Metal Gear Survive; 4-player co-op stealth game

I've got some opinions after playing the PC version of the open beta.

• I'd estimate that over 75% of this game is re-used assets from MGSV, and I'm not even exaggerating. The one level that's available so far is clearly Da Shago Kallai village, (aka the burnt-out Afghani farm from the 2nd mission where you have to assassinate or kidnap the Speztnaz lieutenant) only with a bunch of fog, junk scattered everywhere, and a few relocated buildings. And your gear is identical to the stuff from MGSV too, even down to the guns and their "Strangereal" names.
• The characters move more sluggishly than Venom or his Diamond Dogs did. Apparently this can be partially overcome by spending resources to level up and unlock perks, and there's also different types of soldier classes now. I've only seen the Survivor so far, since that's the player's starting character.
• If you die on the field, all of your loot gets left behind. Yes, even some of your gear as well if you're unlucky.
• When it comes to the melee combat, Dark Souls this game ain't. I'm having a hard time trying to gauge the exact reach of my spear and machete, and since the attack animations tend to lock you in place, this often leaves you exposed to the zombies.
• This issue with how the melee attacks are conducted is made worse by how your firearms now have extremely limited ammunition. This means it's in your best interest to use the resources on the map instead of your own more rare and expensive to craft weapons, or rely upon the melee weapons and their high durability.
• Now, I know up until this point I was sounding completely negative, but it's not all bad. The overall gameplay loop is actually really good: trying to quickly scrounge around for resources to defend your harvester-thingie before the zombie waves begin attacking is fun, the combat from MGSV still holds up well, and if you've got even just a single decent teammate, you'll do fine defending the harvester - at least, from what I'm seeing on the Easy difficulty.
• Unfortunately, the beta is sorely lacking in a friendly tutorial. You're expected to learn on the go, and FAST, and with so many systems and new gameplay mechanics to keep track of it can get confusing quick.

One ugly issue to note... disconnects are NOT handled well within the game. After being matched up with three other players, I was expecting a smooth mission. We all held off the first wave of zombies easily, and during the inbetween lull I decided to go out and accomplish some of those lucrative secondary objectives for more gear and loot. Unfortunately, it was at that time the game developed some connectivity issues and dropped me from the group. Even worse, all of the defenses surrounding the harvester that had been constructed by the other players had disappeared, and I was now left alone to deal with the remaining waves. I had to call it quits before I was overrun and killed, because I had no hope of holding off those hordes alone.

Oh, you had connection issues in the beta?

Funny you brought that up, because it looks like the final version (which released yesterday) is just crawling with connectivity problems and required updates that wind up becoming nonexistent.

Not to mention, we've got a review round-up. (General consensus: looks great, but with its lack of an offline campaign and other stuff, it's as mediocre as we dreaded it to be.)

I'd joke about how we'll be getting articles reading about how "Metal Gear Survive is flopping hard" in Three... Two... One..., but I'm kinda thinking it's not worth the trouble considering Konami evidently doesn't give half a rat's butt about us...

edited 21st Feb '18 11:12:13 AM by TargetmasterJoe

of course Konami doesn't care, they're a Japanese company. Japanese companies leverage Japanese xenophobia as an excuse to essentially ignore anything "stupid foreigners" have to say about the stuff they produce. if you want the other extreme audience reaction from Metal Gear Survive, Nintendo didn't give a rat's ass about overwhelming demand for F-Zero and Metroid overseas (well, at least with the latter, it got Samus Returns).

Kojima, being the Japanese guy born in the wrong country that he is, complained back in 2012 about how myopic Japanese developers are. it all really goes back to the fact that "the nail that sticks up" is adhered to, to a fault. you could see much of the same problems in the anime industry. it's kind of annoying watching these boycotters think their boycotting will fix a deep-seated societal issue, because that's not how that works. (and, of course, like every other time i bring up hard facts, i get downvoted en masse from raging egos, so that's always fun.)

edited 21st Feb '18 4:24:15 PM by Freecom

Well, isn't the US the same when it comes to non-American developers or fans?

Well how much american media outside of cinema is consumed by foreign audiences?

China is the big target for every movie everywhere, not to mention a giant untapped market for Western material in general.

EDIT: Accidentally wrote "in-game currency" instead. D'oh!

