10 Baffling Oversights In Otherwise Great Video Games
9. Metal Gear Solid 3 Revises The Series' Iconic Stealth. Breaks It.
Stealth for the first two games in the Metal Gear Solid franchise was simple. Shockingly so, even. With the whole experience boiling down to essentially whether or not your character was in the small field of view of an enemy (signalled by a cone of vision on the mini-map), these early games were able to create an accessible yet incredibly fun game of cat and mouse.
That is, until Metal Gear Solid 3 overcomplicated things. Removing the simplistic cone of vision approach of previous titles, this third entry in the series added a wealth of new features to aid you in sneaking your way through levels. As a result, enemies became smarter with a long range equipment, meaning patrols could spot you from as far as halfway across the map.
Which would have been fine, if the game actually explained how you were supposed to evade them. Giving you a new camouflage editor, the title had players matching their camo in accordance to their environment, with their stealth rating being indicated by a percentage.
However, this percentage told you virtually nothing about how hidden you were in terms of how close guards could get before being alerted, how fast you could move without being seen or whether or not they could spot you off-screen - reducing the whole thing to an endless exercise in menu-cycling trial and error.