‘Metal Gear Online’ Gameplay: Could Competitive Multiplayer Be Snake’s Biggest Weakness?

The Metal Gear Online gameplay is officially set to go live when the Metal Gear Solid 5 release date hits. This could be a bad idea for the kind of game this series is known to be.

Veterans of the Metal Gear franchise will tell you that the heart of the game is in the stealth. Yes, there are some innovative weapons and tactics involved, but it’s always been best played with Snake sneaking in and not killing anyone other than the occasional boss character.

Another series has used a similar approach to its online multiplayer, though the rule there is to kill without being detected. Assassin’s Creed‘s competitive multiplayer modes have never been popular. It was often slammed for being boring and repetitive, and possibly led to Ubisoft’s decision to make the online portion of Assassin’s Creed: Unity a cooperative one instead.

Stealth and competitive multiplayer modes don’t mix well, and this is where Snake’s latest adventure could fail miserably. If the Metal Gear Online gameplay focuses on players sneaking around and trying to kill each other from cover, Konami could discover what Ubisoft has already learned.

Metal Gear Online could dissolve into another shooter, as gamers get bored with sneaking and waiting for the perfect kill with that nifty weapon, making it little more than a Call of Duty clone. First and third person shooters are everywhere now, so if this is what the competitive multiplayer will turn into, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain will simply end up being another version of what we’ve already played.

If MGO isn’t based on killing everybody else, and focuses more on collecting a certain item before everybody else, then it’s basically a capture the flag scenario, which Halo has been doing for years. Metal Gear Online gameplay could end up being just another version of something we’ve done before, proving that the game is best left offline.

The story is what always made Metal Gear shine, and bringing it to competitive multiplayer could be the biggest mistake Konami has ever made with the franchise.

[Image via Slash Gear]