Metal Gear Online 3.0 is a Fucking Mess.

Game rant time. Feel free to start a roundtable discussion about this. Today's topic, Metal Gear Online 3.0. (This is long, bear that in mind.)

Let me start this by saying I'm an MGO veteran starting with the original on PS2 that came with MGS3: Subsistence. I bought a goddamn ethernet bridge to be able to use my PS2 to play online for this game.

That game was amazing. Like absolutely stellar. Then came MGO 2 with the release of MGS4 on PS3. Great game as well, though at the same time took several steps back from the original for just as many steps forward as it took.

Now we come to MGO 3...and it feels like a hollow shell compared to the original two releases. Yeah, the controls are the tightest the series has ever seen, sure. And yeah the graphics are great. But everything else about the game just feels dumbed down and lacking compared to the other two entries.

The introduction of classes is one I really like actually...but the balancing feels utterly terrible.

The spawning is absolutely fucking bonkers. Spawn killing is now not only a serious thing, but seems to even be a major focus in Bounty Hunter. And you can spawn on your buddies...which in theory sounds great. Worked well in Battlefield afterall.

But here's the kicker. One guy infiltrates into the enemy spawn and then starts spawn killing, his buddy spawns on him and then you have two people doing this. You kill one and then immediately the other guy again spawns on his buddy and this never ends.

Auot-lock WILL lock onto stealthed opponents. I can actually be trying to aim at a guy I can see in front of me and press L2 and my guy will auto-lock onto a random guy crossing close by in stealth. This is pretty goddamn absurd and nearly completely eliminates the idea of stealth. Once more people catch onto this and figure it out it will make stealth camo absolutely worthless.

And the biggest offender so far to me is that if the host quits the match...then everyone quits the match. I've played a LOT of multiplayer shooters but NONE in the last decade have done this. Sure before-hand they would, but not in this decade. That means that if you're whooping the host pretty badly...and if you're doing the buddy spawn camping shit I just talked about above, this is easy to do to a lower skilled player, and they decide to ragequit...then the whole game gets flushed down the toilet and you get to load back into freeplay mode and then try to find another game to load back into after that. (Only for it to potentially happen again near immediately...as has happened to me.)

There are several smaller things, but my first impressions of MGO3 are pretty negative and they left a really bad taste in my mouth. And this is coming from someone who loved the first two iterations of MGO so much that I bought MGS5 almost exclusively for this mode. (I wanted to play the story but could have waited on that with all the other stuff I have to play right now.)

MGO 2 was a complicated mess to play due to Konami's idiotic decision to make you jump through hoops to access it. Having to create a separate Konami log-in through a super slow loading and laggy Japanese website with bare minimum Engrish instructions to get you there. But once you DID get in it was pretty smooth sailing and felt like a fully fleshed out experience and not a tacked on multiplayer mode with big ambitions...which is exactly what this one feels like.

And now we have this. It's not even in just the watered down gameplay but some of the overall design decisions are so confusing it makes you wonder if any of this was playtested at all before launch.

I'm frankly disgusted at how disappointed I am with MGO3 after my first day. I'm hoping the coming weeks can turn that opinion around, even if just a bit. At this point the hassle and time it takes to start the mode up and then find a game that you can get into (And this gets WAY more difficult if you have even ONE person in a party with you, btw) to play just don't seem worth it.

Seriously, technical and gameplay issues aside this has to be the longest I think I've ever spent just trying to go from boot into a goddamn multiplayer game in history. Damn near two minutes of loading, logo splashes, 5-8 pages of online news and then picking a mode...and then more loading and then dropped into freeplay...and then trying to find a match to get into. With no way to refresh the list without just restarting the search, having to set all search parameters again....and then trying and failing to join matches before finally getting into one. It is fucking ridiculous. Anywhere from 5-10+ minutes from boot to get into a game that could abruptly end almost immediately after joining no less. It's one of the biggest clusterfucks I've ever had to endure to play a multiplayer game this decade.

I can tell you this. Coming off of this horseshit to play a raid in Destiny last night made me realize just how much I appreciate that that game...works. And then thinking back on the Black Ops 3 beta...it's like night and day between MGO and that. Boot into the game in 30 seconds flat, pick multiplayer and into a match in less than a minute. Playing and having a good time, no bullshit. People can talk all the shit on CoD that they want, but the fact of the matter is that the games work well and you get in and playing almost instantly. Shit like this makes me realize just how much I take stuff like that for granted. Jesus. Fucking. Christ.