Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes/The Phantom Pain

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My men levels have plateau and fluctuating in the region of 60-65 after i reach it 2-3 weeks ago... (I am not playing FOB/online) and i think these are the maximum levels i can reach....cant move on anymore

wanted to try new combos (current - stealth camo/ serval sniper/ stun shotgun) but earlier on i was playing, it jam all of a sudden, restart and get the disc not reading/ eject sound error...:indiff: I guess that is really it for me...:yuck:
 
i think these are the maximum levels i can reach....cant move on anymore
You need a second FOB. That will let you build more platforms, and take on more soldiers. More soldiers means higher unit levels. The quick-fire way to do it would be through microtransactions, but you can also get MB coins as rewards from playing.
 
I'm on 3rd FOB now, after not playing for awhile, got online, do FOB events, play bounty hunter sessions :) 93% complete, still need those animal stuff.
 
I haven't played online for ages - what are these?

I hopped into Japanese rooms, ones that welcome noobs, low level players, and sometimes I got bounty on my head, not sure how that works, but we just play like deathmatch with tickets/lives, the first team runs out of tickets lose. You should try online once in awhile, good room is quite enjoyable, especially when someone using special character like Ocelot with Tornado gun :P
 
I hopped into Japanese rooms, ones that welcome noobs, low level players, and sometimes I got bounty on my head, not sure how that works, but we just play like deathmatch with tickets/lives, the first team runs out of tickets lose. You should try online once in awhile, good room is quite enjoyable, especially when someone using special character like Ocelot with Tornado gun :P
Ah, I thought that it was something to do with FOBs.

No, I gave up on MGO when the twenty-one day XP bonus I got from the Day One Edition expired. It's massively unbalanced and there was no opportunity to learn any of the maps outside the competitive mode. Since the map changed with every round, I was just running around aimlessly.
 
I never played MGO at all because online isn't my thing but from watching videos it looked nothing like MGS anyway, nobody plays it stealthily by the looks of it.
 
Kojima already did zombies in The Phantom Pain.

Even if I was willing to overlook that for the time being, the (apparent) multiplayer-only approach kills my interest.

True but Konami's efforts appear far more generic. Multiplayer only would also totally turn me off irrespective of anything else.
 
True but Konami's efforts appear far more generic.
Yeah, zombies seems like something that you add to a Call of Duty clone to add about fifteen more minutes' worth of longevity. I did feel that The Phantom Pain took things a step too far with parasites that could make their hosts teleport and the wormholes, so seeing the survivors of the Mother Base disaster get pulled into an alternate dimension was just plain ridiculous.
 
On the one hand, I never asked for this.

On the other hand, as long as you know what to expect, this might not be that bad. I mean, it's not going to be a Metal Gear game in anything but name, that much is already blatantly obvious. It could turn out to be a completely average co-op shooter, maybe it'll be awful like Rainbow 6 Vegas terrorist hunt mode or those Sniper Elite Nazi Zombie Army games, but even those were great fun with friends.

I think the worst case scenario is it turns out to lack any self-awareness and tries to pull the concept off with a completely straight face. I don't see the point in being outraged by it ruining the Metal Gear name (not that anyone here is, but some people are), that was already ruined years ago; if not by MGS 2 being MGS 1 in a different skin then by The Twin Snakes, if not that then MGS 4's awful ending, if not that then MGS V's act and a quarter of "story", if not any of those then there's the legion of non-Kojima spin-offs...

So I mean, I expect to hate this (and it'll almost certainly be as egregious as a game can legally be with regards to consumer-hostile business practices) but you never know.
 
Did you just call the ending to MGS4 awful? That was the most epic boss fight ever! The epilogue runs quite long, but that makes sense given the size of the story they were tying up. Only part I didn't care much for was Raiden's epilogue.
 
Did you just call the ending to MGS4 awful? That was the most epic boss fight ever! The epilogue runs quite long, but that makes sense given the size of the story they were tying up.
I think most of the backlash was aimed at Sunny and FOXALIVE, which was a deus ex machina, and pretty lazy.
 
Yeah, I guess that is fair. But dammit that last fight was cool.

