MGS4 and MGR:R are
You thought wrong.
MGS1 was set in 2005. Game released in 1998.
MGS2 was 2007-2009, released in 2001.
MGS3 was set in 1964. Released 2005.
MGS4 was set in 2014. Released 2008.
Peace Walker set in 1974, released 2010.
So there are installments that were set in the near future, but obviously time passed up the timeline. There are installments that are STILL set in the future, because we aren’t there yet. And there are prequels set in the past.
So what the hell is this bullshit where Ground Zeroes is an entirely seperate thing you have to pay for? What is it, day 1 DLC that technically takes place before the actual game but if you don’t buy it you start off with The Phantom Pain hospital crawling shit? What the hell? Why not just make the whole thing one goddamn game? Kojima can keep his ‘We start out with Ground Zeroes teaching you open-world stuff’ and once you get the hang of it, it goes to the Phantom Pain chapter.
But don’t make me pay for what is essentially part of the same game twice, no matter what the price is for each. Honestly, that seems more tedious than beneficial.
I remember people had a similar reaction to Wheatley’s voice being changed from the placeholder used in the E3 demos.
In this case it’s more justified though. For P2, Peter Lord was a placeholder voice, and Wheatley was a new character.
For the MGS series, David Hayter was the voice of Solid Snake and Naked Snake. Like, for 10+ games. This is a huge deal.
l0l at all the retard fanbois tryin to blackmail. Trollbait galore.
Death threats on the cards again?
Either that, or Kojima is intentionally trying to sabotage the Western market for the game so he can finally kill the series once and for all and move on with his life (and to new IP).
Considering the craziness of some MG fanboys/fangirls, I can hardly blame him.
Hasn’t he tried to do that twice, now? He cocked up MGS2 intentionally to prove a point, which just served to piss people off and demand a new sequel. Then he tried to add closure and finality to MGS4 and insisted that that was the last one for reals this time. He even - for all intents and purposes - killed Solid Snake off at the end. But he apparently couldn’t bring himself to stay away and made Peace Walker, anyway.
This whole sabotage thing isn’t working very well.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to not make the game at all
The problem is, it’s Hideo Kojima. The man is an auteur, a perfectionist. Despite wanting to leave the MG property behind, he has to make something deliverable, and it just so happens he’s really goddamn good at game design no matter how completely batshit the story writing gets.
2015
Holy fuckballs, man. Two years? Ground Zeroes isn’t even coming out late this year, but early 2014.
an Auteur[/SIZE]:
a sell out pussy[/SIZE]:
Know the fucking difference and stop sucking cock.[/SIZE]
coughMGS4cough
What’s wrong with MGS4’s base mechanics?
Controls - tight, coupled with an actual PROPER camera now
Aiming and firing- intuitive. Can be done either over the shoulder or from first person. Shoulders can be switched, cover can be used, but it’s not Gears and it’s not encouraging cover based combat.
Drebin Shop - The purchasing and maintenance of weapons is slickly in-universe and lots of guns are available to customize to a rediculous degree. Plus, there are more non-lethal options than in any previous game. (Stun knife taser for up close, CQC Knockouts with any pistol or rifle equipped, Mk2 tranq gun for pistol size, The End’s old rifle for long range, unsuppressed tranq work, and the grenade launchers AND shotgun can all be loaded with LTL ammo such as flash grenades or V-ring rounds. The Mk2 and the Nagant both can use Emotion rounds in addition to the standard dranq, so you can rage enemy PMC soldiers into killing each other, fleeing in panic, or standing around laughing their asses off for no apparent reason. It’s awesome.)
Full control on stance- Standing, crouching, and prone are all there. You can even roll on your back to engage threats to the rear while prone. Sam Fisher’s control seems almost archaic by the standards of this game.
CQC- the most flexible it’s ever been, and much easier to control than MGS3 mapping the CQC button to the pressure sensitive circle button. You can do a ton of stuff with it and it all works well. Peace Walker may still be somewhat faster since the soldiers you hold up in that game go straight to a prone holdup without CQC based “encouragement,” but there’s many options for how to use it here.
Camo- OctoCamo is incredibly easy to use. No more fumbling through MGS3 style menus to switch camo patterns if you don’t want to. Just press against a surface and voila! You’re almost invisible. However, it’s not a game breaker because of the:
AI- aggressive and smart, uses hand signals, team tactics, flushes with grenades, etc. Of course, the AI has always been pretty smart (MGS1 had guards that could track your footprints through a freaking BLIZZARD).
The only stumbling block was the locations and the plot, since we didn’t get to sneak through battlefields the whole time. If they remade the previous games with even half of the features MGS4 brings to the table, I would be a very happy gamer.
Oh, and before you bag on about Peace Walker being a pile of shit, just remember, it’s practically one of the only games on the PSP that has shooting elements and is playable. Seriously, try the demo of SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 2, and then go to Peace Walker’s control setup and tell me that the former is better.
One more edit for yet another feature I almost forgot. What do this:
And this:
Have in common?
Ehm, Act 3. Act 4. Act 5. Glaring examples of Kojima’s post 2005 ‘genius’.
Pretty much everything else you listed is controls-related. And remaining stuff we already had in MGS2/MGS3, but slightly ‘improved/refined’.
Lol?
Game design =/= base mechanics
base mechanics/controls - 10% of an actual game design
Yeah, exactly.
