Thrik

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

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I appreciate them in principal because it takes you out of your comfort zone in terms of setup of equipment and buddies.

 

But in practice, I am slogging through them and not enjoying them at all, because I like my comfort zone.

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Well you don't have to play them. Go do some easy side-ops instead if you'd like to just waste time until the final mission unlocks.

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The replay missions are awesome. I stand by that statement 100% despite a ton of people disagreeing with me.

 

To be honest, at first they kind of felt like bullshit but they really are the best versions of those missions. Especially the Subsistence missions.

 

I finished mission 46 last night which I guess means I've finally seen the true ending and the big twist.

 

It was a very dumb twist. No idea if it actually jives with the original Metal Gear games and I don't really care. The story in this game was dumb and none of the characters ever acted in a way that made any damn sense. Ironically, as gross as a lot of the Quiet stuff was, she ended up pretty much being the most interesting character in the game. I guess when there is a story this dumb and convoluted, the characters that don't talk really stand out. Except then she did talk and they just conveniently ignored the fact that she had that English strain vocal chord parasite. Shouldn't she have infected Fake Big Boss with the strain while she was guiding the helicopter to them? I guess not because he talks to some dudes right away and everything seems fine. And apparently I missed the part where Big Boss transforms into a big bad meanie. Through the whole game he was like the least evil person out of everyone.

 

But goddamn the gameplay in this game is just top notch. The action missions were lame but as long as I wasn't forced to blow shit up with a rocket launcher, everything was golden.

 

I still need to finish the last few remix missions and I think I'll be done.

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I finally picked this up when it was on sale last weekend. I like it, but man do I not love it. I actually like Quiet as a concept an awful lot, but her characterization retains the same amount of suck I prescribed it before I got the game. I feel like I'm rushing through, and yet it says I'm 25% done. I can already see the grind to unlock new stuff on your base and new loadouts forming. I still intensely dislike all the actual overlay of Metal Gear story in the game, so that's really frustrating. The first encounter with the Metal Gear almost made me quit and not come back ever. It took me almost 2 hours to get Emmerich onto the chopper, because something in the AI makes it wander towards you even if it should have no idea where you are. Fultoning things seems like a necessity in a lot of cases rather than a joy? The skulls fucking blow. Basically anything that is not driving me towards an 80s-era tactical infiltration sim is Actively Bad. Quiet being a scout sniper, for example, is one of the best things in the game because even though it uses bullshit magic to give you scout information, the 2-person team aesthetic drives towards realism in a way that is so very not real but apes it wonderfully.

 

I also am somewhat drawn away from doing the story missions because they A) grade you and I feel pressured to do things one kind of way and 2) every story mission means I get closer to more story drawing me out of the world I personally have built inside the game world. I'm 12 or 13 missions in and there are over 40? That's frustrating rather than exciting, even though I want to keep playing.

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I was trying to get a mod to replace Quiet's default bikini outfit with the regular clothes you can get later in the game, but I've hit a snag.

 

This is the page I found on nexus mods that I was going to use, but it refers to a tool known as the MGSV QAR Tool, which is... gone. Or at least it is for me. When I try to look it up I don't seem to get any results linking to other downloads, people don't seem to address this being gone. Is it gone for you folks too?

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I recently finished this game and really really enjoyed it. I ended up putting about 90 hours in and managed to complete all 50 missions and around 25% of the side op missions. After I knock out some other games I've been meaning to get to I will probably come back to this to do the rest of the side ops and max out my base.

 

One of the best things about playing this game has been discussing it with other people who have played it and hearing how different their approach to certain situations was from my own. I quickly adopted a pretty basic stealth strategy that carried me through a good number of missions where I would scope out an area first to find weak points in guard placement on the perimeter of an area. Then I would start at the outer perimeter and just systematically sneak up to each guard, grab them, interrogate them, knock them unconscious, and fulton them. Then I would slowly move deeper into enemy territory strangling and fultoning everyone as I went until the entire base was empty. I preferred not to use my tranquilizer pistol because the silencer didn't have much durability and it was usually more likely to alert other guards. So I would more or less just watch and wait for the perfect moment to go strangle someone and if I was spotted by someone nearby, I would tranquilize them with my pistol as a last resort.

