Thrik

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

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10 hours ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

Oh that'd explain it, I never really returned to Mother Base that often.

 

You didn't go back to shower after missions? 

 

(I also go back because I think it's neat to watch my base expand after a platform is finished)

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I am not quite sure if there's a point to showering, as I would figure it ruins your camo index, but that doesn't seem to be displayed at any point in this game like previous games. Easy way to "shower" is just change your outfit and change back on the sortie start screen. Does anything actually happen when you boost morale by punching soldiers on motherbase as well?

 

The animal conservation deck is kind of neat though. Also is there any way I am supposed to know how and where to catch the wild animals without checking a guide? I try to remember to place cages  somewhere before a mission ends but almost all of my rarer animal captures were just because I came across them during missions. I don't have a clue on the best spots to place cages.

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I think I mostly only went to motherbase to do the side ops that were there, but otherwise I'd just stay out in the field constantly.

 

(My Snake was a smelly boy)

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I have no idea about animal captures, I just place the cages in a mission, usually all in one place before I extract because I forgot to place them earlier!  It hasn't seemed to matter, I've got a variety of stuff even when all of them are dropped in one spot.

 

I hate the side op that's on the R&D base.  I've done all the other target ones I have, but I cannot find all the targets on the R&D platform because they are scattered around, even with trying to use night vision goggles to find them. 

 

I decided to lay off retrying missions or doing side ops until I get to mission 22 to get the FOB unlocked (and thus get more soldiers to send on missions and more resources coming in, that way the time spent trying to S-rank missions or knock out optional stuff is more profitable).  I'll probably hit that today when I play.  Not sure if I'll try the whole invasion thing or not.  I probably will at some point, but I'll wait until I've got a FOB more developed.

 

 

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Yeah, FOB is really the best way to make money and get resources it turns out so you are probably better off waiting. I finally messed with it today and while it's somewhat tedious because of all of the loading screens, a lot of people leave bases with low security or just a lot of goods to get with little effort. I keep getting my ass kicked by the Konami event FOB though. If you have enough MB coins to get an extra base or two or three, Bjorn, you can also do more of those dispatch missions at the same time (assuming you have enough soldiers) and then get tons of stuff.

 

I feel a bit overwhelmed with this game now with this on top too so maybe I'm gonna take a break.

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10 hours ago, syntheticgerbil said:

I feel a bit overwhelmed with this game now with this on top too so maybe I'm gonna take a break.

 

It's crazy how big and complex this game is.  I ended up going down a rabbit hole of just customizing my guns yesterday and like an hour flew by.  In terms of complexity, this game feels like an MMO that's been around for years and had all sorts of systems cobbled onto it over time.  I feel bad/dumb for not experimenting with more weapons, because all I ever take are the same handful of weapons with me, but there's this entire smorgasbord of stuff to play with.  I love it, but it is really overwhelming. 

 

I did get to the FOB stuff yesterday.  I ended up buying the $10 pack of MB Coins (2000), because I only paid $7 for the game when it was on sale a few weeks ago.  I've had so much fun with it, it seemed reasonable to chuck another $10 at it since I got it so cheap.  So now I have 3 FOBs and can send out 8 teams, which is more than there are missions my people can actually do at a time a lot of times. 

 

I didn't try invading or anything yet, but I might try the official Event invasion today to see what it's like. 

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Despite my best efforts to take a break I messed with it more today.

 

I realized because I have the Definitive Edition it came with 2000 FOB coins yet I also spent some money for coins for more bases so I could do multiple dispatch missions. The prices I originally read online require more MB coins than what the actual in game asks for (on PS4). I guess Konami lowered the prices at some point. So now I have a bunch of left over MB coins I wasted money on. Oh well.

 

I'm so bad at the FOB invasions where the person actually set up their stuff, I keep failing most of them, especially the event one which you have to do over and over to get special things, like a leopard speedo for Snake which I have going right now.  I think I locked myself out of invading really pathetic bases because it only lets me choose hard ones now. So I guess now it's just about filling out FOB platforms to get more dispatches going.

 

There's other stuff on FOB like relationship where I thought you come in and help someone whose base is being attacked but you just press X to "support" and nothing else happens. There's also some kind of virtual league daily and weekly which I also don't understand.

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The servers were garbage for me yesterday, but I did manage to get a few shots in at doing the event FOB.  Those are fucking hard!  Most of my runs ended within 2-5 minutes, but I did finally get all the way through one.  I finally started using the sonar ability of my arm, which I never use in the main game, and it was pretty handy.  I feel blind not having a companion to point out bad guys to me. 

 

I didn't try an actual person's FOB, but I can see me doing that now that I've got through an event one once.  The rewards were pretty nice.