I hated that fight, it ruined my BBE run mainly because I just gave up. And that's saying a lot given that I did the motorbike chase without killing anyone, that in itself was A Big Deal.

But that's not what I meant, I was referring to nanomachines being used to retcon almost everything and the bit with Big Boss and Zero. Like, come on, stop trying to one-up yourself on the broken monocle count and do something interesting! And between that, the final boss fight, the boss fight before that (also a huge task in a BBE run), the QTE of crawling through the microwave corridor, the Dwarf Gekkos and basically the entire last chapter except for the ~5-10 minutes between hitting the deck (literally) and making it indoors for the first time... And the on-rails sections in chapters 2 and 3... Yeah, MGS 4 is my least favourite in the franchise I think. Which sucks because it was great when you could actually play!
 
But the epic music, the amazing setting and cinematography, and the finale battle between two gaming icons! I loved it. The Microwave tunnel is among the most memorable moments in gaming too, imo.

You dislike the boss solely because it ruins the Big Boss Run, which shouldn't have been a thing to begin with?
 
@Jawehawk I guess it depends on what you prefer, games or films. I've realised I actually can't stand cinematic stuff in games because they never pull it off convincingly enough for me so I personally agree with Roger Ebert's (in)famous opinion that games will never be art in that specific regard (I do think gameplay design - i.e. the thing Kojima is really, really good at - is as much a creative skill as any other so maybe that could be called art), but challenges like playing an entire game in under 5 hours with no kills, deaths or alerts are fun. Well, apart from the bits that aren't.
 
I've realised I actually can't stand cinematic stuff in games because they never pull it off convincingly enough for me so I personally agree with Roger Ebert's (in)famous opinion that games will never be art in that specific regard

The thing is... bad art is still art. So no, Ebert's definitely wrong even if you personally haven't found a videogame to have a compelling "cinematic" narrative.
 
I've realised I actually can't stand cinematic stuff in games because they never pull it off convincingly enough for me so I personally agree with Roger Ebert's (in)famous opinion that games will never be art in that specific regard
Film isn't the only artistic medium. Novels, poetry, images; they all qualify. Perhaps a better way of thinking of it is not video games as art, but video games as literature. I would certainly argue that MGS qualifies as video gaming literature.
 
The thing is... bad art is still art. So no, Ebert's definitely wrong even if you personally haven't found a videogame to have a compelling "cinematic" narrative.

Film isn't the only artistic medium. Novels, poetry, images; they all qualify. Perhaps a better way of thinking of it is not video games as art, but video games as literature. I would certainly argue that MGS qualifies as video gaming literature.

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When I was doing my design degree I had quite an interesting conversation about my work being art and not design, which made me wonder - can every creative piece of work be considered art? Is it possible to set out to make art and fail? I think not everything intended to be art actually is art for a number of reasons, quality not being one.

Originality is probably the one I consider most important - it's hard to claim that a cookie-cutter first person shooter, a generic Steven Seagal action film or a pulp fiction novel can be considered art when you have original works that aren't following a very obvious, well-defined formula, and to cut a long post short, the Metal Gear franchise struggles a great deal with originality, except for Metal Gear, MGS 1 and MGS 3. Every retcon, every resurrected character, the entirety of MGS 2... It just feels like he's trying to ******** me and I don't like it because it's so blatant. It feels like he decided he wanted to remake MGS 1 for the PS2 (which explains TTS!), Konami wanted something new so he remade MGS 1 and came up with a moderately clever reason to do it.

So, with that in mind, basically all of the non-gameplay parts of the franchise just feel really hollow to me, and while art can be a lot of things, it can't be pointless because then it's just nothing. That's why I don't consider it to be art. Well, maybe MGS 1 and 3 could be, but 2, 4, V and Peace Walker aren't.

As for other games, I don't know, I honestly haven't thought of any others as potentially being cinematic art. I think the medium is too young, AAA games are aimed too squarely at an immature audience and/or play it too safe to even entertain the notion of being a "good film" (if you know what I mean) and indie games generally lack the intent to be worthwhile in a cinematic sense, they tend to focus on the gameplay because producing a film is expensive.