 

As I got deeper into the missions though, I was forced to branch out and improvise a bit more and that is when the genius of this game really started to shine. Whenever I hit a spot where my strategy just wasn't working, the game always seemed to support exactly what I thought I would need to do to get through. For example, as the missions got tougher it got harder and harder to get through without being spotted and I knew that I had to do something different. So naturally, I figured I would need to start putting more effort into luring enemies away so I could isolate them and take them out easier. It turns out that this game supports several ways to do that so I settled on throwing ammo clips as my go-to way to lure enemies. However, it wasn't quite enough and I was still having trouble in some cases with finding the right position to take them down once they were close enough to me without them seeing me first and alerting the others. So I quickly found that if I just hid in a cardboard box behind a rock and threw ammo clips, they would walk right past me without seeing me and I could jump out of my cardboard box and strangle them once they had walked past.

 

Discovering the cardboard box was a game changer for me and I was shocked to hear from other people that had beat the game that they never even touched it. Once I realized how useful it was, it became one of my main infiltration tools. It was endlessly fun to cause just enough chaos to freak everyone out and make them go into an alert state and then watch 4 guys walk right past me and my cardboard box without a second glance. And my absolute favorite was doing the Wandering Mother Base Soldiers side ops, running up to the delirious dudes in my cardboard box and having them realize it was me and just let me fulton them.

 

As far as buddies go, once I got Quiet and started using her I figured I would probably just use her for the rest of the game as it seemed hard to justify gimping myself by using another buddy. But as I continued going through the game and getting frustrated with certain missions, I was forced to adjust my strategy again and started appreciating the glory of DD. While Quiet was great at scoping out bases and providing cover fire, I was finding that some missions were just getting way too chaotic and I couldn't keep things under control well enough. So I started using DD more and came to really appreciate how well his mechanics complemented my basic stealth approach. With him at my side, I was able to start luring 2 guards at a time while hiding in my cardboard box and once they walked past I would order DD to distract one while I tranqued the other and then interrogated and choked out the one DD was distracting. Combining his distraction capabilities with my existing strategy and the fact that enemies didn't go into an alert state when he fucked with them opened things up considerably. That dog is so fucking rad and I just love pressing triangle repeatedly to tell him how great he is.

 

I think the ultimate culmination of all of these stealth strategies building on each other came out in the Code Talker extraction mission when I started using decoys with voice recordings. I was having kind of a tough time getting through the mansion without being spotted since there were a bunch of guys patrolling both inside and out. I hadn't tried using the decoy yet and figured I would give it a shot to see if I could combine it with my other strategies to get through. So I went through the library area and found a little walkway at the top of some stairs that was adjacent to a hallway with two doors. Once I got up to the walkway I threw a decoy down at the top of the stairs, hid in a box at the end of the walkway, and deployed the decoy. As soon as it deployed I saw a couple guards in a nearby room get alerted and come down to investigate. As soon as the first one walked through the door and walked up to the decoy to see what it was, I burst out of my box, tranquilized him, and popped back inside. The other nearby guard was initially alerted to my attack but was then immediately distracted again by the voice recording so then he came through the door and walked up to the decoy to investigate and I burst out of my box, put him down, and popped back inside. Meanwhile, other guards in nearby rooms started getting alerted by the decoy as they got close enough and they just filed in one by one as I popped out of my box and put each and every one of them to sleep. Then with the last guy I sent DD to distract him which gave me all the time I needed to waltz over to him, interrogate him, and choke him out. When it was all over there were about 7 or 8 guards all sleeping in a massive pile in front of a decoy. Everything was silent except for the occasional cheesy line coming out of the decoy voice recording. As I was about to leave I saw one of them start to wake up and went to try to grab him before he had fully come to. Instead, I accidentally kicked the pile of sleeping bodies and fucking tore out of there like a bat out of hell when I saw all of the blue triangles turn to a red circle and everyone start to stir and get up.

