This video just reminds me of why I was disappointed with a lot of TPP. Ground zeroes, although short, set the bar pretty damn high. Anyways, great content. Keep it up Turbo Boy
I'd describe Ground Zeroes as sandbox rather than open world. Similar, but with the distinction of sandbox just meaning open, and open world meaning a massive open map. GZ is closer to Hitman than GTA. As a result, I find Camp Omega to be the best-designed environment in the entire MGSV experience because it has a clear, focused, dense and memorable layout. TPP's maps are far too open and boring. Ground Zeroes missions open and you're in there ready to go, instead of trekking to your destination for a few minutes (and chopper rides). I think that, if TPP had used a number of maps from around this size to double it, that game could have had tons of environmental variety and a much more memorable play experience.
+The4thSnake Spot on. In my mind TPP should have been multiple Camp Omega-type environments, rather than putting Camp Omega into photoshop and using the enlarge tool.
Turbo Button Exactly. You can see some of this design in OBK Zero, the Oil Facility and a few others. If they'd just gone more in that direction, Phantom Pain could have been great. Just imagine the number and variety of maps Portable Ops had, but more open and detailed like Camp Omega. In my eyes, Camp Omega is as memorable as Shadow Moses, but TPP's environments are disappointingly empty. Thinking about it, I'd be interested to see you cover a game with level design you don't think is as good (maybe TPP or some Splinter Cell levels) and explain what makes it poor design and how it could be improved.
+Turbo Button Ha. That was my thought exactly. Even better if all the side ops were of the same scope and design of the side ops in GZ. TPP was just video game potato chips in comparison.
+Turbo Button what do you think than of some of the missions such as codetalker which gives a bit more of a gz feel being an area out of the way which has a singular target that you can attempt to reach from all directions
I would say it actually did, but judging by the comments here it seems like people don't really appreciate level design until they see a video spelling out all the intricate details of it. I mean the first example that pops into my head is the first mission in africa, where you have to destroy an oil pipeline. The facility is massive but it has different routes that all feel weirdly handcrafted as if each specific option for entry and escape were their own linear level that was just put into one network. I don't know many of the bases by name, but I was just playing a mission in Afghanistan that had a massive base that had a similar level of detail. It's sad to see so many people using this video as a chance to hate on another game. The entire point of this video seems to be showing people the level of detail and craftsmanship that went into this game, and suddenly everyone is acting like it was always their favorite. Not sure about the rest of you, but I remember when that game came out and these same types of people where calling Kojima a con artist and claiming it was just a demo they were being forced to pay for and that the game had absolutely no value. I guess I am just a little exhausted with most of the gaming community being about negativity and complaining about games rather than appreciating the things they enjoy.
@@DriscolDevil I agree. The reason I've played Ground Zeroes for over 100 hours and I still go back to it is Camp Omega. I just adore it's level design and it's atmosphere. But I'm not gonna lie, The Phantom Pain had some amazing and underappreciated levels too. Africa and Afghanistan were fantastic, from Nova Braga Airport, Lufwa Valley, Mfinda Oilfield and Ngumba Industrial Zone to OKB Zero, Central Base Camp, Da Smasei Laman and Yakho Oboo Supply Post. These outposts offered numerous entrances and room for experimentation (regarding verticality, for example), even though they could have more interior areas and surveillance cameras. After mastering the game's unparalleled mechanics though, every infiltration is different when you try different things each time. That's why the game is open world in the first place, to give players freedom of choice/movement, not a map packed with activities. It's just that when it comes to MGSV, people jump on the bandwagon and act like this game has nothing to offer.
@@giox99 I didn't like africa in the pp pain, mostly becouse of the lack of verticality and big bases, the only bases that I can remember are the airport and the mine bit the rest of them feel like little outpost, on the other hand I loved Afghanistan, I remember every single base
I'd rather have had Phantom Pain be made up of Peace Walker/ GZ Side Op styled individual missions that take place in maps similar to Camp Omega in terms of size and scale. So much of Afghanistan and Africa was barren and only a few places were interesting to sneak around in like the Oil Plant. They built up an interesting setting and lore around Camp Omega, making it seem like it'd play a role in TPP but nothing came out of it. I'd argure that TPP's story was more barebones than what we saw in Ground Zeroes.
