about the game. The way PP is designed makes the scripted events and civilians in any other open world game (GTA V etc.) absolutely meaningless and downright silly.

I think mgsv's take on open world games is a breath of fresh air. Every open world game from the past decade has filled its world with more filler crap and less engaging content; they create these amazingly beautiful worlds, but no meaningful way to engage with them. MGSV strips it to the foundation and gives you an insane tool set to tackle your objectives. Maybe missions can feel samey, but to me your means of interaction makes everything feel fresh. The only thing I wish the game had was more random crap going on in the world. Besides that, I don't care that it isn't jam packed with robotic civilians and huge buildings you cant enter.

I'm over 100 hours in, and I just want more of it. If they announced a dlc pack with half the content of the main game for full price, I would buy it in a heartbeat. That's how bad this game's got me hooked. I'm even coming around to the FOB stuff.

I would have prefered more set pieces and campsite that were more complicated to get in. like getting through a duct and then bypassing a code on the door taking the elevator up climbing up the shaft and so fourth. the camp sites are too easy to get in.