 

Another fun one was one of the missions where I had to rescue the kids that had run off and I went super decoy heavy on the outskirts of the palace to lure enemies away and choke them out. By the time I had finished the mission the entire palace was empty and as I was walking out I got a good chuckle when I realized that the aftermath of my infiltration just left a bunch of my decoys facing in one direction while there were a bunch of enemy decoys facing in the other direction.

 

Parts of this game did kind of suck though. The whole Quiet thing was problematic in a lot of ways but ultimately I think she was the most interesting character in the game. The story wasn't all that great and I really didn't care for how everything concluded. There were certain moments regarding Huey where I really wanted the game to let me make a moral choice and instead it just all played out in a pre-canned cutscene. Eli and the stuff with the kids was also mostly garbage and bothered me more than it probably should have. And seriously, fuck Huey. There were some fantastic moments but I just don't know that Hideo Kojima's convoluted storytelling ultimately works for me aside from some of the cool, flashy, action stuff. It didn't help that this game was nearly devoid of the silly poop humor that I was hoping to see. Not that there was a whole lot of that in 4 but there were enough poop jokes to keep me interested.

 

On the gameplay side, the only thing I didn't like were the action heavy missions. The Sahelanthropus boss fight was the worst (especially the extreme version of that missions, ugh) and the skull boss fights were also incredibly frustrating. It just feels so jarring to have all this realistic stealth stuff and then suddenly have a mission where you are fighting a guy that can absorb 20 rockets without flinching. Given that I am basically commanding an army I feel like those missions would have worked better if there was some way you could actually call in the troops to help.

 

All in all though, this game was great and its easy to look past the less than stellar parts. It's strange, I thought I was ready to put this game down for good but as more time passes, I find myself wanting to jump back in more and more.

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I skimmed your post, I will read fully when I'm less hung over, but I'm glad you liked it. It got so much flak for the problems, that people just overlooked how perfect the mission structure was. It was so open ended, but the criticisms I read/heard were that stealth/overt tactics were the only choice, which is just painfully wrong.

 

I also disagree with you that the Sahelanthropus fights were bad. The first one especially was just great it was so tense and stressful trying to hide with Huey. I really had a love-hate relationship with that mission. At first it was so hard, but once I figured out what to do, and had all the toys to back myself up, all I remember was the stress of the whole thing.

The second fight...it's OK. It's a bit paint by numbers once you figure out how to do it, but I still found it enjoyable, despite playing it 4-6 times.

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I skimmed your post, I will read fully when I'm less hung over, but I'm glad you liked it. It got so much flak for the problems, that people just overlooked how perfect the mission structure was. It was so open ended, but the criticisms I read/heard were that stealth/overt tactics were the only choice, which is just painfully wrong.

 

I also disagree with you that the Sahelanthropus fights were bad. The first one especially was just great it was so tense and stressful trying to hide with Huey. I really had a love-hate relationship with that mission. At first it was so hard, but once I figured out what to do, and had all the toys to back myself up, all I remember was the stress of the whole thing.

The second fight...it's OK. It's a bit paint by numbers once you figure out how to do it, but I still found it enjoyable, despite playing it 4-6 times.

 

Actually yeah, the first Sahelanthropus (I never know if I'm spelling that right) mission wasn't all that bad. A little annoying that even when you sneak away he still magnetizes to you and seems to know where you are but otherwise it didn't bother me too much. That last fight though? Ugh. Maybe it's because I never unlocked the legendary gunsmith and hadn't really spent a bunch of time upgrading my heavy weaponry but it just took way too many rockets to take him down. It would be a massive understatement to say he was a bullet sponge. The extreme version of that mission is what really got my blood boiling though. With those spikes often killing you in one hit it got incredibly frustrating and it took a lot of patience and determination to finally get through the whole thing without accidentally getting caught by those. I did rejoice out loud when I finally did beat it though so at least I got a great sense of accomplishment from it when it was all said and done.

