This just in: Japanese gives a slight time disadvantage (my guess is anywhere from 20-30 seconds over the course of the run). There are no other voice over languages available. So English appears to be the optimal language for runs.

So I see a Japanese guy beat my any% WR. That and I started to get a bit nostalgic for the game (it's been over a year since I've touched it), so I'm thinking of making a bit of a comeback.

Obviously, the first and biggest issue is the absence of glitches in the new version of the game. I think if this game has any chance of being speed ran in the future, then this needs to be overcome. The old records need to be beaten.

I spent quite a few hours trying to get my hands on an old version of the game. And unfortunately, there's no reliable way to do it without pirating it. And all of the pirate versions are riddled with problems and flaws that make them unusable for speed runs (crashes, swapping save files, etc.)

So I started doing some research into exactly HOW big of a disadvantage the new version is. And my conclusion is that while it's a disadvantage, it's not a crippling one, especially since runs on the old version of the game are still so un-optimized.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. The helicopter glitch isn't as advantageous as it first appears. Yes, you skip a 45-second helicopter intro. But, to skip it, you have to spend an extra 1-3 seconds menuing, reload a checkpoint (8-10 seconds), and run a slightly longer distance (5-8 seconds). So in reality, it's likely only a 25-30 second advantage per mission. Throw on top of that the fact that many missions can be reached quickly on ground (M4, M14, M15, M16, M18, M24, M27, etc.) and I think in the end, the helicopter glitch gives a 3-5 minute advantage over the course of a first ending run. In a 2.5 hour run, this is definitely possible to overcome.

2. A prominent change in 1.10 that has not been discussed here is that damage from assault rifles and explosives have been nerfed across the entire game. What that means is that it is noticeably harder to die in firefights. In fact, in just screwing around in 1.10, it's almost hilarious sometimes where I can run through 4-5 enemies getting shot the whole time and still survive. IMO, this will change some runs, as you can be more reckless going through levels now and worry less about being spotted.

3. Unfortunately, I have no way to verify this other than some really rudimentary comparisons between my video from 2015 and my new install, but it appears 1.10 significantly reduces checkpoint load times (basically loads where the dog emblem is in the background). My unscientific observation is that it may be as much as 1-2 seconds per load, which would add up to multiple minutes over the course of an entire run. Note: this may be PC-only, I'm not sure.

4. It may be my imagination but D-Horse and D-Walker don't feel like they're getting caught on stupid rocks and walls the way they used to.

5. The loss of the wall glitch really only hurts on M6, and even then you lose maybe 15 seconds.

6. Watching the two new Japanese runs next to their American counterparts, it is clear that language may give a slight advantage/disadvantage. This is something that needs to be tested, but Japanese seemed to be a few seconds shorter during some monologue scenes. If it does turn out that one language is shorter than other languages, again, this could add up to a couple minutes saved over the course of a run.

Returning to an any% first ending run, if all of the above is true, then the 1.10 disadvantage is likely only a couple minutes. That said, I already have some strats I was working on in 2015 that I never recorded that can likely beat this guy's time if I use a lot of his strats as well. So I'll be going for it.

Note: I also believe I've come up with some ideas for an NG all missions% route that could be done in 4-4.5 hours total. That'll likely be my next project.

You need more than 1 run to split runs into separate categories....

Should be offline mode. Game carries over too much stuff from previous saves for it to be a fair run for everybody.

I'd have to look at the list more closely, but my guess is it wouldn't affect anything. In any%, there's no reason to go out of your way to get anymore gear, since you can get everything you need naturally just by finishing the missions.

The new Level 9 upgrades, from what I've seen, don't look that much better or useful than any other equipment, so I don't think IL or NG+ runs would be affected either. But I'd have to take a closer look.

Yes, it's dead. And I'd be surprised if it ever comes back.

All of the IL runs have been done and are pretty optimized and require completely maxed out gear to compete with now. And few people want to spend 200+ hours maxing out their gear just to compete.

Then on top of that, I think everyone sort of realized at the same time that speedrunning the full game sucks.

Why does it suck?

• Tons of long loading screens, cut scenes, monologues and the helicopter intro means that in a 3-hour full game run, you're probably only actually playing for about 2 hours at most.

• And of those 2 hours, you're on the horse at least half the time.

• The horse sucks and gets stuck on rocks a lot. D-Walker isn't much better and is a huge pain in the ass to control.

• Then there's the prologue... nuff said.

• On top of all of that, most of the missions are extremely straightforward, short and easy. Therefore, a 3 hour full game run essentially comes down to only six missions that require a lot of skill and practice (Missions 6, 12, 13, 18, 20 and 28).

