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May 19th, 2023(link)Articles
My writings, Video games
tech

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain – Realistic experience howto

How to have a realistic MGSV:TPP experience, excluding the Bollywood story and cutscenes, and the Fulton system with humans – it can be disabled too if you want – which after all are just a fun aside.

If you haven’t started the game already, it’s required that you start the prologue. If you never played the game at all, you should play with vanilla settings up to Mission 2 completion (“Diamong Dogs”); in such case you won’t need, later, to load the provided savefile. Just use the “Take Me Off The Grid V2” mod to unlock the sniper rifle and you’re good to go.

When you’re ready, you can start modding the game.

If you want to have all the required files ready to go, you can use my Zip here[🡕].

Mods to download:

Do the widescreen fix, if you happen to have a widescreen monitor. For detailed instructions, see this Reddit post[🡕].

In short:

Since you’re going for a realistic playthrough, you probably don’t want the markers. If you do (the can be justified with some high-tech reasoning, especially if your character wears an high-tech suite), do the Cheat Engine thing with K4sh’s tables; the Cheat Engine is open source and the script is safe, I checked myself. Press F1 to activate the markers fix.

About Infinite Heaven, the menu is opened with left-stick-click followed by right-stick-click, or F3 with the keyboard; same to close it. D-Pad to operate.

Before installing Take Me Off The Grid V2 (if you will install it):

OR

block all connections from and to mgsvtpp.exe and mgsvmgo.exe in your firewall settings.

Optional suggested mods, some of which also help with realism, without going into a full rabbit hole:

Now customize the settings:

Original game options:

Infinite Heaven menu:

Now it’s time to change the savefile. The settings we’ve set makes sense only if you have a sniper rifle. Actually, any Metal Gear Solid videogame only makes sense when you give the protagonist a sniper rifle, before we even start talking about realism.

Download my save Quick-start save with sniper rifle[🡕]. MGSV:TPP Steam IDs are 287700 AND 311340. The last one is the one that counts. Overwrite "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\XXXXXXXX\311340\remote\TPP_GAME_DATA

If you want to keep your save, install the mod Take Me Off The Grid V2[🡕], pick the most complete one – the last Zip, Take Me Off The Grid with NoDevReq - Free deployment, and develop the rifle. Save, and then uninstall the mod.

Now, and now only, you can finally play the game.

I also wanted to make a mod that changes the weapons developement so that you can have a natural progression of sniper rifles, and to fully eliminate tranquilizer weapons. It’s just a matter of editing the files in /Assets/tpp/motherbase/script/, but I got bored of the game super quick, because I don’t actually like games, I just liked fiddling with mods a bit.

In any case, the truth is that you cannot have a realistic MGS, because then you get those missions where the enemy base is stuck in a hole between rocks, and of course you cannot climb, because climbing doesn’t exist and never existed in video games ever, and so you have to infiltrate and find yourself two meters near the soldiers, so fuck it.

Actual sniper games are even worse, just see the Sniper Ghost Warrior saga and its unrealistic and frustrating and horrible stealth moments between one sniping spot and the next. The first old Sniper Elite is probably the only decent sniping game.

May 19th, 2023(link)Articles
My writings, Video games
tech