If you haven’t put a few dozen hours into Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (opens in new tab) yet, you probably only know Forward Operating Bases from the game’s endless server status messages. You can’t start building your own FOBs and raiding others until you’ve finished mission 22 – but you can watch this video demonstration right now. Fair warning: it doesn’t really have any plot spoilers, but there are a few mechanical things you might prefer to discover on your own.
Normally I’m pretty ambivalent to the idea of Dark Souls-style PvP, where some jerk who has specifically built their character to kill other characters invades me and crushes my suboptimal PvE build. FOBs are a little different, though, since they are their own discrete little encounters, all of which have very real stakes for winning or losing. Judging by how huge The Phantom Pain is, I should be able to start participating in the FOB race by spring next year. Until then I’ll just content myself with watching real-life Fulton recovery videos (opens in new tab) over and again.
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