Every soldier I kill and every supply truck I mercilessly blow up in the field is missed potential.
From Mother Base, you manage the construction, staffing, and R&D needs of your growing mercenary group, the Diamond Dogs. It’s essentially the full realization of all the good ideas Peace Walker seeded. That isn’t to say that playing like a trigger-happy maniac doesn’t have ramifications, because it most certainly does, thanks to Phantom Pain’s fantastic base-management layer, Mother Base, which is far deeper and and more detailed than it has any reasonable excuse to be. Not only does this create a lot of tense, sweet-looking movie moments, but it gives you the freedom to take calculated risks with room for exciting mistakes. If someone spots you, you get a few seconds of slow motion (called Reflex Time) to take them down silently and prevent a full combat alert. The transition between careful stealth and going loud is a lot more organic than in any previous MGS, and getting aggressive never feels “wrong” the way it often does in stealth games. More importantly though, you’re free to solve those puzzles your own way because of how flexible Phantom Pain’s core gameplay is. The number of different factors to consider makes every bad situation you find yourself in a fun puzzle to solve. Since I didn’t destroy all of the transmitters, reinforcements from nearby outposts came to complicate things at the end. Then there was the comms equipment, which I messed up on. I also knew that I needed a closer extraction point, so I sought out that anti-air radar to open one up. While I knew I wouldn’t have the cover of night, I was also fairly certain I wouldn’t have fog, a sandstorm, or even a little rain to make my footsteps harder to hear, because my intelligence team back at my base forecasted the weather in advance. Phantom Pain’s day/night cycle and dynamic weather played a big role in my decision to pull the trigger on that C4. Let’s take another look at my daring prisoner rescue for instance. But what initially appeared to be an overly dense tangle of features to fiddle with instead unraveled into a well integrated set of meaningful gameplay systems that provided me with a wealth of interesting decisions to make. It’s almost too much, especially given the relative linearity of previous Metal Gears. Right from the moment you’re told to get on your horse and explore the Afghan countryside, Phantom Pain feels intimidating, almost overwhelming in terms of the freedom its open world affords and the number of concepts it expects you to grasp.
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