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On 10/06/2017 at 9:59 AM, syntheticgerbil said:

I am not quite sure if there's a point to showering, as I would figure it ruins your camo index, but that doesn't seem to be displayed at any point in this game like previous games. Easy way to "shower" is just change your outfit and change back on the sortie start screen. Does anything actually happen when you boost morale by punching soldiers on motherbase as well?

 

The animal conservation deck is kind of neat though. Also is there any way I am supposed to know how and where to catch the wild animals without checking a guide? I try to remember to place cages  somewhere before a mission ends but almost all of my rarer animal captures were just because I came across them during missions. I don't have a clue on the best spots to place cages.

 

After a while without showering, I think the amount of slowdown time you get during reflex mode goes down a bit. I think it might also make you easier to spot in certain conditions. It's not a huge difference but it's worth doing.

 

Morale boosting makes soldiers a bit more productive, though again it's a fairly small boost. Bad stuff can happen if morale goes low but it's not serious (and, just like when you don't shower for a while, there's a cool cutscene!). At worst, your peeps might leave? But there are always more peeps.

 

The short answer on the animal stuff is 'nope'. Tranqing stuff is easy enough, but with the cages there's basically no in-game clues to let you know where to put them to catch a particular kind of animal. Some of the rarest animals can only be caught in one or two particular places - if you ever find yourself in a weird-looking clearing or anywhere remotely unusual, you might have a good chance there. But it is only ever a chance: even if you put a cage in the right area, the game rolls dice to determine what you get. I have the official guidebook, which has a map showing where all the animals can be found, and I still had to drop the highest level cages over and over again to get certain animals for the trophy.

(I'm an idiot, though. But I'm an idiot with the platinum trophy!!)

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Oh okay, I turned reflex off early on for S ranks and never really wanted to bother with toggling on and off. I guess the team production stuff makes sense but I'm not really keeping up with the numbers of materials they make even though I probably should get on that.

 

However I sort of want to see these extra cutscenes for low morale and not showering. Will this kind of screw up my stats if I let it get bad?

 

That sucks they didn't find a more intuitive way for anyone to find animals without a guide. There was some stuff on Peacewalker that I remember where people could only get the exact requirements by translating the Japanese guide, specifically the drops for the Monster Hunter missions.

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45 minutes ago, syntheticgerbil said:

Oh okay, I turned reflex off early on for S ranks and never really wanted to bother with toggling on and off. I guess the team production stuff makes sense but I'm not really keeping up with the numbers of materials they make even though I probably should get on that.

 

However I sort of want to see these extra cutscenes for low morale and not showering. Will this kind of screw up my stats if I let it get bad?

 

That sucks they didn't find a more intuitive way for anyone to find animals without a guide. There was some stuff on Peacewalker that I remember where people could only get the exact requirements by translating the Japanese guide, specifically the drops for the Monster Hunter missions.

 

One thing on animals, particularly the cage ones, is just to deploy all 8 (at max rank) every single time you're going to load up on a chopper or finish an mission.  It doesn't seem to work by jumping straight to the chopper from the pause menu, but the other two ways it does.  I think I'm at 80 percent on the animals list now, and I haven't farmed or tried at all to get anything.  Just doing that every mission, sometimes all 8 dumped right under the chopper, has got me that far.

 

 

So, are you to Mission 25 yet?  I hit it tonight, and one thing I'll suggest is that it might be good if you've got a good couple of hours to play when you hit it.  A series of events plays out after it that strongly encourages you to play through the next several missions in a row.  I just played an hour later than I had intended because I wanted to power through it.  Spoilering the rest in case you haven't got there yet:

 

Spoiler

So I ended up losing like 200 fucking base people to that damned disease, because I've fultoned everybody and built multiple FOBs, so I had way to many people to try and manually quarantine.  I had like 1400ish I think when that sequence started.  That's just a brutal series of events if you've gathered a fuckton of personnel. 

 

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On 6/13/2017 at 1:49 AM, Bjorn said:

 

One thing on animals, particularly the cage ones, is just to deploy all 8 (at max rank) every single time you're going to load up on a chopper or finish an mission.  It doesn't seem to work by jumping straight to the chopper from the pause menu, but the other two ways it does.  I think I'm at 80 percent on the animals list now, and I haven't farmed or tried at all to get anything.  Just doing that every mission, sometimes all 8 dumped right under the chopper, has got me that far.

