thinking about games where you capture or recruit dudes and not for the first or last time wishing that there was more meat to running mother base in mgs5
it got pretty comical near the end because i would simply tranq or stun everyone i encountered, letting dd scoop them all up with his infinite wormholes, requiring that i fire (probably meaning: put on a helicopter rigged to explode given the secrecy requirements of mother base) dogs by the dozen to make room on our jam-packed ghost town oil rig for their slightly superior replacements who can make things smaller or bigger or faster or slower, depending
it would have been AMAZING to give your dudes some more life by letting them be buddies, more directly operated by radio commands, with contextual options dictated by their skills- "wait here" "cover me" followed by "harvest plants" once its safe for your botanist buddy to move in. i dont know if this would keep me from dumping dudes en masse but it would make me feel things about it. i am unsure if The Dude Churn is meant to be commentary on big boss' plans or simply just our old friend the L-D popping up in service of progression when i get a cutscene that says "you are all diamonds" that i then follow with firing 30 guys so that the 30 guys with stats exactly like theirs but one point better can come on the job and build me another gun
konami spiked mgs5 real hard and given the inclusion of the mtx grind there i wish the fob system with persistent meta game had just been relegated to mgo entirely because i think it is directly responsible for fucking up a lot of the potential of mother base. and honestly that could be even cooler. player teams could operate bases housing facilities tied to equipment and perks in the matches, which are recast directly as the operations you get hired for as mercenaries. playing games awards your whole team resources. basically, join a team to advance faster and have more options. no team means you have no base, so you cant be attacked. you can opt out but the game wants you to join a team. some tryhard sniper nerd pisses you off during a match so you go attack her team's base and blow up her armory and steal her gunsmiths. hope you still like using sniper rifles without your advanced optics for the next week while it gets rebuilt. the balancing factor being that maybe they hit your r&d in return to keep you from using that FUCKING STEALTH CAMO. you and your team have a job (win matches) and this gives you context for the inter-team conflicts which are completely optional and player- or perhaps event-driven. now you have history with xXxknifeboy69 and a relationship to their team, murderclowns r us. delightful!
i watch yall play dorf forts and it makes me salivate at the possibility of a dude-snatching tactical espionage operations-like with procedurally generated worlds, resources, and organizations dictating the flow of war, just like real life (but with more armored flamethrower wielding intelligent segways)