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Metal Gear Solid V PC Disc Contains Steam Installer, Nothing Else
dotarray writes: The boxed copy of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain reportedly contains nothing but a Steam installer. That's right, even if you fork out real-world money for a physical copy of the game, you'll still have to download the whole thing from the internet.
The game officially launches tomorrow. Early critical reviews are quite positive, though you should take that with a grain of salt until the game is more widely distributed. Game Informer says, "Unlike the linear design of previous entries, The Phantom Pain rarely assumes you have particular weapons and equipment, so the missions are brilliantly designed with multiple paths to success." The Washington Post notes, "The Phantom Pain’s openness feels like Kojima finally found a technical platform broad enough to make use of all of those tools and trusts players to build their own narrative drama from the way they choose to put these tools together for each mission." IGN has this criticism: "... where Phantom Pain’s gameplay systems are far richer and meatier than any the series has ever seen, its story feels insubstantial and woefully underdeveloped by comparison." Metal Gear Solid 5 is launching for PCs, current consoles, and previous-gen consoles; Digital Foundry thinks is likely to be the last true cross-generation AAA title.
The Phantom Pain? Like the pain that amputees feel in the location of their removed limbs? That is truly an awful name for a game.
The game is painfully slow to install, because it's not even there. Makes perfect sense.
I had something similar with logic analyzers from HP. I ordered an upgrade to enable new features on about 50 logic analyzers.
A week later the shipping department called me. Asked me to come get my delivery. I asked them to drop it at me office. They laughed and said, no you need to come unpack it.
Got downstairs and found a full pallet, shrink wrapped with boxes. After 2 hours of tearing down the pallet to individual boxes, I opened one up. Inside were foam spacers holding a smaller box - the size of a legal sheet of paper, about 4 inches thick. Inside that box was another set of foam spacers, holding a paperboard envelope. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper. With a single license key printed on it. A 60 digit license key, mind you.
I had 50 boxes of individual license keys. I spent 3 hours unpacking all of them, then another 10 hours going to each individual logic analyzer to type them in. Mind you, you couldn't just put any key in any logic analyzer. It had to match the serial number, so you had to search all the papers to find the correct one.
Works upgrade experience ever. Thanks HP! (Now called Agilent, I suppose)