Agreed particularly about the Camp Omega lore, all the briefing tapes and setup for just the one mission, in comparison to the feeling of "lacking meaning" to most missions in TPP. I think one of the things that hurt the design of TPP the most was being able to roam around the world _and_ call in the helicopter to go back to base at the player's leisure, this killed the possibility of a more "survival" based approach, which could've made the player feel "stuck" to these open worlds and could've opened a window for actual survival mechanics like in MGS3. Maybe what could've been done was greatly restricting pick up requests, for example only enabling the player to call in Pequod after completing a set of missions and side-missions... this would've gone against Kojima's idea of total player freedom and power, though. Resource management could also have been made tighter, with the player having to rely much more on "on-site procurement", if supply drops couldn't be requested so freely and so often. This would also have to be paired with being stuck in the open-world environment for a while, though.
I know this is really old, but did you know that if you rescue all the other prisoners 1st it makes it so that they don't come investigate? I thought it was awesome that they included this detail. The cutscenes can change in small ways on the TPP as well. Such a gem of a series with Kojima's team at the helm.
Shame Phantom Pain just had randomly placed houses in the middle of the desert which were even reused for both side and main missions. Only two or so missions were actually better designed (the honey bee one and the big metal gear one). If the whole game had like 10 or so Omega camps (with the same idea, meaning multiple drop points, side ops directly in the level, inside and outside levels, different areas such as snow, desert, jungle, etc.) it would be an amazing game. It would also allow for a better narrative and maybe even some bosses that aren't bullet sponge soldiers.
I adooooooooored GZ. Paying $40 (AU) for such a well-designed, cohesive little package was very fine by me and eased the wait for MGSV as I played the absolute heck out of the handful of levels, over and over. Getting to know Camp Omega and it's secrets so intimately, at different times of day too, was pure joy. I wouldn't mind seeing some more games that focused on a single area for their entirety although I suppose that is quite a bold move to make.
In my mind, Phantom Pain never quite reaches the quality of the level design of Ground Zeroes. Camp Omega is incredibly claustrophobic and tense all the way through, and makes you cautious and assess the situation with every obstacle and segment you find. Phantom Pain on the other hand leaves you in a very open area with a super soldier in your control. Both situations are great, but i always prefered the more Splinter Cell vibe of Ground Zeroes, Phantom Pain needed more areas inside buildings like the old games. Thats why im left feeling that the open world of Phantom Pain was a huge waste, considering that it has nothing to do between outposts. I would much rather have had a more consistent pack of well designed levels. Really the only reason to have an open world in MGSV, is to capture soldiers and resources and have a bigger number of side ops, too bad the side ops are beyond repetitive. There's barely any wildlife ffs. Its an incredible shame, that a game with such tight controls and gameplay depth is left in such an empty game. My God is the Phantom Pain a mess.
good level design is so damn important... I like open levels they don't need to be "sandboxes" but if you have 3-4 options, breathing spots, vantage points and whole thing feels like it's grounded ;) in reality makes gameplay much more fun.
The only areas the were like GZ in TPP were OKB Zero, and the Airport in Africa. I feel like much more of the game should consisted of areas like these where stealth was very important
+a slippery sausage that isn't quite too slippery The opening was atrocious. There's nothing intense about holding 'W' for 20 minutes while following an NPC guide and watching Snake stumble forward in a barely playable cutscene. The gameplay and structure is completely different from the rest of the game, so it doesn't teach you its mechanics and rules. The violence is there just for shock value and has little to no emotional or narrative impact. It was one of the most patronizing, self-indulgent and painfully boring game openings I've ever played, and the fact that you have to go through it twice makes it one of the worst sequences in the entire franchise. It's like a complete opposite of the fantastic introduction of MGS1. That game set up the situation and characters with an informative cutscene, gave you the first obstacle 5 minutes in to learn the core mechanics and then led you to the first open location with several challenges, pathways and optional items. All of that in less than 20 minutes. TPP spends over an hour pointlessly jerking itself off before it actually lets you play.
Mattchester it's like the only story driven part of the game, I thought the game was gonna build up to something and have a awesome explanation on all the weird shit that was happening, I liked it at least.
And GZ had a nice balance in equipment that TPP did not have. You actually had to crawl and stealth instead of commanding Quiet to clean a whole outpost with a button or calling an air strike...
Air Strikes limit your rank to a lousy A Real gamers go for that S rank Quiet is just op though. Thats probably the reason why the game takes her away later on xD
Tasking quiet with clearing an entire camp of soldiers will completely tank your rank, and also probably put all bases in the area on permanent alert after it gets reported, because Quiet's AI will just fire randomly instead of intelligently choosing isolated targets first.
I love videos like this analyzing design choices. This was a quality look at how this game guides the player but always gives them multiple viable ways to get the objective of the mission taken care of.
Just watched the video, it'd be nice to have a reference map to not get mentally lost (something that happened a lot to me since I didn't play the game). Otherwise, this is a great video and a great indicator of how maybe things that you think it's coincidence, has been carefully planned out by the developers!
