Delta impressions thread

[starschwar]

I made it past the battle with The Pain.

While I still find myself tripped up by muscle memory and the uncanny feeling of the game being a hybrid of both 3 and 5, I am having fun. I think there needed to be just a bit more polish in the gameplay mechanics. Holdups need to be a very, very specific distance to work that may have made sense with the original controls, but feel entirely arbitrary with the new style aiming and movement. The new CQC animations kick ass, but sometimes I miss the uncomplicated precision of the original. Enemy stun duration seems faster than it used to be. Since I'm hunting GAKOS and Kerotans, I might just opt for more lethality going forward.

Crouch walking is nice to have, but useless considering how 'noisy' it is when not using stalking mode. Enemy vision and AI is so much tougher from the original that camo is almost useless unless you're crawling or pressed flat against a wall.

Thanks to the modernized way combat works - especially third person aiming - alerts are almost a breeze now. Some well-placed semi-auto fire from an AK and most situations can be resolved easily.

Something I adore is the effort to improve MGS3's biggest flaw: too much clicking around in menus. Shortcuts for radio, context sensitive prompts for quick access to cure and backpack menus when it makes sense, and especially the quicklist of camo swaps are all great. Being able to sort food and camo in different ways - so convenient! The cure, backpack, and camo menus themselves have been streamlined and make more sense.

I need to spend more time with it - at least get to the ending - before I fully weigh in. As it stands, this is a beautiful version of MGS3 that offers a lot of improvements over the original/subsistence/HD collection versions. However, with the identity crisis of how actually interacting with the game feels - both weighed down by the "rules" of the original while simultaneously trying to give it some Phantom Pain levels of modernization I'm hesitant to say this is the definitive version just yet. Again, this isn't a Twin Snakes / Star Wars Special Edition scenario where the bad overshadows the good. But this isn't quite there yet.

One last word on performance: my heart goes out to anybody who is struggling to get the frame rate right, and the game probably should not have released in this state. On PC, ultra settings (Native DLSS), 1080p, I'm getting nearly perfect 60 FPS, with the occasional drop to the upper 50s. I've seen reports of people with better GPUs than mine getting worse performance, so I can only assume that it's a complete package - CPU, RAM, SSD access - everything's probably playing a role in potential bottle necks. I'm fortunate enough to say that my personal experience is running far better than the PS2 versions (often sub-30), the PS3 HD collection version (usually 60 with some slowdown), but not as good as Master Collection on my own setup.