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Confessions of a Justified Camper
By Kinketsu | June 22, 2008
First of all, I’d like to set the record straight. I’ve never, ever been a camper. It’s against my very being. It’s not because I’ve got anything against cheap kills. It’s because I’ve no patience. As a youngster, playing Street Fighter II at the ice rink up the road, my strategy was an all out offensive with Ken. I couldn’t be bothered laying in wait like a Guile player, holding backwards and hoping someone will walk forwards in that classic dance. No, I’m the reason you turtle, I’m the reason you hold block against all-out mad fly kicks constantly coming at you, turning into dragon punches over and over again.
When I started playing Counter-Strike, in the late 90s, I couldn’t see the point in the sniper rifle. My best weapon was surprise, leaping around corners, guns blazing. It worked a treat. And even today, with Call of Duty 4, I keep the same philosophy. If someone is pinging the corner of the door frame I’m hiding behind, wanting to get into a sniper battle, I won’t please him by joining in. I flank and charge him, the trigger of my assault rifle rammed all the way down as soon as I see the back of his tactical helmet.
Maybe I’m strange for someone who has been playing shooters all his life, but I’d rather stretch out on the couch for twenty minutes than stretch out on a digital rooftop with a sniper rifle for the same amount of time. I love that kind of stuff in a movie, but it’s absolutely zero fun to play. Four minutes spent waiting for a head to enter my crosshairs could be spent leaping backwards out of a building and spraying folks with my machine gun. I’m playing games for excitement. Why would I want to fall asleep on a roof?
Well, if you are like me, if you are what I described, then Metal Gear Online does not want you. It will all but tell you to clear off at every level. Take me. I started the game with what I knew best, and what I wanted to be, so I specialised in sub-machine guns and Close Quarters Combat. Wrong. Turns out that Metal Gear Online does not really want you to specialise in your chosen field, it wants you to subvert your interests to it’s opinion of success.
Most modes in Metal Gear Online use a ticket system, but you ought not to confuse this ticket system with one like the Battlefield games. The idea is the same but the reality is much different. There are much fewer tickets in Metal Gear Online and you have a much worse chance of defending yourself in face to face combat. Try as I might to play it as a shooter, I just couldn’t. It seems so random in damage that if you try to play it as a shooter you may well punch a hole through your wall first to save you the bother later on.
And of course we shouldn’t play it as a shooter, because this game is made by the Japanese, and they have no idea what a good shooter looks like. My first hints that I was doing it wrong were the levels. Half of them are so windy, and the other half are so vertical, it’s almost as if the game wants you to specialise in assault rifles, sniper rifles, CQC and running. Well, it’s not ‘almost’. That is the formula to winning the whole game. Metal Gear Online is probably the least balanced online game mode to come out in years.
As I said, maps actually pointed me in the direction of sniper rifles. Half of the levels are flat and long, allowing you to see clear across the level, the others are tall with unassailable sniper positions. You’ll soon find a number of good nooks from which to rain death down on the enemy with a scoped weapon. But what of the Drebin Points? DP points replace EX points as the limit of what you can buy, keeping the higher range weapons out of your reach. So that levels the playing field?
Well no, as the M14 Sniper Rifle is one of the cheapest weapons in the game, fully automatic, and gives an instant headshot kill and a half clip body shot kill to anyone you’ll run up against. Traps are the most interesting aspect of the MGO arsenal, you can set up porn magazines, sleep mines and claymores to catch out the enemy, but these can also be set off by your own side, unlike COD4. The result is a total mess. In levels half the size of those in COD4, most of your own team end up looking at the mens’ magazines if you dare drop them anywhere where one might be useful, such as a high traffic area.
The whole thing smacks of coming at it from the wrong direction. Matchmaking is a horrible process, even though Western developers have been working on this for years, it’s a real slog with MGO. And why do I have to go through loading screen after loading screen to play this game online? Why do I have to say OK to five or six different screens before I end up in a game? I heard Kojima and co looked at COD4 before this game came out. What part of COD4 did they look at? The box? All the hoops you have to leap through to play make half of the game seem like a Japanese bureaucracy simulator than a military action game. Unfortunately it seems to me that as far as Japanese developers are concerned, online play means playing kick about with a router.
But if you put the time in, Metal Gear Online is a rewarding game. I’m not saying it’s fun, or something you should play for a quick blast, but it can be rewarding. As one of the least balanced multiplayer games to be put out there in the past ten years, the successful feeling you get when you work out the formula is unmatched. It’s almost like you’re cheating. Yes Metal Gear Online can be fun, but it’s a game were close quarter combat means doing a dozen diving rolls past each other, so as you can get into position for a takedown. It’s a game where you embrace a bad turning circle and sluggish aiming. The game is a success when you play it like what it says on the box, Metal Gear Online, representing all that is wrong and right with Metal Gear. All the great graphics and new features vs. all it’s silliness and daft elements. It’s a complicated title, a niche game that’s frustrated by how pretty and accessible it seems at first. It absolutely is not for everyone. But if you ever wanted to be a sniper protected by a wall of porn magazines, then there’s nothing else like MGO.
Topics: Blog, PC Gaming, PlayStation 3 |
June 22nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Call me weird, but your talk of MGO has me interested in trying it out. I’m not really sure why either. I’ve never been much of a sniper myself. Maybe it’s the fact that the game’s non-western. I might enjoy the change in albeit bad design.
Excellent article. The more time I spend with GamerDork, the open my mind becomes to genres that previously didn’t interest me.
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I’ll give you a game sometime Xib. Talk about the blind leading the blind eh?
A good article Kinketsu, I agree that MGS4 really limps across the finishing line as a shooter. Some part of me wants to think that Kojima and co know this and are planning on fixing it for a later game.
It seems the Japanese aren’t as adept at crafting shooters as your average Western dev house (or maybe just less interested in doing so) but I can provide one great exception:
Resident Evil 4!