Very cool analysis! I struggle with myself. The Phantom Pain doesn't need that size it actually has. Half or even a third of the size is enough but more great designed levels like Camp Omega. With CO alone you can have fun for weeks. You can barely say this about a location in TPP. Nevertheless TPP has its own pros like the Dynamic Day/Night and weather cycle which Groß Zeroes is lacking and you have much less weapons and gadgets. I love Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. You can compare it with MGS2. Tanker mission had a better and more memorable level design but all the cool Story stuff and weapons were on the Plant.
You could make a cheap loadout of simple stealth weapons no buddies and play OSP for yourself. I do wish you could take away the hip weapon honestly even for the cosmetics of it as I rarely use it. However, I find it fun to drop in choose a mission across the map, or just go chronological, and complete side objectives in route using any and all means necessary. Also extracting from the mission on foot, gathering the resources the somewhat varied side objectives and my nature make it feel fresh each time. Plus trying to improvise when you screw up makes for some cool moments that I can't really get anywhere else. Especially interesting when they called vehicle support on me the 1st time. I was like "They do that, oh crap!" lol
This is a common excuse for badly balanced games and it sucks. Think of murphys law, if something can happen, it will happen. If the desired way to enjoy TPP is to only use basic weapons then having hundreds of them is ridiculous, either you use the weapons through the pressure of obligation, or you don't and the game constantly nags you about them anyway with notifications and cluttering up the interface of the idroid. Your solution is to play the game like the old games where you use simple weaponry, except those game had weapons be OSP, which you even noted you wished was in the game. The subsistence missions of chapter 2 have this feature....locked to those missions alone. The game is simply poorly thought out in terms of flexibility. If they can code missions to be OSP, why make it just the labelled ones? Surely a few lines of code would give us the option to make it default but nope....fuck u if you dont want to use weapons, you are bringing a gun whether you want to or not.....realll open gameplay there.....I find it fun to drop in too....except you don't so much drop as you waste 3-5 minutes of your life every mission on that damn chopper, even if you use a container it/s no help when infiltrating at the start of a mission. Also why does ground zeroes have a difficulty option and TPP is piss easy with no way to up the difficulty? And why does Venom sname hallucinate Paz with long hair, even though him and BB both saw her on the chopper with short hair? Also wheres chico? we're told he died on the chopper but never hear from amanda? Never see a body, we can hallucinate Zero saving paz in the ocean but not chico? why is it that we have no choice but to exile Huey when I'm 99% sure he didn't set us up? What happeened to Skull Faces personality? he was sinister and manipulative in GZ and a cartoon in TPP. Quiet cant breath with clothes on.....except the clothes you can equip her with.....Wormholes? Battle gear will be ready for use when? Side objectives likee fulton the men.....or fulton the men 12.....or fulton the materials container 4.....or wonder 3 years later why some tapes flash yellow and others white.....or wonder why the entirity of two countries dont have a single civilian.....or why there are only two countries when the last mission very clearly foreshadows america.....or when do we return to camp omega as promised....or wheres the guard dogs.....or why is every dog in the game come in pairs....or why cant we go into all but 1 door on mother base.....or why does mother base even exist when its useless and peace walkers system worked fine....or why is the game called open world when its basically a few set locations broken up by miles and miles of nothing......or why do all the containers in OKB zero have the Diamond Dogs logo.....or why make a game with a bait and switch twist people figured out years before it even released, and not change it....or suppliment it.....or give us the final mission clearly cut from the game with Eli and Sahelanthropus.....or why 'eyes on kazuhira''.....or why all of chapter 2? why why why.....I love this game btw, play it daily. But its a fucking travesty when cmpared both to Kojimas past work, and even to modern open world games in general. It's just a shame.....real shame.....
I wish I could go back and play GZ with none of my memory of it. I know it like the back of my hand now so it's just a fast obstacle course, even on Hard...
I enjoyed GZ way more then the Phantom Pain. I'll take 10 mission variants on a genius level for 20 bucks over a fuckton of missions on a large empty desert for 50 any day.
you should play Tenchu to see all the stuff you like about ground zeroes with its open ended but tightly designed levels stretched out into a full game
Good video! GZ just shows what TPP should've been going for. I wouldn't have minded if TPP just dropped you into smaller open-world like levels like Camp Omega instead of having you traverse long stretches of nothing to get to another base. In TPP, there isn't really a base on Camp Omega's level of level design.
2:30 you are wrong but that's interesting. I've never seen the gaurds talk to the prisoners because I never have had to hide there. I tranq the gaurds ahead of time before getting Chico meaning I always rush in and out with him. My first time playing the mission took 10 minutes. My second 5.