 

Haha, I'm so fucking bad at remembering this! Even when I've replayed the missions I keep forgetting to put down the cages. It sucks it doesn't count if you lay them down during a side op. I think I'm at 67% or something so you are way further than me. I have so many god damn gerbils. (naturally)

 

Not to mission 25 yet, I left off on 24 because I kept messing with FOB and had to S-rank some stuff. Since I unlocked FOB I've had a lot of blueprints to gather and side ops to open up. I keep trying to finish the event stuff for the exclusive weapons and such. I think they all rotate so I'll probably be at this game every once and a while event for a year or more just to clean up. Sounds like I'll need to cut out a free weekend then if I start 25 though and get all obsessive about the next part. Then I'll click your spoilers. :)

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Haha, I really can't wait for you to get through Mission 31, I wanna talk about how dumb the overall story is in this, but I won't worry about spoilering a bunch of stuff, I'll just wait until you get there.  It's really amazing how good the gameplay is, and how good some of the individual plot moments are, but man is the overall plot definitely Metal Gear.

 

 

Oh, and as for animals and Side Ops, you can still use your cages on side ops, just leave using a helicopter.  If I'm close to a helicopter spot, I take the time to extract that way and drop cages.  If I'm not very close at all a helicopter spot, then I just bail through the pause menu and don't worry about it.  Sadly resupply drops don't let you drop more than 8 cages :( 

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I haven't played this game but there ARE lords playing it for sure (mission spoilers I guess)

 

 

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Hahaha, holy shit that video's good.  That first fucking kill I was not ready for.  I knew you could use air drops like that, but I hadn't ever messed with it. 

 

 

This game is so good when you feel like you're lording it up.  I used the box transfer stations to put myself into the middle of a base to do a side op of extracting one soldier.  Summoned in a sand storm, took out like five guys, extracted the guy I wanted, shot out some lights, and box transferred back out right as the storm was ending.  It's probably been the single most lordy mclord moment I've had. 

 

Edited to add: Weather Modification is hilarious inside the fiction of the Metal Gear.  Like, there's nukes, mechs and designer diseases all threatening to destroy mankind, but oh, hey, this one mercenary force has somehow figured out how to make the weather do its bidding.  No big deal. 

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What is the annoying humming in the second half of that video?

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Riiight. God, I am glad I accidentally shot her in the face during a cut scene. That humming would driven me to distraction.

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I liked the humming, to be honest. Could've been less repetitive, though. But it humanized her in a way so few other things did, besides the ending (which I still liked about her, even if she's a fucking terrible example of female characters). U:

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Yeah, I actually like her humming as well. 

 

On 6/17/2017 at 9:43 AM, Twig said:

I liked the humming, to be honest. Could've been less repetitive, though. But it humanized her in a way so few other things did, besides the ending (which I still liked about her, even if she's a fucking terrible example of female characters). U:

 

I really didn't think this game could have made me hate it more in terms of how it handles women, but I keep being consistently proven wrong.  Big ole list of spoiled gripes since gerbil might not yet be to some of these.


 

Spoiler

 

In the episode where you rescue Code Talker and have the fight with 4 Skull snipers, they're women and the camera zooms in right on one of the asses of one when it introduces them.

 

Quiet just doing a stripper dance in the rain for the hell of it. 

 

Kojima's awful "you will be ashamed of your words and deeds" crap.  The whole justification for Quiet being naked is that she's got the parasites that she needs to breathe and photosynthesize and shit.  And then you get Code Talker and if you listen to the tapes about him, learn that he's 100+ years old because he's got the same parasites and also photosynthesizes his food, but the wrinkly old ass man with liver spots sure as hell isn't prancing around mostly naked. 

 

In Chapter 2 stuff, when Quiet jumps into the poison pit to rescue the kid's medallion, the camera lingers on some bouncing boob physics as Snake hauls her out, burned to shit from the risk she took.

 

Snake and Ocelot letting Kaz torture Quiet for funsies.  Despite her being an integral part of their ability to defeat Skull Face and cure the parasite in the rest of Mother Base, sure, just torture the shit out of her.  I'd have given anything to put a bullet in Kaz at that point (and quite frankly, after that, she could have been a hundred percent justified in murdering every last one of them). 

 

 

It's really hard for me to think of any game that I've loved as mechanically as this one, and despised for its dumb as fuck plot and character handling.  And I even think some of the plot is good and interesting in terms of Metal Gear bullshit!  Just so much bad stuff draped off it.

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Yup it's bad.

 

I actually think she's a decent character ("in terms of Metal Gear bullshit"), but Kojima can't just have a good female character anymore, apparently. Has to fuck it up royally in one way or another.

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My buying it was contingent on being able to mod away her bad outfit. I then never really used her as a buddy, so I missed a few of your gripes. I know Twig says her story is good, but I found myself more comfortable mostly excising her from the game. 

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Well, if that video is anything to go by, I am glad I never had to listen to it in game. It would have driven me up the wall.

 

Horses for courses.