 

I also ran DD over with a tank repeatedly while retrying that mission and that made me sad.

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I stealthed through that entire mission, just to have the Pequad decide to land right on top of a patrol and ruin my total stealth rating. So lame.

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After about 30 hours of this, I now have a much better understanding of what the people who fell off of The Witcher felt like. The mechanics are immaculate, and I have less than no interest in carrying on with the story. I think I'm done with the game, and the metal gear killed it for me.

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Speaking of that Legendary Gunsmith. I just got him, and I can do a couple customisations for my guns, but way more are locked off. Is there anywhere I can see what I need to do to get access to more of them? Or do I just need to generally progress and wait for more to pop up?

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You need to research guns that have those attachments by default, then you can put those attachments on any other guns. I'm not aware of any way to know precisely which guns you need to research.

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Ah I see. I guess I finally have a reason to start researching all those weapons that aren't just tranquiliser and explosives. Are the attachments ever cross gun attachments? As in, a sniper rifle could never take a piece of equipment from an assault rifle? I've basically ignored any gun that's not a pistol or sniper rifle thus far.

 

On a related note, I finally got a silenced tranq sniper rifle and it's everything I hoped. Now I just need to get more sustainable silencers.

 

EDIT Well I guess if I wanna fight the skulls I'll have to get new weapons anyway  :(

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I keep wanting to go back and finish the mission tasks I have left, but...they're just kinda boring. Listening to conversations is so hit and miss, there's no way to tell if you've successfully listened to a conversation (which is such a ridiculous concept, I heard the damn words, why didn't it count?) until you complete the mission. Plus, it takes fucking ages.

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Ah I see. I guess I finally have a reason to start researching all those weapons that aren't just tranquiliser and explosives. Are the attachments ever cross gun attachments? As in, a sniper rifle could never take a piece of equipment from an assault rifle? I've basically ignored any gun that's not a pistol or sniper rifle thus far.

 

On a related note, I finally got a silenced tranq sniper rifle and it's everything I hoped. Now I just need to get more sustainable silencers.

 

EDIT Well I guess if I wanna fight the skulls I'll have to get new weapons anyway  :(

 

I believe sometimes the attachments are cross weapon type, and other times they aren't, with no real indicator. I think I remember researching a pistol with a medium endurance silencer and being able to put it on my sniper, but it's been a while.

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The weapon attachments changed the game completely for me.

 

I played this weird hybrid overt-stealth play style. Firing a sleep grenades and sprinting everywhere, never getting detected, but never trying to hide. So much fun if you combine it with

the Raiden costume

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So a little while ago I 100%’d this game, and got all the sweet cheevos. This is not something I have done with a video game since GTA: Vice City, and tbh that game was ultimately way less fun (remember those ambulance missions?). But I did it here because I enjoyed the look and the sound and the feel of the game so very much that I always felt excited to boot it up. And at a certain point, once the initial thrill of each new mission had faded, the game became about messing about and seeing how far I could push the systems, which is something that brings its own unique pleasures. 

 

Anyway, some scattered thoughts on fully ‘finishing’ MGSV:

 

The most useful tip for wherever you are at in the game is that whatever Kaz or Ocelot say you should be doing when you’re on a mission, don’t do it. Doing something unexpected often enables better results; and even if it doesn’t, at the very least the outcome is going to be really funny. 

 

When fighting Sahelanthropus,

it helps to stay close to him and treat him a bit like a Dark Souls boss: run between his legs, and use your best rocket launcher to shoot those white pipes and cylinders on his back. He doesn’t like that.