We're finally understanding what the real-world currency will be used for, and it's not looking good. For example, do you want to create another player character? Guess what? You've gotta pay to unlock another character slot, or delete your original. Oh, and the revival pills can be bought with the premium currency too. Check you Yong Yea's video below for a more detailed analysis:

edited 22nd Feb '18 4:15:03 PM by SgtRicko

I haven't been paying as much attention but since I can't watch that video right now, I'm assuming we have to pay IRL cash to have additional characters, and not just grind for extreme periods of time for the digital points that let us unlock them naturally? It's dangerous to assume that players will like this spin-off project enough to want to pay for a do-over.

@129 America is merely playing catch up. as i often tell people, for everything bad happening in Western (or at least American) AAA gaming, you can trace it back to somewhere in east Asia, and that "something bad" is usually amplified tenfold.

people are dumb and that's why microtransactions work. i've seen players spend MB coins in MGSV for decidedly more useless things... like sticking out like a sore thumb with an all-gold outfit in Metal Gear Online. i get it, wearing your money to flaunt it around is something people like to do (i'll never understand it), but in a game where camouflage actually kinda matters, you just look stupid.

as far as i can tell, there's no competitive multiplayer in Survive anyway, right? so the people complaining about this are mostly doing so out of principle.

edited 22nd Feb '18 9:37:44 AM by Freecom

Do tell. About the being traced to asia thing

here's a Reddit post i made a few months ago, talking about games in different east Asian countries. (the "right to cheat" article and the article about the hyper-competitive South Korean job market linked by the OP are particularly enlightening.)

i say America's playing catch-up because China's been doing pay-to-lootbox *years* before it was ever a thing in America. i often tell people that lootboxes will never work here in America (at least, not to the extent AAA gaming wishes it'd work) mostly because of cultural differences. you can't transplant a business model wholesale from one country that protests for the "right to cheat" to another country that at least has the common courtesy to pretend like they don't do that sort of thing. although, in the past few years, i've ran into a lot of gamers that'll easily say "it's just a game, so why the hell do you care if i cheat?", so maybe the AAA games industry has successfully used the boiling frog effect on the issue...

i always kinda scoff at people who think AAA gaming is in the shitter, then cite Battlefront 2, GTA Online, or every game Ubisoft's recently made as proof. i tell them, if you think things are bad now, look up ZT Online, or any Korean free-to-play, or any Japanese game (which is inevitably gacha-based and on mobile) because that's AAA gaming's goal.

Or most Facebook browser games, and smartphone games for that matter.

yeah, where do you think those games learned their craft from?

i take this issue like i do every other issue in life - initially have my expectations lower than rock bottom. in this case, that would be ZT Online. at least from that point of view, something like paying for revives or a second character slot in Survive, paying to skip the grind for overpowered military vehicles in GTA Online, or lootboxing the latest trendy jacket in The Division all look goddamn generous in comparison, and i won't find myself going gray before hitting middle aged worrying about an issue nobody cares to fix (or worse, aggressive apathy a la "don't tell me what to do with my money!"), like The Jimquisition and Yong Yea look like they're on their way to becoming.

Ironically, those more severe examples are probably why the lootbox controversy from Battlefront 2 didn't bother me very much. Yes, while it definitely can lead to far worse abuses from developers if unchecked, right now the state legislators are only going after the big fish, and ignoring all of the more uglier examples you'd find elsewhere. I mean really, people are complaining about Overwatch's loot crates, despite them being purely cosmetic? Talk about the wrong target, go check almost any mobile game you'd find on a smartphone and you're almost guaranteed to find far worse abuses!

I mean, I wouldn't say it's in the shitter, but I've been getting a lot more out of games like Life Is Strange, Nier Automata, Oxen Free, Prey, and games from Telltale like The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands, and The Wolf Among Us ^note (assuming I'm not misusing the term, a quick google search says Nier Automata, surprisingly, isn't triple A despite the gorgeous visuals, which I find skeptical but from what I'm playing there is a certain lack of content)

A lot more than I have out of Halo 5, Metal Gear Solid V, Overwatch, Black Ops 3, Agents of Mayhem, Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne, Arkham Knight, Uncharted 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, Sly 4, Resident Evil 7, Final Fantasy XV, and probably some ten other games. Last of Us, Kingdom Hearts, and Red Dead Redemption withstanding.

edited 22nd Feb '18 8:50:25 PM by Soble

For the most part I'd say we're in a golden age.

