My Fear of Metal Gear Solid 5

I will start this off by saying that I am a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. The characters, the gameplay, the hilariously convoluted plots; I love them all. So imagine how amazingly excited

I was when Metal Gear Solid V was announced. Watching all of that gorgeous gameplay footage, hearing all of these badass new features that they had added to the game, and hearing all the little tidbits from the plot was enough to make me crazy, to make me crave this game with every fibre of my being. This sounded like everything that I could have ever wanted in a Metal Gear Solid game. Nothing was going to ruin this experience for me. I was going to marathon this game and I was going to love every minute of it.

And then there came the phrase that gave me pause. That phrase was, “Freedom of Infiltration.”I had to look into what exactly that meant for how the game was played. Turns out it affects everything about how the game is played. This literally means you can play the mission however you want, unlike some past Metal Gear Solid games where you could be rather confined in how you played the game. I watched a few videos (spoiler free, of course) about how a single side mission could be played in six different ways and was baffled by the results. What truly got to me about this was the fact that these were what considered the more obvious routes to take. These were options that I wouldn’t have thought of.

That’s where my fear about this game comes in. I am not concerned that this game will be bad or will somehow let me down, everything I have seen or heard makes the game sound incredible, the sort of praise that Makes Metal Gear Solid 5 seem like pinnacle of video games. What I’m afraid of is that I won’t be smart enough to play through this game while taking advantage of all the incredible things that you are now able to do. I fear that I will be playing this game in such a straightforward, simplistic, and unimaginative way that I won’t be taking full advantage of the games mechanics and systems. 

Long story short, I fear that I am not smart enough to play this game the way it should be played.
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Now, all of this is not to say that I am not still hilariously excited to play this game. In fact I think the total open nature of the game is one of its greatest strengths. It will force someone like me to really think about how to accomplish something; it’ll challenge me to think outside the box, to really consider what the best ways to go about things are. But it will always leave open the option to just run inside and kill everything that moves. It is this flexibility that gives the game a near infinite replay factor, and that is never a bad thing.