Metal Gear Online : PS3 Review

Posted December 4, 2008 by General Victory in Featured, Featured Home, PS3 Reviews, Reviews.

Metal Gear Online : Starter Pack
After playing through the starter pack for well over 30 hours, my final thoughts were along the lines of the game being worth looking into despite the few networking issues that plagued it during the premiere beta. Now that Konami has had time to tweak everything, how did everything finally turn out?

To summarize for those who need a quick overview, Metal Gear Online is the online multiplayer component of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, though it is treated as a stand-alone game, much like Counter-Strike: Source was with the original release of Half-Life 2. Players create their own character and fight in one of the variety of gameplay modes, including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Sneaking Mission, Rescue Mission, Capture Mission, and Base Mission. Once you’ve got your character all figured, you can then choose from a list of skills that can be leveled up, giving them new abilities and enhancing old ones. The game itself plays very similarly to MGS4, with non-linear means to fight and complete objectives.

The core gameplay tends to consist of the red team and the blue team fighting each other, or over objectives across five different maps. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are straightforward, but the other gametypes have a bit more meat to them, especially Sneaking Mission. In Sneaking Mission, a randomly chosen player takes the role of Old Snake and must collect three dog tags from KO’d enemies, while the red and blue team try to fight each other in regular Team Deathmatch, though killing Snake on the way also tends to happen very often. Rescue mission is similar to 1-Flag CTF, with one team defending an objective and the other trying to capture it. Capture Mission consists of both teams trying to collect one or both objectives and defending them for a set period of time. Finally, Base Mission is similar to King Of The Hill, with each team competing to capture several bases spread throughout each map. Overall, there’s a nice selection of modes to choose from, and hopefully more will be added in the future.

Controls in Metal Gear Online are quite standard and easy to grasp, with one of the only problems being the first-person mode coming off as too sluggish, something I hoped would have been fixed from the beta. The auto-aim system also feels a bit random and if you’re not using the skill that enhances the view distances it works within, its only good use is with the Stun Knife for easy stabbing or shocking. Weapon and item changing is sure to be annoying at first, but once you choose and customize one of the three ways to do them, it becomes a lot more manageable. Most of the standard movement and gestures from the Metal Gear series is still present, such as hanging, crawling, forward rolls, and crouching. The d-pad is used for giving voice commands, which allows players without mics to communicate with their team, if only in a very basic manner.

As for getting into a game, you have three methods to choose from, including Free Battle, which is just a server listing of all present games, Automatching, which is just a matchmaking service that references players’ stats and connections to match each other up, and lastly, Training, which is a good way to figure out how to play when you’re just starting. In general, Automatching is clearly the best route to go, as you’ll find games with very minimal lag in comparison to finding one in Free Battle, which gives absolutely no indication as to whether or not the game will lag other than a rudimentary system in which other players rate a host out of five stars, which stays with their profile forever, much like the feedback system on eBay. Still, it just doesn’t make sense to not include even basic icons like a green, yellow, and red circle to indicate how good your ping is, especially in the year 2008. Lag itself is indeed a big problem, and while Automatching tends to alleviate most issues in this regard, you’ll still run into matches where you’ll seemingly die randomly, only to realize that the client-side hit detection is out of wack and the game assumed the whole situation.

Another issue with MGO is with the actual interface itself is your friends list. Instead of using the standard PSN friends list, Konami makes use of their own, meaning you have to add everyone again. And they sure didn’t make it easy to do, either, as the person you want to add has to be online in order to receive the request. Not only that, but the other person must reciprocate by sending you a request as well. The Konami ID is also another ordeal, as you must create an ID for Konami services as well as MGO itself, all the while being signed in on your PSN account. There is absolutely nothing standardized about the way you operate the game’s online features, and it’s a shame that this route was chosen in lieu of just using the same PSN ID that nearly every other game uses. For an online-based game, this is unacceptable, and one of the biggest things holding it back from being as good as it could be.