You want bad? Go look up Larry Bundy Jr's Fact Hunt series on Youtube. The amount of company-backstabbing, straight-up illegal behavior, and utter indifference to the product being made (other than it being a potential source of investment revenue and nothing else) that happened from the 80s all the way up to the mid 90s is astonishing. Basically, the older companies truly didn't care about the product, only that it be made in time to cash in on major release dates, holidays etc. For example, the infamous Atari E.T. game? The developer, a single programmer, only had roughly six weeks to design the game before the Christmas buying spree. No surprise it turned out to be a glitchy, incomplete mess.

Heck if anything, the 24/7 media coverage and near instant spread of news today is helping to keep most devs honest, since their misdeeds will quickly spread like wildfire if scandalous enough. Well, ok, Konami's an exception since they honestly don't give a flying f***, but the effect certainly shows with most other companies, doesn't it?

edited 22nd Feb '18 9:25:33 PM by SgtRicko

Konami doesn't give a flying fuck because Japanese companies have Japanese people at their beck and call to back them up. that allows them to play by their own rules. i made an example out of Nintendo earlier, but you can honestly say the same thing about any other Japanese business decision that would baffle a Westerner. the only exception i can really think of is when the director of the Kemono Friends anime got fired for bringing the franchise back from the dead, solely over an episode he produced on his own dime and put on Youtube. getting fired is kind of a big deal in a country that typically employs for life.

The way I'm seeing this, I think Konami has been rather pissed at Kojima and Metal Gear that firing him wouldn't be enough, they decided to run the franchise he created to the ground. It's still petty as fuck, tho. Like, if fans have been coining FucKonami, they decided to counter by having their own phrase: FucKojima.

That could explain how Super Bomberman R was raised with care, but Metal Gear Survive is... this.

However, as this post said, I'm somehow compelled to agree that the haters do not have the high ground either. I mean, yeah, I know Konami has been doing shit things in general, but I hate it when people use 'moral high ground' (most commonly 'supporting bad practices in gaming') as a way to overwhelm other opinions. For me, that kind of people feels like just wanting to push their vision of the world and gets pissed that it didn't work that way (like, how can other people accept that 'bad practice'!?)

edited 24th Feb '18 2:26:44 AM by ChrisX

I wonder, why is Konami preforming bullshit like $10 charges for save files yet consumer friendly moves like free DLC for Bomberman? Is there like a divide between the people running the company into the ground and the only sane members left?

@143 well, when you have a tendency to berate everything about Japanese game design given half the chance to do so (that 2012 interview i linked earlier is just the tip of the iceberg), i'd be surprised if Konami didn't hate him. supposedly MGSV went over budget too. in hindsight, maybe it was intentional considering Kojima wanted literally nothing to do with the series since MGS2, which was his first attempt at killing the franchise off. MGSV was probably his "revenge match", so to speak.

about Konami doing shit things: the problem is, people don't step back and look at the bigger picture. i've said this before and i've said it again - dehumanizing employees is disconcertingly normal in Japanese companies. you can put the pieces together from any cursory Google search about Japanese work culture. i don't know why Nikkei felt the need to put an article out about them. maybe it's the "fuck your health insurance" thing, but from what i'm told by a translator over at /r/metalgearsolid living in Japan, he's not inclined to believe that since you're required by law to have health insurance, much like America.

in any case, it's pretty telling when the Japanese corner of the internet doesn't bat an eye towards this article other than the occasional ファッキュ・コナミ (fuck you Konami) from the occasional 2channer who got lost on YouTube trying to find Nico Video for MGS3 pachinko. shit like the clusterfuck that happened to Kemono Friends is what really gets Japanese people riled up (tl;dr anime director gets fired over a YouTube episode made on his own dime, citing "copyright infringement" [after initially giving him free reign to the IP], then shifting the blame to all the voice actors for god knows what reason).

long story short, Konami's about average for a Japanese company, which in terms of the rest of the world is decidedly below average. Japanese people don't care to do anything (or are too scared) until truly mind boggling things even to the average Japanese person happen.

edited 24th Feb '18 10:59:38 PM by Freecom

Ah, Values Dissonance. Gotta love it.

edited 24th Feb '18 11:08:00 PM by superboy313

This is amazing. To do this in that kind of an environment...

Tactical Espionage Action.

The revolution has begun.

: This should be trending, like NOW. Because when you understand the context of the message, holy crap...

Plus, nobody here thinks any of this is coincidental, right?

Because hey, maybe the usual work environment in Japan is way different than it is in America or anywhere. But when people are finding derogative secret messages like this? I'd say this should be a call to arms.

EDIT: Double holy crap, other web sites are finding out about the message too.

edited 26th Feb '18 7:52:22 AM by TargetmasterJoe