Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is finally out on PC, a few weeks sooner than initially expected. Good news: it's not horribly broken! In fact, it seems to be running very nicely indeed so far. Samuel is reviewing it for us, and he's sent through these impressions of how MGS5 runs based on a few hours with the game.
"Things were looking good for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain s port after Ground Zeroes impressive transition to PC late last year, a well-optimised version brought with it a decent array of graphics options and remappable controls. I m a couple of hours into The Phantom Pain and so far it feels like it s of the same high standard.
"My hardware is roughly two years old. I ve got an Intel I5 4460@3.20GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780, and I m running everything on extra high settings, only dropping a touch beneath that in combat encounters. One noticeable issue, though not game-breaking, is that the game stutters whenever it quicksaves and the orange icon flashes in the top right-hand corner. Otherwise, this is as impressive a port as Ground Zeroes, and I can t wait to get through The Phantom Pain for our review."
Like Sam, I have noticed some momentary drops during those quicksave moments. I've also noticed occasional screen tear even with vertical sync enabled, though this may be due to problems with running the game in fullscreen windowed mode (you can run the game in windowed, borderless fullscreen and fullscreen).
I'm running an Intel i5-2500K quad core with a GTX 970 and 16GB of RAM. As you'd hope, the game runs at a steady 60 FPS even during hectic moments. The in-engine cutscenes are especially impressive, and despite some detail pop-in in the open world, the game looks great, if not quite on a par with The Witcher 3's open world.
Options
The range of graphics options is fairly decent. A field-of-view slider option would be helpful, particularly for players who want to spend a lot of time aiming in first-person. There's no separate anti-aliasing option, and from comparison screenshots it looks as though MGS5 is using a post-processing anti-aliasing solution. If you want to soften jaggies, tun PP up.
The graphics options offer a lot of scaling opportunities for older machines. If you turn shadows down too much you get a very ugly, blobby strobing effect, on foliage in particular, and very low textures look poor when you're pressed up against them (which will be often). However, if you can lift these to medium, you'll find a handsome game indeed. Before you have to mess with the main settings, you can always turn off niceties like volumetric clouds and drop ambient occlusion a little to save some frames.
Control wise, the game switches between a gamepad and mouse and keyboard controls on the fly, though some button prompts get stranded by the transition. There are two control setups for pads. For keyboards and mouse you can assign button prompts independently in the key assignment menu.
Low, medium and highest settings
The game is perfectly playable at its lowest settings, but object pop-in undermines the majesty of the open world. Up close, things start to fray. as you can see on the wall behind Snake. It's hard to see in still images, but there are a lot of jagged edges on lower settings, which are mostly smoothed out with maxed-out post-processing. The smoother colour grading and shadowing effects provided by high post-processing and ambient occlusion are nice touches for good machines, but I honestly doubt I'd miss them at all if I was forced to run the game on medium settings.
Here also is a comparison between low and high settings, which I largely include because this man was strangled for about five minutes while graphics options were changed, and he deserves to be included for his suffering. You'll notice that Snake still looks good in both shots, but the guard's tunic takes a hit from the reduced texture. The wall and rocks to the right show the difference some high-res textures and ambient occlusion can make to environments.
Problems and incoming fixes
We haven't encountered any serious issues with The Phantom Pain yet, but others with old CPUs that don't support SSE4.1 are experiencing crashes. The Tokyo dev team is posting on the Steam forums with assurances of a fast fix. Kojima Productions are also sourcing crash reports on this thread to net compatibility issues. Aside from that, there don't seem to be many problems, though let us know if you've run into any in the comments.
We'll bring you more impressions of the game shortly with the first section of our Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain review-in-progress.