Let’s include 69 fucking guns in the game, out of which you are only going to use the M4 - why bother with everything else, it does fucking everything anyway. Oh and screw the progressive satisfaction of finding a new weapon, screw the conservation of ammo - cause you can buy shit FOR POINTS and you will never run out of ammo even with auto aim on.
Remember how in previous MGS games, every single weapon served an actual purpose in-game? And how successful in the game you were depended on how good you were at using those means to an end? Screw that too.
Guns of the Patriots = Guns fucking everywhere, do you rike it lol
How the fuck this is being considered good game design is beyond me.
Yeah, the number times you got to sneak through something remotely resembling a low intensity skirmish could be counted using a hand of a disabled war wet who lost a couple fingers to a mortar strike.
All I saw in MGS4 game design was a shitload of promises by the marketing department that were never fulfilled (and the failure blamed on ‘PS3 limitations’), dumbed-down MGS3 core gameplay elements, a shitload of on-a-rail shooter sequences and fighting minigame.
Great game design. Har. Har.
Stealth camo? I don’t really care.
I don’t think I used the M4 in my whole last playthrough. I stick exclusively with LTL weapons. Yes, even for the motorcycle chase sequence, I was using the V-ring twin barrel shotgun to do a no-kill completion, because, for me, that is THE only way to play MGS games. Generally I find lethal completions harder than non-lethal since killing means you make more of an impact on the game world and invariably draw more attention to Snake. I’ll have to do it sometime anyway, just to see how well I do.
(NOTE: Both MGS3 and MGS4 love to change your weapons to fit weapons equipped in the cutscene before gameplay starts. This annoys the piss out of me.)
Compare to MGS3’s arsenal. How much of that did you actually use? Again, I only used LTL, which means I stuck exclusively to the Hush Puppy and the Nagant tranq rifle. The greater amount of LTL methods in MGS4 compared to MGS3 is why I hold 4’s arsenal in higher esteem overall. More tactical options = more variety. Ergo, MGS4’s weapon arsenal > MGS3.
HOWEVER.
MGS3 is the better game. It has a better story and a much more consistent style of gameplay overall. It introduced a lot of the things that MGS3 perfected, and the survival elements really helped immerse me in the setting and the plot. The controls are rougher, yes. The original version of MGS3 even has the overhead camera as default, which honestly does NOT fit the setting at all and makes it near impossible for me to play properly with the overhead on. My full playthroughs were with the Subsistence version on PS2, and I’m almost done with the HD port on PS3.
Chief point to be made here- just because a game does some things right or wrong does not mean it is objectively a better or worse game. MGS4 does things I like. It gets a lot of details right (like trigger discipline, which was the purpose of the screenshots last post comparing to Human Revolution, which also does this right). Does that make MGS4>MGS3? Hell to the fucking no. MGS3, taken as a whole, is much MUCH better than MGS4. It’s self contained, it’s well designed, it’s almost sublime in how good it is. But I do respect MGS4 for continuing to evolve core mechanics while tying off narrative loose ends. I enjoyed both games, yes. But I will not resign myself to hate MGS4 by accentuating just the things it does wrong.
Games for me are always to be taken as a whole. On one end of the coin, you take a game as it’s own standalone experience. On the other, you stack it up against similar games or others in it’s respective series. Taken as it’s own game, MGS4 is a success from a mechanical perspective, and despite it’s faults is still worth playing. From the perspective of the full series overall, it’s definitely one of the weaker entries.
You can stop swearing at me and telling me I’m sucking Kojima’s dick now. I am a bit of a critic, and I have my reasons and thought processes for evaluating games the way I do. Which reminds me, I need to get that Max Payne 3 review up at some point so I can broadcast to the world why MP3 is an absolutely shitty game that should never have been made.
Apart from there not being enough room to use it.
And if you’re going to base the whole argument solely on non-lethal playthroughs being the only way for you, there’s not much room to argue really.
I can relate though - I do enjoy my non-lethal runs.
You realise the latter was a joke rite?
Rite?
Seriously though, there hasn’t been much Auteur about post-2005 Kojima. Just listen to what he says in interviews. Is it his fault? Not necessarily. But it’s fairly obvious that there is no room for him to do anything significant within Metal Gear franchise any more. He openly acknowledges it too - he’s been talking about wanting to explore other IPs, old and new - for ages now. Yet he still haven’t moved on… because he is a perfectionist? Please.
He just hasn’t got enough balls to go against Konami politics - a company within which he no doubt feels very, very comfortable. He cannot really do much more then to point out his displeasure with the situation - it’s ultimately up to konami what’s he’s going to do next. And don’t say it’s news for you. It’s been fairly obvious for a while now - all one really needs to is to look at the topics discussed in KojiPro reports.
Thing about the stuff I pointed out - MGS4 doesn’t really offer any improvements apart from incremental refinement of controls yet it overflows with unreservedly bad design decisions.
Does it make it a bad game? No. You’ll find that I never said that in any of my post. Neither do I hate it, I just dislike it as a metal gear game.
Agreed if serious.
Incremental refinement of controls and arsenal =/= whole new aiming and movement systems created whole cloth for the MGS4 engine. But enough about that.
Konami is almost certainly milking him dry, and that has been the case for some time. He still manages to turn out good games despite the license wearing thin, but yes, he really could use a new IP. Of course, Konami’s idea of a new IP would probably be a third Zone of the Enders.
One of my friends has championed the idea of a Snatcher remake. What are your thoughts?