There isn't even a penalty for quitting.īounty Hunter especially sounds fun on paper: you get to fulton opponents and depending on the number of players they've killed, that number gets added to your team tickets. Outside of a short description for each mode, the game throws you in and expects you to know what’s up. They’re there, sure, but you can and will have a much better chance using lethal weapons. Things like the benefit of using non-stealth weapons, or sneaking around and waiting for someone to fall into your trap are not encouraged. Metal Gear Online doesn't actually teach players about how its gameplay is unique. After all, plenty of online games suffer from the same plague on their first few days of launch. Now, you may shrug this off to the old 'players still learning the game' excuse. Doesn't matter though, because all modes play like the good old Team Deathmatch. There are three modes in Metal Gear Online: Bounty Hunter, Cloak and Dagger, and Comm Control. If this isn’t frustrating in a supposedly tactical game, I don’t know what is.Īll modes just boil down to Team Deathmatch That means if your host disconnects for any reason, not only will the game not auto-select another host, it will erase everyone’s stats with it. That’s because modern games usually have a listen server of sorts set up, and the ones relying solely on peer-to-peer connections seamlessly pick another player to be a host when the current one disconnects, without interrupting your game too much.Īnd you know what else games haven’t suffered from in years? Experience points and stats that only upload at the end of the match. If the match host disconnects, everyone is thrown out and nobody gets XPĪnnoyances like host migration are things we haven’t had in games for a long while. Doesn't matter if you’re joining an 11/12 game or a 5/12, games are always full. The only catch is that the number of players reported is almost always out of date. You can be here for minutes or hours.īrowsing games is the answer, right? Wrong! When you query the game for servers, it lists a number of different ones depending on the criteria you picked.

It won’t tell you how long it’ll take, and it won’t tell what it’s doing. Remember how in modern games that message actually says what the game is doing, things like 'finding the best server,' or 'narrowing down options'? Well, you’ll find none of that here. Auto matchmaking leaves you with just an icon on your screen that indicates it’s searching for a match. Since its launch yesterday, I've had trouble getting into servers no matter the mode I pick or the method I try. The way you get into a game is by either choosing automatic matchmaking, or browsing a list of games. When you choose the Metal Gear Online option from the menu, you’re thrown into what the game calls 'Free Play.' You’re left to run around in a small map while you wait for your game to load. It boggles my mind how in 2015, when games' online components have moved well beyond being a tacked-on feature, some developers still manage to get it wrong, or don’t bother implementing it correctly. The matchmaking/ game browsing experience sucks So while some of my issues with it may not be news to fans of that mode - and possibly something they've even come to expect from it – they’re nonetheless annoyances that when added up, make for a forgettable, often frustrating experience. I’ll admit, I've never played any of the previous Online iterations (this being the third). The multiplayer end, Metal Gear Online, will become nothing more than curiosity for most of the player-base, owed to a combination of bizarrely backwards decisions and gameplay that doesn't offer anything new or interesting. Well, the single-player portion of it anyway.

Where do I start? Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is one of the year’s best games. The top seven reasons why you shouldn't bother with Metal Gear Online

First class trouble servers