 

I agree with a lot of the complaints I’ve heard about the plot feeling half-formed. But I sort of…don’t care? Or rather, those complaints have nothing to do with what appealed to me about the game. And I find it fascinating how those criticisms seem to have been pre-empted and actually implemented into the themes and mechanics of the game in a way that is basically unprecedented for a production of this size. For example, I wrote a (lightly spoilery) thing on my blog here about how the way music is used in the game embodies some of its wider themes.

 

Still, I wish the characterisation didn’t feel so sparse. Even now there’s something mysterious about all those locked doors on Mother Base. I wish I could go and visit Ocelot and Kaz. I wish that there were actual consequences to choosing not to take Quiet, instead of just seeing less of the game. I wish there were more tapes about stupid stuff. I don’t have strong feelings about Quiet’s outfit, but I wish she weren’t so…quiet.

 

Chapter 2 is basically a gussied-up NG+, but some of the semi-hidden plot stuff there is absolutely astonishing. Most notably:

the moment where you’ve got to kill your own infected soldiers on the Quarantine platform, including the group you find in the basement — as soon as you discover them, the Peace Walker theme starts playing on a background boombox, and they all turn to salute you. It’s heartbreaking.

Special mention also to the scene where

Quiet is reading the co-ordinates over the radio to Pequod, which is possibly the most erotic thing Koj ever wrote.

 

I like that Donna Burke, who does the pleasantly understated voiceover for the iDroid functions (‘…Marker placed…Marker removed…’) is the same person who sings the ridiculously bombastic theme song for the game, including the ‘WOAH HOOOAH’ bits when you spark up your phantom cigar. Apparently she also does the English announcements for the Shinkansen trains in Japan. All of this is immensely pleasing to me.

 

The one Easter Egg I loved best was

the AI pod from Peace Walker. If you shoot it with a lethal weapon, or with a piercing tranq round, it will start saying odd little things in the voice of The Boss from MGS3. One of the things she’ll say is a series of words in Japanese that are actually a series of train stations in Japan, listed sequentially. These are a reoccurring meme in the Metal Gear games, and one fan theory is that they replicate the journey that Kojima would take to work every day while taking the train to Konami. As a tiny piece of continuity, passed from one game to the next, It’s the kind of thing that would basically be meaningless to anyone other than him — but I think I love it for just that reason.

 

The one tape I loved best was

, where she is locked inside the AI pod and rambling to herself as she slowly suffocates. She seems to be teasing out some of the more advanced themes from MGS2 and MGS4 and Peace Walker, but the whole thing is just deeply strange and awful and mysterious.

 

 

I never did any of the FOB stuff beyond what was explicitly required. I also never got invaded once in over 120 hours of play. But then I was careful to ramp up the security on all my platforms, so perhaps I just wasn’t an appealing target. 

 

Collecting all the animals is a pain in the butt. Even if you use a guide to put the capture cage in the ‘right’ place, there’s still an element of randomness that determines whether or not you’ll get the thing you want. Best left to the end of the game, if you want to try it at all.

 

The scripting in the missions where you have to overhear enemy conversations is built like a house of cards. If you get seen by ANYONE — even if you’re only glimpsed, like when the white ring appears without an alert — then sometimes the conversations just won’t occur. And there is no way to trigger them again.

 

I would recommend leaving most of the S ranks and extra objectives till at least the middle of chapter 2, when you can eventually develop stuff that make clearing those S-ranks and extra objectives much easier. In particular, get

the Serval sniper rifle, the fully upgraded Stealth Camo, the fully upgraded CGM rocket launcher, and the armour mod for the Parasite Suit. That sniper rifle has a ridiculous range, can be silenced, and it’ll kill even those heavy guys in riot suits in one shot. The Stealth Camo lets you turn invisible for something like two minutes at a stretch, and it recharges: perfect for those extra objectives. And the Parasite Suit makes even the boss battles on EXTREME difficulty much easier; and crucially, it doesn’t affect your mission rank.

