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I'm aware that there is other scrapped content to speak of, like the Battle Gear and guard dogs that soldiers within the game still reference in their dialogue, but the team made a concious decision to take those out because they weren't fun to play with, and I don't know about you, but I trust the decision of veteran game designers more than some anonymous stranger over the internet. It doesn't change the fact that this was just ONE mission out of fifty, thirty-eight when you take out challenge missions which would have required extensive playtesting in their own right. Whether or not you believe him or not is up to you, but between listening to the person who actually helped put the game out there versus getting lost in your own paranoid fantasy. It's worth mentioning that Peeler stated the reason for including the scrapped mission on the Collector's blu-ray was not to close that part of the story, but to give us a taste of the development process behind MGSV. Hell, the timeline at the end of Mission 46 even states 'Eli establishes his Kingdom of the Flies in Africa' so maybe it IS still supposed to be canon? I don't know, you don't know, and we might never know. I admit that this leaves certain plot points up in the air, like the fact that Eli is still carrying the third vocal strain and Sahelanthropus is still out there in the world. Maybe it wasn't even that? Maybe one of the actors couldn't finish recording so they decided to scrap it, maybe the gameplay portion didn't come together the way they hoped, there are literally HUNDREDS of potential reasons why Mission 51 didn't make the cut. Robert Peeler, former PR manager for Konami, suggested that KoTF was planned as post-release DLC content, but perhaps they weren't able to go through with this plan because of Kojima's departure from Konami. It's a shame that zombie survival is the best follow-on Konami could come up, but maybe it'll be the surprise hit of 2018? Who knows. GZ and TPP's stealth sandbox gameplay peppered with the organic base building system, making you feel more like Big Boss than ever, while rewarding you with continuous stream of new toys to play with and new ways to approach missions has been my favorite experience this entire generation so far, and I'm STILL playing it on a weekly basis two years on.
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Many of us ended up loving the gameplay of MGSV, and for me personally the fact that we'll probably never get a sequel (or even just MGSV-2) is the biggest tragedy of the Kojima/Konami drama. With Project Ogre, Kojima Productions sought to create a free-infiltration sandbox with an emphasis on replayability, and regardless of your subjective opinion of the story (which is little more than a 'take it or leave it' subplot anyway, much like Peace Walker was) I'd say they achieved what they set out to do. Breath of the Wild and Final Fantasy XV are two Japanese-developed open world games that have similar structural issues.
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You got a 40-hour campaign (give or take) with a story that ended up being stretched thin in places NOT because of cut content, but because of the open world nature of the game itself.
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The game was finished, guys! You don't have to keep saying that.