[quote=@lavulman] I know MGSV's development is understandably a touchy subject for a lot of people, but even though I'm still kind of salty about what Konami did to Team Silent and Igarashi, it's pretty hard for me to lay all of the blame on Konami with MGSV. They gave him 80 million dollars and a few years to make the game, which is more than a lot of developers could hope for. When I played the game and drove through all those vast expanses of wilderness with nothing significant in them, it really struck me as a waste of time and money, and coupling this with the writing fumbles like the one you mentioned with Ocelot really gives me the feeling that Kojima and his team were doing a poor job at managing the time and money they were given, whether it was sufficient or not. Even if he'd gotten it, rounding off the game with yet another Sahelanthropus fight like it was supposed to still feels pretty underwhelming. But yeah, those optional scenes with Venom breaking up fights and shit with his boys were pretty cool and I would have liked to see more of that sort of thing. [/quote] Oh yeah Konami isn't the primary one to blame imo. But I kind of feel like they have some indirect responsibility, 80 million or no Kojima didn't even want to make another game in the series and like you said with the expansive worlds with nothing of note in them and really a plot that overall doesn't really need to exist in the grand scheme of things it really shows. I mean, with the Ocelot thing and other questionable choices there is [i]some[/i] excuse for it, but it feels less like a major plot element having validity and more like it's there just so the point itself isn't entirely nonsense. It's more that it's a game that has a lot of tools to be great, I'd argue the gameplay is probably the smoothest MGS has ever been but from a story and emotional standpoint everything feels either cardboardy and tacked on (killing the infected soldiers really didn't even come close to hitting me with the emotional punch as much as furiously tapping X through the microwave hallway) or they're just not there. It's just the games good points that annoy me more for that reason. Like I love seeing Venom show Eli why Big Boss is the master of CQC, or just that scene with Ocelot echoing the words Big Boss taught him in 3, if there was at least more of that I could enjoy my experience more and empathize more with the cast.