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This is the view overlooking the outpost from the first mission after the prologue. Miller's being held in there somewhere. Find him. Get him out.
It really is a great start to the game proper. It evokes the very best of the Far Cry games while still heavily demanding proficient stealth. Engaging the enemy is fool-hardy and dangerous. Even more so if you've a target to protect. But if you've been playing enough
Ground Zeroes prior to this, you should be well prepared. Kojima said somewhere that
The Phantom Pain would be easier for players who struggled with
Ground Zeroes because it would be much more open with many more opportunities to retreat and hide off somewhere. Unlike the
Ground Zeroes camp, which left little room for error on its little island.
It feels like a far more mature
Peace Walker, with many of its ideas expanded and refined to more appropriately fit both the theme and the platform. For example, between every mission in
Peace Walker, it was implied that a chopper picked you up and took you back to Mother Base. This sometimes felt wildly inappropriate, but it fit within the bite-size mission constraint of the PSP. Now remove those limitations, give it an open world appropriate for 2015, and now you can stay out in the field for as long as you want, and manually request a resupply whenever you really need it. There's no need to go home after every mission (though it is unwise to stay out there
too long). Just open up your iDroid if you want to manage Mother Base or accept a new mission. It feels so much better and goes a long way toward making this feel like one of the best open world games ever made.
As last year's
Thief made clear, open world plus stealth make for a killer combo. Even
Dying Light understands this, with many of its finest moments taking place at night, when evasion becomes your primary tactic.
The Phantom Pain shines just as bright, if not brighter. I've just played a mission that had me blowing the communication dishes off the top of three structures in an enemy outpost. I infiltrated it at night, carefully planted C4 on all three dishes undetected, moved outside the perimeter of the outpost, called my horse, blew the charges, and galloped off into the night like I was never even there. It was one of the most awesome little moments I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a game like this. It was like one of those TV shows or movies, where the bad guy's have somehow secretly planted explosives all over the place despite the security detail. It felt just like that.
I'm happy to say that every moment of the game so far has been absolutely golden.
