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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Play as Snake on open-ended missions where scouting a base, choosing your gear and deciding when to sneak or fight can change your approach.
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Developed · Konami
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a stealth action game about Snake rebuilding his forces after the events of Ground Zeroes. Instead of moving down one narrow route, you enter large mission areas and decide how to reach an objective. You can study guard positions, approach from a different side, wait for darkness, avoid a patrol or fight your way through. The story involves revenge and the private army called Diamond Dogs, but you do not need to know every earlier Metal Gear game to understand the immediate goal of a mission. The opening explains why Snake is starting over.
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The useful loop is to prepare at Mother Base, choose equipment, go into the field and bring back people or supplies that help the base grow. The Fulton recovery system lifts selected soldiers and materials out of a mission area. Staff at Mother Base can then support new equipment development. Buddies such as a horse or the dog shown in the gallery change how you travel and scout. A quiet approach is usually different from a loud one, but the game lets you experiment instead of demanding a single solution to every outpost. Look at the photo of Snake beside a building: it shows how a nearby guard and a lit area can make even a short crossing worth planning.
Konami released the game on September 1, 2015 for PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It is the larger follow-up to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, not an alternate name for that shorter prologue. Metal Gear Online and later editions are related releases, but this page describes the original Phantom Pain game. If you are choosing where to begin, expect stealth missions, base management and a story told through both missions and the people you recruit, rather than a conventional level-by-level shooter.
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