Polish Hill

Yea I ran into the same situation but after completing another handful of side missions it eventually opened up for me. It is dumb and bad how they lock that down without a clear path to opening up the last mission or two.

You should be able to skip just the rehashed missions and still continue on. I will say toward the end you start realizing how often they use some of the same areas over and over.

So I don't know if anyone cares at this point regarding some of the minutiae with the ending but there were a few bits that confused me.

Possibly a stupid question but I'm hesitant to look too hard I fear of spoilers. Most of my side missions go grey with a check mark after completion. However, I have at least one prisoner extraction mission where the box was checked but it is still white font, does this mean there's additional prisoners or things to do on that?

Dumb Emblem

Beating a dead horse on Mission 16 but since it's the last one I did I'll chime in too.

There is also a wonderfully stupid conversation between Mother Base soldiers about wanting to feel D-Dogs "puppy pads" because of how soft they would be. Just incredible.

Thank you both, will probably just do that tonight and replay at a later date.

Welp I'm an idiot and after seeing this switched from the STUN SMG back to the ZZZ pistol. I was able to down the bear finally. Did everyone use the tranq sniper rifle to take down Quiet or is it reasonable to do with the tranq pistol? I did extremely will in the battle with her but headshots from the STUN SMG only chipped away at her meter so I'm assuming it was because I was using the wrong weapon again. I'll chalk it up to being my first Metal Gear, womp womp.

Legendary Bear mission talk, not spoilery but just in case

Was a little overzealous on a side mission last night. Did a great job of tagging soldiers but on my way to the prisoner I got spotted and gunned down relatively quickly. Next attempt I was able to actually make it to the prisoner but his guards sounded the alarm so I had about two dozen soldiers bearing down on me. Most of the time I would just restart from a checkpoint and run it again but I wanted to see how far I could get by going full on Rambo. Things started well enough and I was able to clear out the troops outside of the door but that still left about 10-15 guys on alert or actively coming my way. A notification that a sandstorm was coming felt like a minor miracle and gave me the cover to escape with the prisoner into the hills without force. A really fun, unexpected resolution that really made me appreciate all the systems working together.

Probably got about 4 hours in. From the little I've read enemies will adapt to your playstyle so I've intentionally tried to vary it from mission to mission. I won't get into specifics but on one side-op I got to experience just how extremely effective mortar can be. Only real quibble is I wish the story cassette stuff was integrated better. Still playing during radio dialogue or just having to hang out in the helicopter to listen to tapes is fine but I wish there was a better way. Other than that this game has been extremely fun and I wish I was playing it right now.

Thanks a bunch for the information pyeixe and Smart Jason, I'll probably run through each mission once just to experience them all and then repeat a few to try and extract some additional folks. This is my first actual Metal Gear game after watching what seems to be all the major ones at Giant Bomb. I'm really reluctant to do too much reading for fear of spoiling cool stuff or just missing out on the discovery of the game but what kind of strategies do you all employ in Ground Zeroes? I was able to make it through most of the missions I've done so far with just one retry and generally non-lethally. Also that Intel mission...

Finally pre-ordered last night and did a run through the first mission on Ground Zeroes. Does anyone know which missions in Ground Zeroes lead to staff at Mother Base in the full game? I don't know if its specific prisoners or if I should be trying to balloon people off-shore but I'd like to try and knock out a few of those missions if they carry over.

I went from knowing nothing about Metal Gear Solid a year ago to pre-ordering Phantom Pain.