Preview: Metal Gear Online
This week I didn’t get to finish any games despite making a lot of progress in Grand Theft Auto 4, but I figured it was a good time to talk a bit about the Metal Gear Online beta that I started playing a couple weeks ago. There’s a lot of anticipation for Metal Gear Solid 4 and a lot of Playstation 3 fans are hoping that it’s a "system seller" game that will jumpstart the PS3. Metal Gear Online is the first time the Metal Gear series has been given a multiplayer component, and there has been a lot of speculation as to whether or not Konami – a Japanese game developer – could make a multiplayer game that would appeal to a Western audience.
Let me start out by saying that the process of actually signing up to play the game was, to put it nicely, difficult. When the beta first went live I had to download a patch that was half the size of the entire internet, it left my PS3 running all day. Then, once the patch was done downloading, I was told politely to go to Konami’s website to register for a username to play the game. "Alright" I said, "I’ve come this far, nothing can stop me now!" Nothing except for a website that is getting absolutely hammered with traffic that is. It took me three (yes 1, 2, 3) days to finally be able to register for a username. Not only that, but you actually have to register for two usernames, one is your Konami ID then the other is the actual Metal Gear Online ID. The best part about the whole process is that the site would tease me almost looking like it was going to work only to get to the very last step and crap out. Pretty infuriating. Also the in-game interface for getting into a lobby is kind of clunky, and actually joining a game can take up to five minutes. The nice thing about it taking so long though, is that people are more apt to stay in a game so once you get in you’ll probably be playing for as long as you want, you don’t have to worry about everyone leaving and having to sit through another five minutes to get into a different lobby.
The game strips out a lot of the classic gameplay mechanics most gamers love about the Metal Gear Solid franchise, particularly stealth. There’s a game type called "Sneak Mode" which, it would seem, would encourage stealth but that ends up not being the case. Usually from what I can see the sneak mode always just falls apart into your typical team deathmatch. The premise for sneak mode is that two teams are fighting to get the most kills (whoever has the most at the end of the round wins) while one rogue player gets to play as Solid Snake with all of his gear. The only problem with that is that it seems like no one ever wants to be Snake, and if they do there isn’t much of a tutorial on how to play him. What you’re supposed to do as Snake is, because you’re so well outfitted (you can use his active camouflage to hide, his robot friend to take down enemies) you can take out members of both teams as they try to fight each other. If Snake gets a certain number of dog tags without being killed (you get a dog tag by holding up a member of either team, effectively sneaking up on them and pointing your gun at them) Snake wins. Still, because the mode can be comprised of a bunch of players it can basically be like 15 players versus Snake, so let’s just say Snake doesn’t win very often.
If you aren’t Snake then you get some pretty standard equipment – you can choose between a myriad of primary weapons (assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns) as well as side-arms (pistols, even a gun that shoots darts which knock out an opponent without killing them). There’s also a nice selection of explosive devices ranging from your standard frag and flash grenades to more interesting goodies like claymore mines and C4. You acquire your kit by spending in-game money, each weapon costs a certain amount and you only start out with a limited budget. Then, as you play, you are rewarded with more money for doing well – for example if you kill someone from the opposing team you get some cash. Each time you die this cash is added to your initial bankroll of $1000 so you can improve your kit as you play. It’s basically just like CounterStrike.
Where things get a little interesting is that you can equip different skills to your soldier sort of like perks in the Call of Duty 4 multiplayer. Some examples of skills are added proficiency with certain weapons (Assault Rifle bonus, Shotgun bonus, and so on) as well as bonuses for using certain explosives like the claymore. Additionally you can get bonuses that help you out in different ways, one of my favorite bonuses is the movement bonus which makes you faster. So really though, depending on what your skill set is your actual weapon choice is already chosen for you. That is to say if you give your soldier a bonus in assault rifles chances are you aren’t going to be picking a shotgun as your main weapon as that’s kind of contradictory. You can change your skills between rounds though, so if you want to experiment the option is there, it just won’t happen during any one single round.
Another component of classic Metal Gear Solid games that is sort of missing in MGO is CQC – Close Quarters Combat. A lot of the fun of games like Metal Gear Solid 3 was sneaking up on a guard with only your knife equipped and slamming his face into the ground to knock him out. Sure, CQC is in Metal Gear Online but unless you’re really good with it trying to take someone down in CQC is like giving yourself a death sentence. That’s because of a couple reasons – one, the game is set up so that more often then not a team runs around together, so if you CQC someone (which doesn’t kill them instantly, it only knocks them out) there’s are really high chance that one of his buddies will just pump you full of lead while before, during or after you take them out. Secondarily, if you just knock your opponent down with CQC he can still fire his weapon from the ground – this is great if you’re the person knocked down because it takes away some of the ‘cheap’ aspect of randomly getting knocked out, but at the same time it makes actually killing someone with CQC a big pain. First you CQC them then once they’re on the ground you have to avoid their gun fire while you switch to a gun to shoot them – basically it rarely happens, especially because the mechanic for switching weapons in the game isn’t very good. To switch weapons, equip camo, pretty much do anything you have to stop, hold the right trigger, then use your analog stick to flick through a bunch of different items. It’s something I only ever do when I know I’m absolutely alone otherwise it spells disaster. All that being said, even if you don’t kill someone it’s really satisfying to jump out from around the corner and knock a guy carrying a big-bad assault rifle into the ground. You also get points just for the knockdown which is nice.
Another one of my gripes about the game (and a lot of other games) is that it has an auto-aim feature. Auto-aim should never be allowed in competitive multiplayer (yes, I’m looking at you GTA4!) because when using it one of two things happen:
1. You get a cheap one-shot kill
2. The auto-aim decides to lock on to someone or something other than the person attacking you, and you take a fall
You can choose to turn auto-aim off but that doesn’t mean everyone else has it off so you’ll still find yourself getting rocked from across the map with one shot all the time off of someone who got lucky with auto-aim. I think there’s a setting in the server options to turn auto-aim off but I’ve played on quite a few servers and all of them kept the option on.
I know it seems like I’ve pointed out a lot of negative things about the game but all-in-all, it’s pretty fun. Definitely the best multiplayer experience I’ve had on the PS3 so far (granted the other one was Warhawk which, after playing the Battlefield series as much as I have pretty much looks like a joke). The regular deathmatch and team deathmatch games are pretty fun, and as a shooter it holds up pretty well. It also has a cool capture the flag gametype where you not only capture the flag (in this case it’s this little monster thing which spawns on the map) but you also have to coordinate with your team to take it back to your base and defend it for a certain amount of time to win. I had a lot of fun playing that gametype. Basically it was an overall positive experience and it’s definitely a game I’ll continue to play. I also look forward to playing the final release when Metal Gear Solid 4 finally drops on June 12th!
Also, one last thing I just remembered – the game gets points just for actually using the Greek letter for beta ( ß ) to denote the game is a beta version. =P
