Besides the size of the main mission, do we know how substantial the side missions are and how many weapons/gadgets/vehicles there'll be?
The side missions are (with 1 very short exception) all around the same length as GZ or a bit shorter. Some of them are very good, particularly the one just underneath GZ. I've found a number of different weapons/vehicles, can't say for sure how many there are.
Care to elaborate on this? I think it looks like it plays great in video.
For the most part it plays more intuitively than any MGS before it, but a couple of bizarre design choices keep it from reaching its potential. For example, while crawling on the ground, touching a wall or other obstacle will sometimes- but far from all the time- cause your character to sit up. It's not like the old mgs games where they squat into cover, either. It seems to happen for no reason, and it's gotten me spotted
Another issue which is probably an extension of this: on the ground, you can aim and strafe, and when you click the left stick ("dash button") on top of this combo you will roll from side to side. A bit more intuitive than it was in mgs4, but once again if you hit a wall it will cause your character to.... GET UP AND START SPRINTING! since you're holding sprint, which is GUARANTEED to get your character spotted by anyone in a 100 yard radius. VERY frustrating to sacrafice your ranking just because the game insisted on making such a nonsensical decision. Bottom line, when the player chooses to crawl they should be locked on the ground until they hit the stance button again. Seems like common sense.
There are others but those are the ones that stuck out most. Cover is extremely stubborn. What the game needs is either a mgs 1-3 system where it's very clear you're in cover and you're fixed in it until you cancel, or an uncharted type system where a button press has the same effect. This tomb raider auto cover thing is just not cutting it. It's stubborn about when you can get into cover, and once you're in, don't even think about moving around. So you want to sidle over to the corner of a wall to peek around the corner? You better be damn careful as you approach that edge, because the game doesn't just cut you off before you expose yourself like every other mgs- you'll get spotted as soon as one polygon passes the corner.
This might not be a big problem if you were able to very slowly move your character like in mgs 3 and 4, but it seems to be, you push the control stick 20% in the direction and nothing happens, push further to 40% and nothing happens, go to 60% and suddenly he just hurls himself forward. There seem to be only 2 speeds - half press and full press, and it's not very fun trying to slowly approach those corners when all I can seem to do is clumsily flick myself around.
There also seem to be a couple of strange bugs (ps3 version). Mostly when you're spotted, you can run away and hide, if they lose sight of you they'll go into search mode within a few minutes. Well sometimes they just keep firing at the place you were spotted. I snuck all the way around the base and watched from far behind their backs as they shot at nothing. Totally concealed. When all of a sudden, they immediately all knew where I was for no reason, and all came slowly running across the base towards my completely obscured location.... that was weird.
In spite of all this I think the engine really shows a lot of potential. You can tell it will really shine in an open-world context. I'm being critical because I want TPP to be as good as it can possibly be. As for story/Sutherland impressions, I will save it until everyone else has the game
