I will cover gameplay only. Story and narrative are deliberately excluded, as the game's incompleteness there is already well documented.
TL;DR: I found myself wandering through this empty world, avoiding the outpost I had already cleared 20 times, doing missions in places I had already seen and already knew how to solve. It's also nice that missions don't carry over the progression from your free roaming, and that this progression is not permanent. Basically the game tells you to do something, and then it discards what you did. In the end, after 30 hours (10 of which I left the game open waiting for upgrades to complete) I just gave up. It's so boring. The game design defeats itself. It's repetitive, shallow and uninteresting. I realized that the best strategy was to do the outpost once and then ignore them. The best strategy for a mission is to speedrun it. The best approach to the game is to actually ignore it, and "play" the systems the game uses, because these systems are broken and disconnected.
MGSV fails at what it needed to do: a large, open world stealth sandbox. The mechanics are extremely good, but the game design defeats itself, resulting in a boring, unbearable game.
[b]Thesis[/b]
MGSV is a broken game design resulting from several internally competent subsystems (stealth mechanics, AI, traversal tools, base-building, a PvP economy) assembled without a unifying design authority reconciling them against a single coherent player experience. Every specific failure below is a symptom of that one root cause: a production that lost its integration phase, not any single bad idea.
The game runs well and is [b]mechanically[/b] great. Mechanically here means that the stealth mechanics are superb and the controls are very good. The issue is that they put these things in a game design that defeats itself in several ways and it honestly sucks.
[b] No depth in the core loop[/b]
The game is wide but not deep. There's a large tool inventory (weapons, buddies, decoys) but the actual problem space per outpost stays constant: a bounded area, fixed guard archetypes, one or two objective types, no dynamic escalation. More hours produce more instances of an already-solved equation, not new problems. By mission 6–7, the full solution space is visible. Nothing new gets revealed later, which is a real ceiling to what the game offers. Compare it to other stealth and infiltration game where the solution space changes in each level. Difficulty scaling later in the game is almost entirely stat-padding (helmets, armor, more HP, more guards) rather than new tactical problems.
I really missed "curated" levels and situations. The open world to me is completely detrimental to the design of this game.
[b] The reward system is broken (Goodhart's Law)[/b]
Missions are primarily evaluated on completion time, not stealth. This is arguably the single worst design decision in the game, and a textbook case of Goodhart's Law: once a proxy metric (mission clear time) becomes the actual target, it stops representing what it was meant to represent (playing well/stealthily). The rank system disproportionately weights time over stealth and non-lethal play. A methodical, non-detected, no-kill run can score lower than a run where you tranquilize everyone and finish in three minutes. Since the score has consequences in your gameplay, this defeats the stealth and infiltration approach. The net effect is that once you understand this, there is no in-game incentive to play it nice and slow; in fact, the rational way is to speedrun missions because that's what the game rewards.
[b]The Open-World Transition[/b]
MGSV maps are large, but there's a lot of "nothing" in them. The world is large, travel is slow and boring and extremely repetitive. The outposts are all the same. You get one copy every 500m. They realized it is boring, so they added side routes so that you can avoid them. No fast travel, despite the open world genre norm across two decades. A lot of transversal time with nothing to do in it. And every means of transportation is so slow.
The Fulton/balloon mechanic is sitting right there as an obvious repurposable traversal tool and was never used for it: why can't I Fulton-extract myself? Was that not boring enough? Why do I need to wait 3 miunutes for a chopper to come get me? What does it add to the gameplay?
So ok, I could use a jeep to move around.. but hey, I have 12 of them at the base but I need to somehow unlock it to use it for a mission. Too bad, I need to get bored a bit more before actually having fun. Once you unlock it, you need to bring it with you, which isn't always possible. How the heck to these soldiers go and leave the outposts? Are they fulton-dropped there? Because outposts and checkpoints have no vehicles for the most part.
The helicopter pickup (wait for dispatch, wait for arrival, sit through takeoff/landing) and the long empty drives are the same thing: traversal time with no embedded decision or threat. The fix the designers did ship (helicopter auto-pickup, wide unguarded bypass routes around outposts) is a patch that lets players skip the world rather than a fix that makes the world worth crossing.
Even the effing Mother Base itself is oversized relative to what it needs to do: crossing between platforms takes real minutes by jeep, for no gameplay reason.
[b]The mission design is stupid[/b]
Good stealth design makes the objective clear and the method something you have to study. MGSV inverts this: the how is clear (tranquilizer gun or just no-trace approach), but the what is not. In fact, side objectives aren't disclosed, trigger conditions are unclear, it's unclear where you need to go, and optional tasks are essentially undiscoverable without external guides. How the heck am I supposed to know that a mission task is to retrieve all the metal in a outpost? How am I supposed to know that to get the full completion I have to extract 3 tanks?
This puts friction in the wrong place. MGSV makes you think before the mission, on a wiki, so that you know what the actual mission is, which is a different and much less interesting activity than actually beating a game.
[b]The economy is broken[/b]
By mission 13, when I actually dropped the game, I have 2 million GMP. I can't use them because everything is gated behind grinding resources. Apparently the Diamong Dogs have a huge supply chain issue and they can't really buy metal or fuel. Sucks to be playing as their leader, then.
GMP was made abundant because it was never the currency the monetization design cared about. Materials and MB Coins were the actual scarce resources the systems were tuned around, because one pulls you into the PvP metagame and the other into the cash shop (that was never shipped). The two-million-GMP-with-zero-resources problem is leftover plumbing from an economy that the single-player campaign was never really built to use on its own terms.
[b]Idle-game mechanics[/b]
It feels like playing a money grabber, cheap mobile game. A 36-minute research timer takes 36 actual minutes of gameplay! Some base expansions take multiple hours. This is arguably worse than a classic mobile-idle-game timer, which at least lets you close the app and get real progress for free while living your life. MGSV requires you to sit inside the session, doing something (missions, side ops, or literally idling at base) while a countdown that has nothing to do with skill runs down.
In fact, 30% of my play time is the game just sitting there open while I did other things so that the research and developments unlocked.
[b]Conclusion[/b]
It's a bad game design. If you like to create a challenge for yourself and grind (a lot), then you might like this. But if you're looking for a good, nice regular single player, I recommend something different.