This is all subjective, though, as is all art. Take a walk through the Tate Modern then cross the river and visit the Tate Britain, somehow all of that is art. Aaanyway.
 
As for other games, I don't know, I honestly haven't thought of any others as potentially being cinematic art.
I think that the term "cinematic art" is misleading because it implies that games fall into a particular medium that I completely disagree with.

When you watch a film or read a novel, you take on the role of a passive bystander. You can witness the events, but you have no ability to influence them. In video games, you are an active participant, and so you can influence events and be influenced by them. This enables a deeper level of engagement with the audience, and allows developers to explore ideas that other text types cannot. Metal Gear Solid asks if our DNA is our destiny, if we can only ever be the person our genes say we are; Sons of Liberty questions our cultural identity in the digital age, asking whether or not we should censor ourselves now for the sake of future generations; Snake Eater challenges the assumption that politics and ideology go hand-in-hand and examines what it actually means to fight for a cause; and The Phantom Pain looks at what happens when you stop fighting for a cause and start fighting for a legacy.

Of course, it's not just Metal Gear Solid that does this. Far Cry 3 has you stranded on a tropical island trying to rescue your friends from pirates and slave-traders, but the further you get into the game, the harder it becomes to justify rescuing them since they're all arseholes and you have to murder everything in sight to free them. Similarly, Far Cry 4 has you venturing into a bloody civil war and the game immediately starts manipulating you; it challenges the cultural cornerstone of "we are opposed to tyranny in all its forms" by saying "you don't know tyranny when you see it". Fallout 4 is fundamentally a game about what makes us human; two hundred years after nuclear war, humanity has started to recover, but the Wasteland is populated with imitation people with uncorrupted pre-war DNA, and so the question is what makes us human and what is worth saving. And BioShock Infinite plays into dystopian science fiction to explore free will, choice and the possibilities of redemption and how conflict in society must be confronted rather than ignored.
 
When I was doing my design degree I had quite an interesting conversation about my work being art and not design, which made me wonder - can every creative piece of work be considered art? Is it possible to set out to make art and fail? I think not everything intended to be art actually is art for a number of reasons, quality not being one.

Originality is probably the one I consider most important - it's hard to claim that a cookie-cutter first person shooter, a generic Steven Seagal action film or a pulp fiction novel can be considered art when you have original works that aren't following a very obvious, well-defined formula, and to cut a long post short, the Metal Gear franchise struggles a great deal with originality, except for Metal Gear, MGS 1 and MGS 3. Every retcon, every resurrected character, the entirety of MGS 2... It just feels like he's trying to ******** me and I don't like it because it's so blatant. It feels like he decided he wanted to remake MGS 1 for the PS2 (which explains TTS!), Konami wanted something new so he remade MGS 1 and came up with a moderately clever reason to do it.

So, with that in mind, basically all of the non-gameplay parts of the franchise just feel really hollow to me, and while art can be a lot of things, it can't be pointless because then it's just nothing. That's why I don't consider it to be art. Well, maybe MGS 1 and 3 could be, but 2, 4, V and Peace Walker aren't.

As for other games, I don't know, I honestly haven't thought of any others as potentially being cinematic art. I think the medium is too young, AAA games are aimed too squarely at an immature audience and/or play it too safe to even entertain the notion of being a "good film" (if you know what I mean) and indie games generally lack the intent to be worthwhile in a cinematic sense, they tend to focus on the gameplay because producing a film is expensive.

This is all subjective, though, as is all art. Take a walk through the Tate Modern then cross the river and visit the Tate Britain, somehow all of that is art. Aaanyway.

Whether you deem a cookie-cutter game, book or movie to be "art" depends entirely on what your definition of art is. If you want to rule out creative works that you perceive to have zero artistic merit, that's fine... but when others see artistic merit in these works, however little it may be, you'll tend to come off as a pretentious ass. :lol:

For instance, MGSV... how does its story not have artistic merit? I mean... regardless of whether you think the story as a whole was good or told well, the whole deal with parasites targeting individuals who speak certain languages is at least mildly original and interesting. Do you hold works to some threshold of originality they must meet to be considered art, which MGSV just fails to match in spite of having some degree of originality? If that's the case, the vast majority of creative works in any medium would probably also fail to cross this threshold as well. Way more than if you just ruled out things that had literally no creativity or originality.