• The game is very unforgiving of mistakes. Even a very simple error can lose you 30-60 seconds, if not more, thus killing your run that you've now sat through 20 minutes of loading screens and 40 minutes of dull missions (and don't forget the prologue!) to get to.

• The RNG of guard placement and being spotted is absolutely maddeningly random at times. So are some of the boss fights. Combine this with the above and yeah, it gets frustrating.

The strength and beauty of MGS V is in the improvisation of it -- the ability to approach a mission and accomplish it in three or four different ways, often adjusting on the fly based on what's happening in the moment. By speedrunning the game, you essentially bypass what makes the game so great and never get to experience it. And on the flipside, you're forced to endure hours of what the game is weakest at: shitty vehicles, poor mobility, unpredictability, etc.

I'm totally capable of improving my any% time by 6-7 minutes with some new routing and more efficient execution. But my interest in the game went from 10 to 0 in like two days at the end of October and I haven't touched the game since.

I love the game. It's probably on my all-timer list. But I have no interest in coming back to it. Maybe in a few years I'll do another casual playthrough.

Yeah, this is getting pretty ugly. Zefie's new WR for M19 is a good example of this as well.

As much of a pain as it is, I think we're early enough in the game's speedrunning life, that if we all take the time to resubmit our runs with RT instead of IGT, we could solve this pretty quickly. As it stands right now, like 90% of the leaderboard is just the same 4-5 guys.

If we're going to switch, we need to do it sooner rather than later.

I don't think all missions NG is dumb at all. It's just dumb to have both All missions and second ending categories since they're basically the exact same run.

But yeah, a lot of this is just waiting and seeing what people want to run and what appeals to most people. Both "All Missions" and "100%" appeal to me, as I love 100% runs. I just don't see anyone completing a 100% run any time soon. That would take a TON of optimization, especially doing all of the side ops.

Honestly, S Rank in general feels pretty meaningless to me. That goes for both full game runs and individual level runs. With the exception of a handful of levels, if you get the any% record, you'll have the S Rank record and vice-versa.

I'm fine with just:

• First ending any% NG
• First ending PSNK NG
• All missions NG
• All missions NG+
• All missions PSNK NG+

Misc Cats = All missions S Rank, 100%, Subsistence(?), etc. That seems pretty logical and accessible to me.

I'd like to run an all missions NG category one day. Whether it's S Rank or not doesn't matter to me. At that point you're talking about the difference of maybe 15-20 minutes in a 7 hour run.

I think having 100% as a primary category, at least for now, doesn't make sense. Who knows, maybe we completely break the game in the next year and make it doable. But at this rate, that's probably an 15-20 hour run.

So, I've been spending the past couple days researching any% second ending and I've unfortunately come to the conclusion that it doesn't make much sense to have one. Let me explain why.

Second ending occurs after you complete either Mission 45 or Mission 46. To get missions 45/46 to spawn, you must do the following:

• Complete all story missions up to Mission 43 (so this is Prologue, M1-32, M35, M38, M41, M43)
• Complete the following Side Ops: Extract the AI Unit, Eli's Challenge, Extract the Man on Fire's Body, Extract the 5 missing children
• Listen to all yellow cassette tapes
• Build your command platform up to level 3
• Reach bond level 100 with Quiet (if you want to unlock mission 45)

It's funny, any% first ending is very straightforward, but after the first ending, the game gets very complex. It's not clear when certain missions open up, you have to go back and complete some missions you skipped in the first ending run (5, 9 and 11 if you want Quiet) and beginning with Mission 35, you HAVE to have the Cargo fulton extraction device, which requires an R&D level of 19 and a Support level of 16. So you have to slow down and farm staff for a while to build your staff up.

All of this is fine though. It's all runnable. The Cargo Fulton can be gotten in time for Mission 35's spawn, you just have to extract some extra soldiers and be really clever with your staff management.

The problem is the base platforms. The problem is two-fold:

• When speedrunning, you don't have enough resources to start building platforms until after Mission 35 once you get the cargo fulton and can farm containers.
• Upgrading the command platform to 3/4 takes MORE THAN FOUR HOURS GAMETIME to complete. And that's assuming you have all of the resources and click to expand it immediately upon it completing.

To put this into context. For me to get from the end of Mission 31 to end of Mission 43 took about 3 hours each time. I was going very slow both times. I was stopping to extract soldiers and in one run I was spending time getting Quiet's bond level up (actually not hard, just boring). Even when I upgraded the command platform to 2/4 as SOON as it was available, I finished Mission 43 with more than 40 minutes left for it to hit 2/4. It takes over 2 hours for it to go from 2/4 to 3/4.

