My hype is zero now. I am going into the game with zero expectations. It seems like there is nothing in the game that sounds Metal Gear to me atm. I hope this changes when I play the game.
With all due respect to Yong, he is not a journalist. He runs a "fan" community. There is obviously going to be some level of bias in his coverage.
Reviews that came out today are not credible. Reviewing games in a controlled environment are not acceptable to me. I am not saying that they are entirely wrong and some of their concerns are legit. But honestly, playing 2015's biggest game under PR's watch...what kind of credibility do you think these reviews carry?
All videogames journalism is enthusiast press. It all features heavy bias.
And going further than that,
all journalism is subjective opinion unless it's simply news reportage or event reportage. But even the latter usually comes with a dash of priorities and a side-helping of publication prerogative.
However, the review 'boot camps' are ridiculous because of the time limit they impose, rather than any PR 'watching eye'. When you say to someone 'you have three days to finish this thing', they're going to rush and focus on pressing ahead, rather than having fun and enjoying the game. That's the nature of giving someone a time limit.
I'm gunning for that full knightfall protocol in Batman AK, but it really sucks that I have to go through all riddles to get there.
I normally hate doing secondary missions in open world games, and I'm around 97% in Batman AK, but that's because the game world and its characters have been interesting enough for me to want to resolve everything. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't bother going for the 100%.
Those riddles are a chore and I'm only trying to get them all because I'm already close enough.
The Riddles get really fun and satisfying when you get to 10. Having it quantified to such a small amount, and the story starts kicking off again... It's really great, and worth blasting through the other 240 for, imo.
I really liked the design because some open world have too much 'optional' content. When you need 100% to get the game's ending,
none of the content is 'optional'. The developers are saying, categorically: 'Here is what you need to do to finish the game. Go have fun doing it.' Rather than, say, in Ubisoft games: 'So if you want to 'finish' the game, do twenty of these mediocre story missions and see 1/5th of the gameworld. But, if you want, there are also all these hundreds of things you can do, just
if you want. Some of them might be shit, some might be great, but you won't know until you go try!'
Imo the quality of content overall is diluted in games like that when so much stuff is optional and just
there in the world. I reckon MGSV's more focused main missions and side-ops that impact all your abilities and resources will sidestep this - along with the fact that getting the 'True' ending will probably be meaningful and well-signposted, more like in Arkham Knight, making it all pretty satisfying.
It's so damn strange to me that some say story is barely there or it's scaled back while others say it's just as present and crazy as always. How is the amount of story subjective? Am I being dumb? Are some people taking the tapes and side missions into account while others aren't? I don't get it.
I think a lot of the disparity comes down to the press 'boot camps'.
Journos at these boot camps probably went running through the game's main story missions to 'complete' the game's story. They will ignore, or not be aware of, the fact that:
- many side ops contain significant story points, this isn't signposted and you need more extra time to play/find them all
- many cassettes contain background story like Codecs used to, and you need lots of time to play these
- apparently we need to complete certain prerequisites to get the full conclusion for the game, and that would take more time than these journalists have
The few journos who have had the time to really soak in all this extra content have said the story is absolutely satisfactory.