 

There are some extremely goofy and stupid ways to get an easy S rank on certain missions but I won’t spoil these.  

 

I could go on, but I think I’ve written too much already. I find it very easy to get carried away with this game.

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The more time that passes, the more it bothers me that Chico didn't even fucking show up in the game. He was so instrumental in setting up the entire plot of TPP; it's amazing he's just completely absent.

 

True ending spoilerish I mean game's been out for decades now so it shouldn't matter but people are nuts about spoilers so here we go, seven whole words

.

Wonder if he's off with Real Snake?

 

My guess is not. The game is very obviously not finished, so I'd find it hard to believe they put much thought into a prospective "sequel".

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Oof. Just finished "Blood Runs Deep" (mission 18).


Those child soldiers kept running ahead of me! They were definitely in 'wait mode' because I didn't have the option to tell them to wait instead it was giving me the "Go" prompt. But often when I wandered off to take out some soldiers they'd just start scuttling ahead without me telling them to. It was incredibly frustrating, especially when the enemy found out the child prisoners had escaped (which I thought was scripted at the time). Yet somehow I got an S rank!? I don't get this game's rankings.

 

I saw one mission task was to not have the guards discover the missing soldiers. How do you do that? Just by not raising an alert? Right after I picked up the kids I blew up C4 on the satellites, anti-air radar and the communication device thing, so that might have shot myself in the foot a bit.

 

Non spoiler question, is there any drawback to having soldiers in your 'waiting area'? I have 250 soldiers not currently occupied and I'm a while off from having enough fuel for more base upgrades. I'm too lazy to kick them out though, so will it matter if I leave them all there?

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Oof. Just finished "Blood Runs Deep" (mission 18).

 

Man, that mission is such a clusterfuck of awesome.

 

I had the best time with it. I ran out of ammo and had to survive with a sniper rifle I found, and under all the pressure of the kids running around like crazy I was just pulling headshots left and right. Ah, it was an amazing balancing act.

 

The ranking system is like 90% based on how long it takes you to complete a mission. If you run in, all guns blazing and finish it in no time at all, you'll have an S, no problem.

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I saw one mission task was to not have the guards discover the missing soldiers. How do you do that? Just by not raising an alert? Right after I picked up the kids I blew up C4 on the satellites, anti-air radar and the communication device thing, so that might have shot myself in the foot a bit.

 

Non spoiler question, is there any drawback to having soldiers in your 'waiting area'? I have 250 soldiers not currently occupied and I'm a while off from having enough fuel for more base upgrades. I'm too lazy to kick them out though, so will it matter if I leave them all there?

 

Re: 'Blood Runs Deep', one way to do this extra objective is to

kill or extract absolutely everyone (EEEEVERYONE) in that base, and in the little gulch that leads outwards, and those snipers in the vicinity of the landing zone. Nobody else will actually spawn in after you release the child soldiers, so after that, you'll have a free run to the LZ.

 

There's another upgrade that makes this even easier, but you might not encounter it till much later in the game.

 

There isn't really any disadvantage to having a waiting room full of lower-grade soldiers. If you recover guys that are slightly better but still not as good as your main guys, the lowest-grade staff in the waiting room will automatically be fired to make space. You can also use them later on to populate your FOB platforms, when you get that far. The game actually does a surprising amount of base management stuff for you.

 

The only thing it's really important to do is to go through and 'direct contract' (L2 on PS4) any guys who you definitely want to keep, either because they have special skills or because you just think they're cool people. If you don't do this, they could be accidentally bumped or possibly even sent on a combat mission and killed, and you could then lose the ability to research the items they enable. I've heard of this happening to somebody's Master Gunsmith, and I don't even know if they were able to get him back...

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If the rankings are mostly speed that makes a lot of sense. I tend to be methodical and take out whole outposts at a time, but in this case I just snuck round the back.

You're both so violent. I'm sticking with tranq darts all the way. I accidentally killed someone on my last mission apparently :( Must've been some stray C4.

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