Even if you farm resources early and start building the platform early on, say around Mission 20, you're still looking at a minimum 6.5 hour run.

What I'm saying is: Second ending any% requires you to do one of two things:

• Slow way down and farm resources/soldiers throughout the entire game or
• Sit around and wait about 2.5 hours after finishing Mission 43 for the base platforms to finish.

This is why I think we should just get rid of the category and just have the All Missions S Rank category instead. Because in that extra 2.5 hours you need to finish the platform to spawn Missions 45/46, you can easily go through and complete the rest of the missions. So if the run is going to have to be 6-7 hours, might as well complete all the missions while you're there. As it stands, doing a second ending run is likely barely any faster than an all missions run.

So I propose the following full game categories:

Any% first ending First ending, Foxhound All Missions, S Rank NG+ All Missions NG+ Foxhound

As it stands, if you're going to run Second Ending, there's absolutely no reason not to run All Missions because they both require the exact same amount of time more or less. And in many ways, you NEED to run all of the missions to get 45/46 to unlock anyway.

You're right breezer. I just remembered that I paused my run for like 30 minutes last time. It happened to be the first time I used the cigar.

Did a run yesterday with no pauses and IGT is fine. Submitting both times today.

You have a link to a video explaining that? I haven't seen it.

I think I agree Pewable. Having run NG first ending about 7-8 times now, you gain significant time in Missions 1, 6 and 29 from using the cigar, about 90 seconds real time. Yet, it adds about 30 minutes to your IGT. I'm regularly finishing runs now with my IGT about 25 minutes longer than the real time, which makes no sense.

I know the concern here is about load times and how they will be different between people. But I've now done runs with the graphics set really high with a high resolution and the graphics settings on the absolute lowest with a low resolution and I notice almost no difference in load times. My guess is that the difference in load times between computers and platforms is likely a matter of seconds across a 3 hour run. Not enough to justify changing how we measure a category. Execution is a much, much, much bigger factor over the course of a three hour run.

The other factor here is reflex mode. I have now done full runs with it both on and with it off and I strongly think players should be rewarded for turning it off. With it on, when an enemy spots you, it's an instant 5-6 seconds lost, which over the course of a 3 hour run, can add up to be 2-3 minutes real-time. If we use IGT then you're not penalized at all for using reflex mode. In fact, you're encouraged to use it because it allows for easy headshots without actually hurting your IGT. This slows the game down and removes a lot of skill from it.

So what I'm saying is this:

• Using real-time encourages use of phantom cigar which means you can skip about 2 minutes worth of "wait for the chopper" sequences.
• Using real-time encourages people to turn reflex mode OFF which requires more skill and requires you to be strategic about when you will allow enemies to spot you and when you will not. It also punishes you for mistakes, whereas reflex mode saves you from your own mistakes.
• Using IGT makes it in the player's interest to be spotted so they can get easy headshots, thus slowing the game way down and making good routing and high skill less important.
• Loading times, in my experience so far, are not much of an issue. They seem to be about the same length regardless of settings (lower settings helps framerates, not loading times, imo).

Did we ever decide this? I'm doing first ending NG runs and I use the phantom cigar in some places to speed my real time up quite a bit (mostly waiting for choppers). But it screws up my IGT. I know IL runs are IGT, but wondering what the stance is on full game?

The Pitch Dark warp happens in Pykn's run at 4:35:50 here:

Both happen at around 600m away from the target area. Both happen around water. Both happen when the players are moving. Other than that I can't see any other similarities. It's never happened in my games.

So now we need to figure out how to reproduce this:

4 is faster to get to by horse after 3 anyway. And 7 is one of the only missions where you DON'T want the default landing zone, so you wouldn't use it anyway.

But yeah, this is going to knock 15-20 minutes off every full game run once everyone learns to do it.

Only catch that I've found is that your buddy doesn't spawn with you, they are parachuted in on Mission 3. A bit annoying, but still a massive time save.

Wow, if you can do it for almost every mission in a full game run, then you just essentially cut off 20-30 (boring, uneventful) minutes off every full game run. If so, cheers to you sir.

Will test this out this weekend.

Holy shit Pewable. Now we're talking!

I'm doing full runs of NG any% and I was doing a run tonight and I was just thinking about how annoying it is that probably a full 20-30 minutes of a 3 hour run is nothing but chopper time.

So let's see, this means in a full game run, you can skip the chopper intro for missions 3, 12, 14, 23, 30. Any others I'm forgetting?

I'm running NG and yeah, basically I found just send the chopper to the second LZ then run there with the horse (no walker yet). It's been consistent for me.