Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

[elmuerte]

What do you even unlock? It's just arbitrary base staff right?

I thought GZ was just a quite extended demo. Before I downloaded PP I played GZ once. I went back to GZ after I played a lot of PP, and it was quite horrible. The gameplay felt really rough.

[Nappi]

I was wondering if I should re-play GZ before starting Phantom Pain as well. Decided not to and it did not come back to haunt me. It's not worth it for the base staff at least.

[Gormongous]

What are people's opinions on the necessity to play through Ground Zeroes multiple times, both for the experience and to unlock things in Phantom Pain?  I'm steadily working on convincing myself to go ahead and buy Pain, but have a nagging itch I'll be missing something by not having dug deeper into GZ.  I played through GZ once, in a pretty short/rushed session, on someone else's PS4. 

 

There are multiple 100% perfect saves uploaded here and there across the internet, for the completionist. If you've played it once for the aesthetics, I say that's enough.

[Twig]

Well.

 

GZ only really sets up the story. I played it before TPP and I did everything because I was enjoying it so much. I'm a crazy person, though.

 

As far as unlocks go, it's not at all necessary. So don't worry about that.

[Bjorn]

Thanks all, that makes me feel a lot better about not dipping back into GZ (and I was going to be a lot less likely to buy Pain if I felt like I needed to drop $80 on both and not just $60). 

[Griddlelol]

I like the stealth suit. It's certainly not necessary, I just think it looks better than TPP stealth suit (and is cheaper in terms of deployment). 

[manny_c44]

Phantom Pain gameplay is so much more fulfilling than Ground Zeroes but it's hard to pin down why...I guess you can't really escape like you can in phantom pain. Even D Horse changes the dynamic enough to make the game feel 'free'. If Phantom Pain was as difficult as GZ there's no way I would've dumped so much time into it.

[rohlfinator]

I dipped back into GZ for a bit yesterday (since I never did anything past the main story mission) and actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It's certainly less polished than the main game in a lot of ways, but it feels more tightly designed than a lot of the TPP late-game stuff. And I'm a sucker for this style of gameplay with a limited loadout and the difficulty bumped a bit too high. If they released DLC of just like, 50 Subsistence missions, I would be all over that.

[miffy495]

I did all of the missions in GZ first and have no idea what I may be getting that's extra. I assume that everyone gets the "Wandering Mother Base Soldiers" side ops, which would be the one possible thing? I've seen some costumes. For beating GZ, I think I got a pretty decent early-game sneaking suit (which I've LONG since abandoned) and the ability to gold-plate my cyborg arm. You can also be a PS1 model Snake or Cyborg Ninja if you got all the XOF patches and finished GZ's secret mission on Normal and Hard, respectively. I didn't do that though, so I haven't noticed that.

 

I liked GZ a lot. I didn't actually get all of the XOF patches for the bonus, so I may go back and play the Deja Vu and Jamais Vu missions sometime. Once I'm done with TPP, anyway. I have now done 117 Side Ops and up through mission 35. This shit is great.

 

WAIT! There is that ONE prisoner side op...

 

Where you re-do the "Rescue Miller" mission but Hideo is in his place.

 

Is that available if you didn't rescue that prisoner in GZ?

[Twig]

The wandering missions you get regardless. Also that rescue mission.

 

You just unlock some early boosts, i.e. A-rank soldiers. And the sneaking suit available sooner, like you mentioned.

[osmosisch]

As a Dutch speaker, the switch to the new location was awesome. Didn't need no interpreter

[singlespace]

After playing way too much PP, I really wish they included a

helicopter support mission, or support option, like the side ops in Ground Zeros where you're supporting Hideo from the air then rescuing him

[Twig]

I relatively frequently use the fly-in to take out other helicopters for the later side-ops. Also I used the chopper exclusively for S-ranking the OSP version of that one where you have to destroy all the air radars or whatever!

 

But yeah I did really enjoy the Hideo rescue mission, it's a shame there's nothing like it.

[Griddlelol]

I think I may have burned myself out on MGSV, but I really want to 100% it (currently sitting at 90%). I have 200 or so hours of play time, but I'd say about 20 of those are from idling it waiting for things to finish.

 

Seriously, 24 hours to build a nuke. Who's idiotic idea was that? If I could pay £5 to make it instant, I totally would. It'd easily save me £5 on my electricity bill. 

[BadHat]

The extra soldiers you get from GZ are a nice early boost, but they kind of suck later on. I had to give the Eye and the Finger the Boot pretty early on.

 

I agree that having more helicopter-based stuff was a huge missed opportunity. Actually I'm surprised they didn't just straight up let you order the chopper around while you're in it. Get it to circle around a base while you mow everything down with the minigun, yeeeeeeeee.

 

Has anyone actually killed a single thing with the minigun? Only things I've ever managed to hit are sheep (sorry sheep).

[Twig]

I have never manually kicked anyone in mgs5. I just let it auto-kick people. I'm assuming it kicks the lowest skilled soldiers, and even if it doesn't, I don't know if I care enough. My facility levels are slowly rising without me even doing anything. I fulton EVERYBODY.

[Dewar]

I would go through and kick the troublemakers occasionally.

[Reyturner]

I found a button to automatically optimize everyone. Who am I to argue with auto-optimizer button?

[Twig]

Heh.

 

I might kick all the Bad Dudes, assuming that's something I can easily sort-find, 'cause I have like a thousand dudes.

[Gaizokubanou]

yeah with the new patch, if you sort the entire crew by skill, all of bad guys should be above diplomats.

[Twig]

Neat! When I get back to the game I'll do that, then, thanks.

[BadHat]

I saw some tooltip that having two troublemakers in a squad makes them focus on eachother and basically cancels them out? Not really sure how this works in practice. Anyway I stopped caring about them since all my troublemakers are now high rank, and my medical team is good enough to get crew back out of the sickbay pretty quickly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Reyturner]

Maybe the mother base management is Kojima's commentary on Konami's HR practices.

[elmuerte]

\Has anyone actually killed a single thing with the minigun? Only things I've ever managed to hit are sheep (sorry sheep).

 

Let me guess, that was a sheep shot?

[Twig]

So I beat this video game.

What.