Now regarding the state of the game industry, yes AAA games are often safe and/or simplistic... just like Hollywood. Though in both the case of Hollywood and the AAA game industry, that doesn't mean that nothing of artistic merit can ever manage to come from it. And the same goes for indie games... a lot of them might just focus on executing some unique gameplay idea, but there are definitely exceptions. You can tell an original story without having a bajillion dollar budget... it might be rough/unpolished, like a budget indie film might be, but if the core idea's good it will still have merit.
 
I think that the term "cinematic art" is misleading because it implies that games fall into a particular medium that I completely disagree with.

Well, what I mean by that is games are not any one thing, some are basically films (Heavy Rain), some have zero story and just want you to kill things (Hard Reset, though that may have had an inconsequential fluff plot), some aren't even nearly skeuomorphic (Super Hexagon, for instance), so I don't think you can talk about games being art without specifying what aspect you're talking about. As I said before, I consider Hideo Kojima to be an artist in terms of gameplay mechanics because that's just the level he's at, in every game he's come up with something new - unlike his writing, which constantly rewrites what he's done before. George Lucas did that with Star Wars, and look what people think of him now!

When you watch a film or read a novel, you take on the role of a passive bystander. You can witness the events, but you have no ability to influence them. In video games, you are an active participant, and so you can influence events and be influenced by them. This enables a deeper level of engagement with the audience, and allows developers to explore ideas that other text types cannot.

And yet games that actually leverage that unique dimension, they more often try to mimic films and I think they almost universally fail at it. Most often they try to basically place the player in the film and then that's it, the film continues. Ok so you might have to make an impactful decision that actually affects the outcome (which happens very rarely now) of the plot.

Far Cry 3, for instance, you say it becomes harder to justify rescuing your friends because you have to kill so many people to achieve it, but the game never actually presents not killing people as an alternative. It's like they're saying "Isn't it horrible that you have to kill all these people... Oh well, have a new gun!" which, again, completely invalidates any message they may have been conveying because they don't even believe it themselves. It's like in Blood Dragon, the protagonist complaining about the tutorial as a joke, but the joke loses all its meaning because even though the developers themselves know that people hate mandatory tutorials and are directly telling you that, they make you sit through it all the same!

I had a similar issue with Borderlands 2 (which, incidentally, was the last game with a plot that I really got into); you're told to hate Jack because he wants to kill everything on Pandora, yet you keep getting side quests from your friends to kill Pandoran life too, and the game tells you this with a completely straight face and never once hints at the double standard.

Whether you deem a cookie-cutter game, book or movie to be "art" depends entirely on what your definition of art is. If you want to rule out creative works that you perceive to have zero artistic merit, that's fine... but when others see artistic merit in these works, however little it may be, you'll tend to come off as a pretentious ass. :lol:

For instance, MGSV... how does its story not have artistic merit?

I know I'm not coming across well, but what I was trying to say before was that although there are interesting and unique elements to the games, they're all ultimately undone by the constant retcons and resurrections. How invested can you be in a story if you suspect the next installment might just undo vast swathes of it? Imagine you played Peace Walker before MGS 3; would you feel the same about executing The Boss if you knew she'd pretty much be in the next game? If you played MGS 4 before MGS 1, would you even react in any way to the CODEC chat where Snake tells Naomi he killed his own dad? That lack of originality, by bringing back dead characters or changing the past in such a way that feels like he's just doing it because he doesn't know what else to do to progress the story or get a certain reaction from the audience, completely undermines everything else he does because you end up having no faith in it and therefore it's hard to get invested in it. In my opinion.

I mean... regardless of whether you think the story as a whole was good or told well, the whole deal with parasites targeting individuals who speak certain languages is at least mildly original and interesting. Do you hold works to some threshold of originality they must meet to be considered art, which MGSV just fails to match in spite of having some degree of originality? If that's the case, the vast majority of creative works in any medium would probably also fail to cross this threshold as well. Way more than if you just ruled out things that had literally no creativity or originality.