Once you get past these problems and finally just start playing, you’ll no doubt be a bit confused about how you want to play. With a number of skills to choose from, it’s really hard to figure out what you want to play as when you first start, and it can be incredibly frustrating those first few hours. Once players finally start leveling up their skills, it becomes clear what works and what doesn’t, and that’s when the fun truly begins. Skills are not permanent, thankfully, and players can swap them out at the beginning of each match, though you must stick with them for the duration of the match once it’s begun.

Skills play a major role in Metal Gear Online, with each character can have up to four skill slots, but the catch is that in order to use skills higher than Level 1, they require more space. For example, one setup could consist of one Level 3 skill and one Level 1 skill; another could be four Level 1 sets, etc. Some of the more interesting skill choices include CQC, Blades, Scanner, and Sixth Sense. One of the more important skills in everyday combat is CQC, short for close quarters combat, is the fighting style introduced by The Boss in MGS3 and used in sub-sequent Metal Gear titles. One of the best results (and examples of mixing skills together) is when Level 1 CQC is used in conjunction with Level 3 Blades, which allows players to grab enemies and slit their throats for an instant kill. Scanner and Sixth Sense are examples of skills that work with the SOP (Sons Of Patriots) HUD system, which is similar to that of the one used in the recent Ghost Recon titles, and is shared with other players. Scanner allows small tracking devices to be injected into enemies while in a CQC hold, which keeps tabs on the enemy, and Sixth Sense shows nearby traps on SOP.

Graphically, everything is quite good, though a bit mixed in some areas. The character models and most of the other in-game models look great, but sometimes the environments can be inconsistent in terms of texture quality and model detail. The frame rate is also a bit inconsistent, with it usually running at 30 FPS, though there are cases where it will speed up and slow down when transitioning from a big area to a smaller one, and vice versa. It doesn’t seem to dip below 30 FPS, though, so it is very much playable. The music is also great, and the player is given the option of choosing from a myriad of selections, including pieces from all the major installments of the Metal Gear series.

One of the cooler features that seems to be included in a lot of newer games these days is the ability to snap screenshots in-game, allowing you to share your exploits online with your friends. You can upload the screens to your profile on the Metal Gear Online Community Support site, or save them in a higher resolution onto your XMB, with the ability to mess with the colors, brightness, and contrasts. Other online features include personal stats, rankings, match history, and the MGO Shop. The MGO Shop is set to be a place where new downloadable content will be available for purchase in the future, though for now there are only two things, which are character slots and more voice commands.

Metal Gear Online has a lot of potential for an online-only game, but it just seems incomplete at the moment in regards to content. Character customization is one of the high points, with a lot of different ways to choose the appearance and skill sets of each character, though only the latter is able to be changed after the fact. With a standalone version released in Japan in Summer 2008, one can only hope the same happens for the rest of the world. It would be great to see MGO released as a standalone game on the PlayStation Store as well, like Warhawk. Despite the fact that Konami prematurely killed of all support for the original Metal Gear Online, I don’t see this happening with the current iteration due to the sheer popularity and availability. I would like to see more effort put into the netcode, and add an indicator to show your ping in the Free Battle server list. The gameplay itself is very balanced, and has a nice pace from starting out to mastering different skills, and perhaps the only bottleneck is just the networking and the features that go with it.

Metal Gear Online : GENE Expansion
The first expansion pack for Metal Gear Online, titled “Gene Expansion”, was released on July 17th 2008 at a cost of $11.99 (£7.99), or $14.99 (£9.99) for the “Plus” version with an additional character slot. The expansion adds the capability to create female soldiers and several new features. These are three new maps, two new special characters (Meryl and Johnny), the “Survival” game mode and a new reward system.

As of November 18th 2008, the Gene Plus version of the expansion is no longer be available within Japan, however no confirmation of such a change has yet been added to the English language version of the Metal Gear Online sites. The Gene Expansion will still be available

A content expansion for Metal Gear Online, the Gene Expansion is the first in a series of planned content packs that will augment the basic game included with MGS4. The pack includes new maps, characters, and options; people who buy the pack will be able to set up games or play in games that have these features enabled, whereas people who don’t will not.

The first thing that Gene adds is new maps. These are Coppertown Conflict, Virtuous Vista, and Tomb of Tubes.

