Along with regular missions are side-ops. These are specific side missions that award things like a soldier who can help translate foreign languages when you perform an interrogation at knife-point, or extra skilled soldiers. The other reason for side-ops is that it lets you explore the world in a way you don’t get to whilst focussing on a mission. In true Kojima Productions style, secrets are often buried quite deep, so getting out and hunting down those side-ops gives you the opportunity to stumble across little things you mightn’t otherwise find.
One thing Metal Gear fans might miss is the presence of a mini-map. Gone are the days of seeing guard’s and security camera’s vision range and instead it’s up to you to keep an eye on the guards as well as stay out of sight. To help with this, enemies can be tagged with the aid of binoculars. Once an enemy is tagged, they’ll be marked with a red arrow as well as a number indicating how far away they are from you.
Looks like some kind of awesome rave party going on over there!
Although there’s no mini-map, you can still access a larger map via your iDroid. The iDroid is a small-ish handheld gadget that displays the map, allows you to mark locations for you to travel to easily, lets you call in air support, read up on your mission etc.
Completing missions without raising the alarm has become incredibly tough in MGSV. There are now heaps of guards at main bases, and they all have their own stationery positions or patrol routes. If you want to act like a true stealthy spy, you’d do well to hang back and make a note of where all of the guards are and how they act. You can also take advantage of shift changes by waiting for guards to swap over and running through the gap they create.
The A.I. in MGSV is pretty intuitive and enemies will come check out areas where they may have spotted you. However, their actions can become a bit predictable which I guess is a good thing if you’re not that amazing in the stealth department.
If you don’t care about causing a stir and getting spotted, feel free to charge in and blast everyone away with whichever lethal weapon you want. But if you managed to get through a mission without raising an alert, you’ll get a better score at the end of it. My best so far is A… and that was during the very first intro mission. (´～｀ヾ)
After playing MGSV for a good twelve hours, I didn’t come across one single bug. The only qualm I had was the Restart Mission button in the menu. Being a gamer, my brain assumes that the very top button in the menu when playing is the “Resume” or “Continue Playing” button. After a solid two hours of playing one night, I reached a point where an entire base became alerted to my presence so I wanted to restart that particular base. So there’s me pressing ESC to bring up the menu, but being very “in the zone”, I instinctively navigated to the Restart Mission button thinking it would take me back to the last checkpoint. Instead it took me all the way back to where I was two hours ago… My fault for not reading properly and seeing that the top button actually said Checkpoint, but still a little bit unintuitive to not have that particular button read something like “Restart from last checkpoint”. Moral of the story: pay attention!
Mother Base
If you haven’t played Peace Walker, you’re probably thinking, “What is this Mother Base thingy?” Essentially Mother Base acts as your… well… base. Fortress of solitude, headquarters, command post, whatever you want to call it! The point of Mother Base is to act as a place to accommodate the soldiers you extract. Not only that, but it’s also where you can develop new guns, grenades, cardboard boxes etc. at the cost of GMP (Gross Military Product). GMP acts as the currency needed to do things like develop new technology.
How ’bout them names? Represent Pouncing Wallaby!
Like I said earlier, extracted troops can be assigned to different teams. Some of the teams are Research & Development, Support, and Intel. You can assign any troop to any of these teams but you also need to take into account their individual affinities with each team. Using a ranking system starting at E and going all the way up to S++, you can easily tell which individual would be best assigned to what team. I.e. If someone has E rankings for every team but has a D for R&D, you’d assign them to R&D. Get it?
To increase your troops rankings, it’s important to keep a high morale at Mother Base. You can do this by… beating up your troops… taking them out in the field or just visiting Mother Base. Another way to level up their rankings is by earning medals which can be received by completing tasks like completing a dispatch mission. Each troop can eventually be controlled and customised by you to take out into the field. So you don’t have to play as Snake the entire time (although I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to play as Snake all the time.)
Mother Base is constantly being built and upgraded as you’ll see when you hitch a ride there in a chopper. The whole base can be explored except for fenced off areas. Being situated on an oil rig out at sea, if you fall into the water, or throw one of your troops overboard, it will be the same as dying and you’ll have to reload from your last checkpoint.
When you’re first introduced to the Mother Base, Ocelot instructs you to try out some hand-to-hand combat with your troops. In familiar Metal Gear style, you can grab an enemy (or one of your troops) in a choke-hold and either interrogate them at knife-point, put them to sleep or slit their throat. Obviously when you’re on the Mother Base, killing anyone is severely frowned upon and to prevent any accidents happening, the throat slitting option is unavailable. So is the option to equip a lethal weapon.