I was watching a Let's Play type thing of Metal Gear Solid 3 when this came to me. And first off, despite all the flack I give for Kojima being pretentious and MGS4 kind of going off the god damn rails (which it did) MGS is still one of my favorite series. The cutscene to gameplay ratio is annoying and getting worse all the time but still...I like them for what they are. Weird, goofy, and sometimes poignant little stealth games.

THAT SAID, watching this playthrough, one thing that occurred to me, that at least for me, would make the game way better: take more damage. That's it, you don't have to reprogram the AI, change the gameplay, just...make Snake take WAY more damage. Enemies in MGS games tend to be annoyingly sluggish when they discover snake. They pace, kind of look at you, and then pop off a few shots before hanging out in the open waiting to get shot. I haven't played Ground Zeroes so if enemies actually take cover instead of standing out in the open like FOOLS please tell me. But anyway, even this wouldn't be a problem if every time they let off one of those bursts you lost 1/4 or 1/2 of your health. That way, when you get discovered you can't just be like "WELP, TIME TO KILL EVERYTHING!" (Pewpewpewpewpew). Given, I tend to reload because I'm one of those annoying stealth players. Especially in MGS3 where you have to wade through a river of all the fuckers you killed and in the case of my first playthrough (which was stealthy but with lots of throat slitting) LASTED FOR APPROXIMATELY TEN YEARS!

But yeah, in the case of stealth games one of the toughest things is how to make stealth feel like a viable and needed option, and I feel like in this serie's case the damage thing could solve a lot of niggling issues. I mean, they already have other issues like having 10 billion weapons, many of which are silent and non-lethal and have no drawbacks to using them *sigh*. But that issue is not for today. Most of the time they make it so your character just sucks at combat (Thief), or the point is to dispatch enemies stealthily since 1-on-1 confrontation will get you killed in a hurry (Mark of the Ninja, Batman when the enemies had guns). But MGS kind of puts all of its eggs in one basket: is it an action game, is a straight up stealth game? The adjustments to the damage Snake takes from a gunshot or whatever, could tip the scales back towards stealth without making combat an impossible option.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that.