Coppertown Conflict is a remake of Brown Town from MGS3’s online mode. It is a dust-swept town, with sandstorms blowing back and forth obscuring vision. There is an open street for snipers to duel on, and in addition there are tunnels and buildings for more close-range combat. As a whole, the map has a very neat atmosphere; it feels similar to the map Midtown Maelstrom, in that they’re both about urban combat with lots of places to snipe or hide.

Virtuous Vista is a long, open map taken from the South America section of the game’s single player mode. There’s a lot of greenery and tall grass in this level, which means that people who wear green have a good advantage for hiding (in much the same way that people who wear tan or brown on sandy levels have an advantage). The map is pretty much built for long-range sniper battles, with lots of little areas for long-range shooting. The main point of the map is the power station – in team games, one team starts at the power station and the other team spawns at the other end of the map and must attack it. There are also some emplaced weapons around the map – the power station is defended by heavy machine gun turrets, and there is a mortar pointed at the power station that can be used by the attacking team. Both types of emplace weapons can be used to great effect if teamwork is used; they’re both powerful weapons, but they’re also both out in the open, which means that a sniper can simply pick off the user if they’re not covered by their allies.

Tomb of Tubes is an entirely indoor level – a sewer facility with channels of water going through it. The level is poorly lit, and there’s a lot of background noise due to the rushing water. It’s a claustrophic level perfect for close-quarters combat, and it’s also one of the levels that’s dark enough to warrant use of the flashlight gun attachment. The level has a lot of water, as mentioned; it’s the only place (that I know of) where water is deep enough to swim in, and it’s frequently possible to drown by either being knocked out while in the water, or “playing dead” for too long while in the water.

With Gene, the ability to create female characters has been added. This requires you to make a new character, either by buying a new character slot or deleting your old character (unless you have the Gene pack when you make your first character), and it’s somewhat odd that female characters weren’t included from the very beginning. The female character faces, like their male counterparts, cover a variety of ethnicities – Caucasian, African, Asian, and Hispanic. The voices have a wide range of personalities, and tend to sound reasonably professional (and they can be customized further with pitch changes). The models for the characters are reasonably proportioned – no giant breasts or skimpy clothing, though they’re not entirely devoid of curves. All in all, the female characters seem to be tastefully done.

Another new feature is the inclusion of unique characters – in this pack, those characters are Meryl Silverburgh and Johnny / “Akiba”. When the option for unique characters is set in a game, each character is assigned to either the red or blue team. A random person on each team gets to be that team’s unique character for a round; after the round ends, another person gets the chance to play as the unique character.

Meryl is a leader gifted with several abilities. She has her unique Long-Barrel Desert Eagle, a powerful scoped handgun, that only she can select as a weapon. Her presence as a leader restores Psyche to all allies around her, and she can wake up a knocked-out character with a single tap (whereas normally it takes a few seconds of holding down the button to revive someone). She also excels at using handguns and conveys a lot of information through SOP – namely, enemies that are targeting her and enemies that she has damaged are both highlighted with SOP.

Johnny’s abilities mostly come from his lack of nanomachines. He cannot connect to allies with SOP (though he can still communicate with radio and chat), but at the same time he is immune to enemy abilities that rely on SOP, like Narc and Monomania, as well as items that use SOP like the SOP DESTAB (in Base mode) or the Scanning Plug. On the other hand, there are some disadvantages brought about by his lack of nanomachines; committing friendly fire causes Johnny to curl up and apologize profusely for a few seconds, instead of the normal “SOP Locked” status that prevents you from firing your weapon for the same amount of time. Furthermore, his famous character trait – his irritable bowels – comes into play after he kills 3 or so enemies, and he has to pause to use the bathroom. Afterwards, a stink cloud surrounds him, causing anyone caught in it to choke and cough. Johnny’s special ability is that he can see every trap on the entire map, and he’s also capable of disarming traps from a safe distance. Johnny has two special weapons – the “regular” special weapon, the XM8 Compact, or his “advanced” special weapon, a large-caliber automatic sniper rifle. The latter can only be purchased in Drebin Points mode for 10000 Drebin Points.

