Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was a fantastic open-world sandbox game, but other games in the genre have failed to take many lessons from it. Hideo Kojima is best known for his storytelling as he creates fantastical characters and puts them at the center of rich plots filled with subtext, twists, and shocking moments. However, he also has some of the most unique gameplay out there. Whether it’s walking around trying to deliver packages in Death Stranding or sneaking around in a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid, there’s no one making games quite like Hideo Kojima. He’s an innovative mind, and yet, a lot of developers stick to the same repetitive formulas.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain may have an underwhelming story that some have deemed unfinished, but the gameplay lived up to the hype. Kojima and Konami made big promises ahead of the game’s release with regard to the gameplay, noting that it would be the first truly open-world Metal Gear game and have all of these awesome features. Gamers are conditioned enough to know that marketing can sometimes oversell a game’s potential and the final release won’t have the depth that they hoped for, but Metal Gear Solid 5 has some of the best gameplay of any stealth-action game out there.
When I think about good gameplay, I think first about the controls. How easy is it to move around, how much flexibility am I allowed over my actions, and so on. In essence, can I smoothly react to something as quickly as I could if I were really Big Boss in a combat situation? That’s my barometer. Metal Gear Solid 5 really empowers the player through gameplay.
You can roll around on the ground, allowing you to evade danger or quickly move out of an enemy’s sight without having to get up and make yourself a bigger target. You’re not just glued to the ground and forced to awkwardly move your body in ways that no human ever would. The gunplay is also sleek and allows for hair-raising action, especially when you pull off a last-second slow-mo headshot that prevents an enemy from raising an alarm. Even the driving is pretty fun, allowing you to drift around corners as enemies fire mortars and bullets at your Jeep.
There’s a fine degree of precision in how the game controls that is both immersive and fun. That feeling of control is also extended into the customization for the game. You can kit out all of your weapons, load up with an extensive array of gadgets, and bring a vehicle or ally with you every time you deploy. Not too dissimilar from Death Stranding, you prepare for your mission as best as you can before you ever leave your base, but the real fun is in the improvisation.
When you get out into the open-world, anything can happen. Metal Gear Solid 5‘s world reacts to how you play. So, if you are frequently sniping soldiers with headshots, they’ll start wearing helmets. If you’re a big fan of heavy weaponry, they’ll wear heavy armor. They even get clever and will put down decoys that can be hard to differentiate from a real person from a distance. If you shoot it, it will alert them. As a result, you have to be prepared to adapt as the AI adapts based on how you play. It’s like a live game of chess, where every move is being countered by the other player.
Thankfully, this is a pretty freeing sandbox where you can call in a helicopter to rain hellfire down on targets, sneak into bases by lying down in the bed of a supply truck, or go in guns blazing with a tank or mech. I’ve even seen someone use a Fulton balloon to suspend an enemy in the air and then drop them on top of another enemy to knock them out. Enemies will even trip over you if you’re climbing up a ladder while they’re going down, making them fall to their doom.
This is what makes Metal Gear Solid 5 so fun to revisit. It’s all of these different systems interacting with each other in ways that allow you to do whatever comes to mind. Every time you do a mission or clear an outpost, it doesn’t have to be as simple as shooting up the place with an AR or doing stealth take downs on everyone. You can stick up an enemy and interrogate information out of them, you can drop a car on their head, or you can have your knife-wielding dog stab them to death. There’s so much more variety than that, which keeps things fresh and exciting.
How Other Games Failed to Learn from MGS5
Metal Gear Solid 5 borrows a tad from the Ubisoft formula of having bases all over the place that you can clear out. Sometimes you have to go here for side missions, other times they’re there just as something to do. However, Hideo Kojima built upon that formula instead of keeping it the same. By allowing the AI to adapt to you, the bases can change every time you return to keep things fresh. The same tactics won’t work every single time, forcing you to use other mechanics in the game and engage with it all as a whole rather than just using the same weapons/strategies over and over again.
One game that tried to play with the idea of a reactive open-world was Dying Light 2. Based on the decisions you make in the story, it can radically open up new things in the world and even introduce new threats. Developer Techland stated that roughly 50% of the game would be unseen in your first playthrough just because there was so much variation in the choices you made. However, this was ultimately cut before release, something that has bugged fans even though it was still a good game.
Again, this just goes to show that Hideo Kojima aimed for the moon with Metal Gear Solid 5 and somehow hit the mark on a gameplay level where other games have missed. A lot of open world titles feel like you’re just going around and checking off boxes these days, but that could be avoided with more freedom in the sandbox gameplay and a world that is more dynamic. Perhaps it’s time for some developers to stop thinking about bigger being better and think more about how you can have a small map even in something like Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes and have it feel extremely replayable because there’s so much depth to the gameplay.
Hideo Kojima pushed boundaries in the Metal Gear Solid series for decades and is still continuing to do so, allowing for some of the most engaging gameplay out there. But because there are other games that are more commercially successful, it feels like we’re following the trends of what’s popular instead of what is best to play. There’s room for refinement even in the gameplay of Metal Gear Solid 5, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is actually taking the opportunity to do that as they’re too busy chasing other open-world trends instead.