Pretty much, yeah. It's a combination of a few things, though, originality isn't the only criterion but it's the one I think is most important. Intent is another big one, for instance if you were to copy a successful film just because it was successful and you want to be successful to (aka "playing it safe"), then that's not art, that's just a product, right? But if you wanted to tell the same story your way and it just happened to be unoriginal in that sense, then I think there can still be artistic merit as long as there is enough deviation from the thing that is being copied (or perceived to be being copied).

MGS copies from itself too often and I wonder if the intent in MGS 2 was to actually tell the story that it claimed to be telling, or if (as I said) he just wanted to remake it and happened to come up with a good reason after the fact. I used to do that in school and then uni when I was given a brief that didn't really fit what I wanted to do. For instance, I was given a project to make something based on Howl by Allen Ginsberg, instead of trying to find inspiration from the poem I made three posters literally out of the poem - data visualisations of the words and language - because I wanted to do data visualisations. It was cheating, but it was technically fine.

Now regarding the state of the game industry, yes AAA games are often safe and/or simplistic... just like Hollywood. Though in both the case of Hollywood and the AAA game industry, that doesn't mean that nothing of artistic merit can ever manage to come from it. And the same goes for indie games... a lot of them might just focus on executing some unique gameplay idea, but there are definitely exceptions. You can tell an original story without having a bajillion dollar budget... it might be rough/unpolished, like a budget indie film might be, but if the core idea's good it will still have merit.

Maybe not nothing, but not enough for playing-it-safe AAA films to be considered art on the same level as the usual examples of Citizen Kane or The Godfather. Two of my favourite films are Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner, one is based heavily on Heart of Darkness and the other on Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, but neither are direct book-to-film adaptations, they both differ a great deal and I do consider both to be art (although admittedly the latter is much more for mise-en-scene and the way it builds the city in which it's set, I love the former for the story it tells). That goes back to what I was saying about intent.

Indie games, on the other hand, I agree that a game of any budget can tell a story, but I'm mainly talking about games that work like films. I think? I apologise for this mess of a reply, it's quite difficult to field two conversations at once and put what I'm trying to say into words. But yeah, there are indie games that do interesting things like breaking the fourth wall (which, by the way, is something I loved about MGS 1: "Press the action button to regain your strength"), and actually The Beginner's Guide told a story in a fairly interesting way until it kind of fell apart at the end, and ok, I admit I would probably consider games like that to be art, but that's a pretty high bar! And again, I thought I was talking mainly about games that attempt to be cinematic, but maybe I wasn't, I can't remember.

TL, DR: I still don't consider MGS to be art in a cinematic sense because Hideo Kojima keeps undermining his own work and repeating himself. In terms of gameplay, visuals and audio, yeah, it's art... But the plot has been made pretty much pointless.
 
Far Cry 3, for instance, you say it becomes harder to justify rescuing your friends because you have to kill so many people to achieve it, but the game never actually presents not killing people as an alternative.
Yes, it does - Liza constantly tells you to come back to reality.

Imagine you played Peace Walker before MGS 3; would you feel the same about executing The Boss if you knew she'd pretty much be in the next game?
Only on the most superficial level. Although the Boss "appears" in Peace Walker, the game makes it pretty clear that it's not the Boss, but a base imitation of her.

MGS copies from itself too often and I wonder if the intent in MGS 2 was to actually tell the story that it claimed to be telling
That's the point. MGS2 asks how we decide what information is worth keeping in an age when the availability of information has exploded. Do we trust someone to make that decision for us (and if so, should that be), or do we hope that we can endure without it? The game retells its story to make a point: that with the selective application of information, we can tell any story about ourselves that we choose; notions of "fact" and "truth" don't come into it.
 
Metal Gear Survive can get in the bin. They'd be better off making it an original title instead of slapping the MG badge onto it; it's going to get flak and garner unpopularity no matter what Konami try to do with the MGS intellectual property and most fans, myself included, are looking at the game with derision.

Make it an original title and you'd get at least neutral anticipation which is surely better than a game which is going to be flamed from the outset.

Of course, nobody is forced to buy the game but people become quite attached to their series and don't like seeing them tampered with or oversaturated in a way which is considered unnecessary.
 
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