"Camp Omega shows that open world doesn't necessarily have to mean EMPTY world". Alas. If only they'd have followed their own sage design pointers for TPP.
Bruhhh I never played MGS games this is my first one, I never knew it was stealth focus, I thought this is something like just cause, I came there guns blazing and tank is every where there are over 30 guards chasing me, and I thought Wow this game is hard Thanks anyway I'm gonna reinstall it and try your approach
If only The Phantom Pain was a linear game with self contained open missions such as this one. Would be much better than the open world we got, not saying it isn't good because it is not only good but almost great
It's too bad Kojima wasn't working at Konami by the time Hitman 2016 came out. If they decided to mimic Hitman's episodic release for Phantom Pain and release a bunch of Ground Zeroes-level chapters it would have been magnificent.
And for some reason Kojima didn't take all these decisions to heart when designing MGSV. There were precious few areas as detailed and fun to explore as Camp Omega.
It's kinda sad that Camp Omega ended up being the best level of Metal Gear Solid V, better than anything in The Phantom Pain except _maybe_ for the area around the mansion in Africa where you rescue Code Talker (which, by no coincidence, was the place Kojima used to showcase the Africa open world)
I would say some missions in TPP, such as the mission where you're introduced to child soldiers or the mission with the facility full of corpses at the bottom of the water (I don't remember the mission names or numbers) were just as well designed as Camp Omega. The problem is the game between missions like those. Open and kinda boring.
Miller the Lady Killer, lol. More like Miller got the hots for Big Boss, not ever gunna kill him. This should have been the whole game, not do the Phantom Pain with it's half arsed story and lack of any real direction.
I don't agree about this game showing that "open world doesn't have to mean empty world". This isn't open world. Everything is hand-placed and choreographed for the specific scripted mission you're on. It's a little like the first two Thief games, or the lab and Grozny Grad in MGS3, where you can take different routes but you're definitely playing a level/mission, and not an open world. And then of course we get to TPP and the open world is pretty empty.
what i hate the most in such games is the fact that hero still crawl in the light. that's like so immersion\suspense of disbelief breaking with eye's fov of 270" everyone would be instantly spotted if acting suspiciously, but if he just slowly walk calm as if it is where supposed to be he won't be spotted also silhouette should belong to the place even if it's not a hitman game you still shouldn't be that OBVIOUSLY NOT A SPY NOTHING TO SEE HERE
Phantom Pain has the same design philosophy as Ground Zeroes. Plenty of entry/exit points for infiltration, same high density of guards, same house like structures, fences, concrete, for cover while you're sneaking around and the same kind of prisoners and guards to capture or kill. An honest look at both games reveals that they arent very different. Only Phantom Pain has smaller outposts between the large bases. But of course it does. It's a full game. And nobody despises the far more simplistic hallways of previous MGS games that were all less impressive than any one outpost in V.
I know this is old but HOW was this a scam? It's not part of the main game and in fact is better made than the main game since Kojima wasn't pressed for time, and what game developer didn't have issues transitioning projects from the PS3 to the PS4? Plenty of developers went out of business during this time period so it's pretty clear that decisions like releasing this game and the FFXV demo were smart choices during times when even the "surefire hits" like COD and Assassins Creed started struggling
It's the same level, same enemies for maybe 3 hours max if you just play through them all skipping the cutscenes. Snake Eater is also a 3 hour experience but in those 3 hours you have 64 unique rooms, maybe a dozen enemy types, and 9 unique boss fights. The decision to release this on it's own was because Konami wanted to charge $100 for the game but couldn't without pissing everyone off so they pulled this bullshit and gamers sadly praised it. They pissed in our mouths and some called it rain. And then gamers got more upset over some irrelevant pachinko machine that doesnt even exist in their own country. It's a joke. Ground Zeroes was one of the most audacious scams in the game industry imo and its shocking people are eager to defend it so much.
When a level is smaller and designed to showcase the massive improvements to an otherwise laughably classified "stealth game", it creates certain expectations. It finally appeared that we were to get a full on stealth game. To claim that Camp Omega is similar to any of the locations in The Phantom Pain is ignorant. Just because they used the same controls and mechanics, does not make them the same. There is a reason it is called level design. This is something The Phantom Pain lacked because of the open world. Open world games have a tendency to ruin the formula of games which were not optimally designed for such scale. The scale becomes a problem when the level design features nothing as smartly crafted as a "demo" that preludes the actual game. It impacts pacing, narrative and replay-ability. I would rather play a well crafted linear game than a shoddy and vapid open world game. But if you don't like attention and then revoke the ability for people to respond, you look like a fool. If you are this kind of person, do not respond to this :^)
