See Snake's Cool Clubhouse In MGS V: The Phantom Pain
For all his pals and animal friends
Yes, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain [official site] is a game about super spy Snake sneaking around an open world to get revenge and stop a shadowy organisation. It's also a game about Snake building a cool ocean clubhouse for his soldier pals and all their animal friends.
A new 30-minute video hows all the fun Snake will have around Mother Base, including playing with his dog, defending it against attackers in online invasions, showering (finally, a game learns the joys of cleanliness from Deadly Premonition!), and flying around listening to Joy Division.
Mother Base is Snake's home away from the field, where he and his closest advisors hang out. It's also where he's building a huge army by abducting soldiers from the field, who are presumably so impressed by how cool it is that they want to stay forever. MGS: Peace Walker introduced Mother Base as a place folks could upgrade to help develop items, but was mostly a pretty concept to wrap around a tech tree and a few spreadsheets. Mother Base in The Phantom Pain is an actual place, as publishers Konami have shown before, and it's built to your specification.
Snake can order the building of new facilities, like R&D creating new weapons or support to help him in the field. You get to choose how to build them and lay out the base, change the colours, give it a natty insignia, and all that. This isn't news. What's surprising from this video is quite how much goes on there:
I'm into the showers that wash off blood and stink between missions, and how folks will give you the gas face or toss water on you if you forget for too long. Beautiful, that. I only needed to be fined a Stinky Agent penalty once in Deadly Premonition before I learned my lesson. Snake can also give moral boosts to staff by checking in on them, eavesdrop on conversations, calm tensions between soldiers, run challenge missions, visit the animals he's yoinked from the field, and precisely lay out its defenses.
That last part is important when you dare venture into online play by building Forward Operating Bases onto Mother Base. Building these remote arms let you tap more resources, but also opt you into the online mode where other players might invade you. They'll arrive on a FOB and try to reach its core, swiping staff and resources on the way. You're alerted when they strike, and can return home from missions to fight them off. Again, Konami have spoken about this before, but this shows a lot more - down to watching replays of invasions to help you lay out your cameras, drones, and so on.
It's all very cool. Always a fan of adding weird but really polished details, that Hideo Kojima. I am so excited about this game.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom pain is now due on September 1st, after Konami bumped the PC release forward to match console versions. The game's dedicated multiplayer side, Metal Gear Online, won't arrive until January 2016, because reasons, but I assume FOB invasions will be active.