The final additions in Gene are Survival Mode and the Rewards Shop. Survival Mode is a mode that takes place for four hours (8-12 Central Time) on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Players form teams of 6 people and see how long they can survive against other teams in randomly determined games. Beating a lot of teams in a row without losing gets you more points; the points are then used in the Reward Shop (which, at the time of writing, is still not up) to buy new clothes, gear, camouflage patterns, and face paint. Survival is an interesting mode that allows a team of friends to get together and really put their teamwork into practice, and it’s definitely a fun mode despite how rarely it’s playable.

As a whole, the Gene expansion’s main problem is how it’s been handled by Konami. It seems that they were wholly overwhelmed by the response that the pack got and underestimated how many people would want to play it. There are only two servers for Survival mode, the MGO Online Shop was down until recently because too many people were on trying to buy the expansion, and the Rewards Shop went back up at a later date because they couldn’t deal with the number of people that would try to get in. However, the expansion itself and the content it provides definitely adds to the MGO experience, so this is a must-have for any fan of the game.

All Other Updates for the GENE Expansion Pack include:

For GENE EXPANSION only

Metal Gear Online : Unknown Level – Expansion Pack 3?
In February 2008 a collection of new screenshots were released for Metal Gear Online, within this collection were three screenshots that show off an abandoned urban city that includes stairs, arches, burntout cars, balconies and even a clock tower, this looks like it was built for plenty of sniper battles and lots of CQC encounters due to the amount of hidden places, but when MGO was released with MGS4 in June this map was nowhere to be scene and it’s still not available even after two expansion packs.

This looks like a large and powerful map as maybe lots of the buildings on the outskirts of the map could maybe be entered and used as sniper positions as well as cover from enemy fire, all of the maps so far have had the same initials for both words to describe the map, see below.

• Ambush Alley
• Gronznyj Grad
• Midtown Maelstrom
• Urban Ultimatum
• Blood Bath
• Coppertown Conflict
• Virtuous Vista
• Tomb of Tubes
• Silo Sunset
• Forest Firefight
• Winter Warehouse

This level looks like a cross between Coppertown Conflict, Midtown Maelstrom, Urban Ultimatum and Gronznyj Grad but much larger than any of them, the ideal name for this map would be Desolate District (DD). All we can tell from these three screenshots is that the map has been tested on at least two different modes, these modes are Team Deathmatch and Sneaking Mission.

So far Kojima Productions haven’t decided to release this map and their reason for this is still unknown. Could they have abandoned this level? could it be used in the next version of Metal Gear Online with MGS5? or could it still be in development right now and be part of the third expansion pack for the current Metal Gear Online.

Closing Comments
MGO is a fantastic multiplayer game. Metal Gear Online goes a long way towards fixing many of the problems seen in the online sections of MGS3, Portable Ops and Portable Ops Plus, this comes with a brand new camera system that literally changes the way of the gameplay. For fans of the series, the additional extras, including the unlockable items, different game mode make the game truly full-filling. For the price, you can’t go wrong with MGO as you get MGS4 bundled on this disc as well — the only problem is that if you haven’t played and beaten the any of the other Metal Gear games then you’ll have trouble getting used to this game, but it still can’t be missed as the controls are easy to pick up.

Once again, this is the best version of the online segment to the Metal Gear series and it pushes the PS3 just as far as it can go. With endless hours of play this makes for a fantastic experience that will stimulate multiple parts of your brain and make you feel all fuzzy inside. The two new expansion packs, the new unique characters along with the new game modes and maps make the action fit well into the gameplay and certainly make the gameplay even more challenging. With so much going on this is a game that will easily please fans of the series and help to win back those who were dismayed by the online segments used in MGS3, Portable Ops and Portable Ops Plus.

With one of the most beautiful graphical styles and dozens upon dozens of things to try out in this highly detailed game playing it for even 30 hours just isn’t enough, you’ll want to go back and play for another 30+ hours. There’s still the one issue with the camera system that can become frustrating, but with the general level of excellence everywhere else and considering the power of the PS3 this is still an amazing game. MGO is a great way for the online portion of the series to continue and is a great indication of more great MGO features to come. Online games don’t get much better than this.

Tagged as Expansion Pack, GENE, Meme, Metal Gear Online, MGO, Review