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The humming originally was driving me crazy but there's ways to make it stop. She hums whenever she is "active" and is aiming at nearby enemies. So if there aren't any enemies she won't hum. Once you increase here bond to like 2, which is easy to do after one mission, you can send her to other places across the map and scout them out to mark enemies ahead of time so you won't hear her when she does that. I usually do that when I'm done needing her. If you do get attacked no matter where she is she will soon appear with cover fire.

 

I do enjoy using her a lot on some missions, especially when trying to S rank. She is also a pretty cool character in a game with none except that we are instead to leer at her the whole time. I'm really sick of her bending over in the chopper for the hundredth time. I don't even know when I earn a way to put some fucking clothes on her but it's probably going to be too late. Then again if I do that I may betray my words and deeds.

 

I'm probably going to get to mission 31 tonight but I think I have to play until mission 51 until I can go back in this thread and click all the spoilers? Needless to say I feel the same Bjorn, this story is shit, it's wrapped in bad characters and bad plotlines. I know MGS is known for being ridiculous, melancholic, and nonsensical but I do truly enjoy the plotlines and characters except for maybe all that happened in MGS4 was atrocious. Revengeance was such a bad game too for so many reasons I won't get into here but I know that doesn't really count. I lost some faith in the series with 4 but Peacewalker turned all of that around. The Ashley Wood/Yoji Shinkawa art was great, the gameplay was great and somehow turned around the clunky nearly unplayable Portable Ops into solid mechanics that MGSV would be widely based on. I liked Miller, Amanda, Paz, Strangelove, and Chico. I was so happy when Otacon was cheesily reintroduced as Huey to keep that dynamic going. The way that game ended was a nice bittersweet ending. It really could have just stopped there.

 

So starting with Ground Zeroes just everything was turned on it's head tonally even though they doubled down on the fanservice stuff that I contest was majorly introduced in 4 and was not all over the games before like some consumer first/anti-SJW types would have you believe. Skullface is a joke, him using rape as a tactic doesn't make him more evil. I just watched a scene

 

where he and Big Boss sat through a whole car ride. They were too big and bulky in the back of the jeep looking like toddlers while staring at eachother awkwardly while Skullface has 10 minutes of exposition. Boss says not one word. Then they go silent so that a loud song can play while they just sit there still awkwardly. I'm just bored and spinning the camera the whole time. There are no cinematic camera angles or any kind of visual effect to go along with all of this plot dump. It makes Skullface look infantile and portrays him as harmless. So all that rape tape stuff in Ground Zeroes has gone to waste anyhow even if it was supposed to have some intended grave impact and not shock for shock's sake.

 

The game just got too serious. I can't find any confirmation of this theory but it seems some think the reason Big Boss just kind of ran out of lines in Phantom Pain outside of some earlier cassette tapes was because Kiefer Sutherland was too expensive? Is there any evidence to it? It would make sense. A big part of enjoying the plot to Metal Gear for me is besides the incredulous interjections David Hayter delivered to all of the characters, Big Boss/Solid Snake was always one to respond or even give values and advice. Even if a character were rambling off a bunch of unrelated info dumps like with Paramedic and movie trivia, there was a banter there that kept things interesting. He showed he cared what they were talking about. Now Big Boss just sits there and looks at people like an idiot. Or if not that, looks dramatically away into a blank area off screen, facing away from the characcter who is speaking. There's even times when someone expels something important and I'm just angry yelling at the screen, "Fucking say something! Doesn't this plot matter to you?!"

 

If Kiefer Sutherland was that expensive, then removing Hayter for the sake of a C-list celebrity was a big mistake for the last game in such a prominent series. If he needed some celebrity voice, would Bryan Cranston have been too expensive? Kojima said the reason for him going so X-TREEEEME was because of Breaking Bad and Cranston did used to do anime dubs. He would have done a good Snake.

 

Also Ocelot isn't the same character. First, his accent is some kind of shitty Texas thing Troy Baker cooked up trying to be a less gruff Joel. I'm kind of sick of Baker now anyway. Then, we don't have this kind of nemesis feel to him any longer. The deviant weirdo thing he had going on in MGS3 made sense with his appearance in MGS1. I particularly loved him in 3. Now he's just back for some inexplicable reason, with a very awkward and ugly 3D model I might add, playing the role that Miller should be playing. He's incredibly positive about everything and he seems like a generally low stress and supportive guy. In other words, he's completely bland now. So far he's been absolutely useless to the plot and doesn't even need to be in this game.

 

And Miller as a fleshed out character was a good addition to the series with Peacewalker, not counting his brief MGS1 and Metal Gear 2 stuff. He provided backup and banter with Big Boss and was playful and good humored. It's also canon that he and Big Boss might have a thing for eachother. Now he seems to have become an angry misogynist with no sense of loyalty and nothing fun to say anymore. He's not really into interacting with other characters anymore either. It's like the soul has been sucked out of him and everyone else.

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