12 Obvious Reasons 2015’s Most Hyped Video Games Will Fail

4. Metal Gear Solid V - An Open World & Mute Snake Ruins The Storytelling

For the first time in franchise history, the Metal Gear Solid series is going fully open world. While Kojima's franchise has created large, open levels in the past, these hubs have still always been heavily scripted so that they fall in line with the developer's cinematic tone for the games. Unfortunately, a player-driven open world completely negates the potential for focused, well-paced storytelling - something the new 'mute protagonist'-style Snake seems to be erring further towards. With the player given the ability to tackle objectives when they want, it inherently makes telling a time-sensitive tale more difficult, as the stakes rarely feel daunting if you can take time out from your world-ending mission to capture 12 chickens or whatever meaningless fetch quests you still have pinned on your to-do list. However, with that said, although story-driven open worlds have rarely ever been pulled off successfully (even the plots of later Batman games pale in comparison to the original Arkham Asylum because of their more open nature), if there's one man who might have the intuition to finally perfect this holy balance, it would definitely be Kojima.