Image: Konami
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, just got a new and nefarious type of "microtransaction," or in-game item you can buy with real money.It's insurance, and it's about as fun of a purchase as it is in real life.The Phantom Pain launched an online mode today, where players can invade other players' bases, even while they're offline. So while usually you'd log on to find that another player has wrecked your crib, forcing you to replace stolen items, if you paid for the Forward Operating Base (FOB) insurance during that time, all those items will be automatically replaced. Without the insurance, you have to pay for them again.You can buy insurance with the game's currency, MB coins, which you can earn slowly by playing, or just buy with real money in packs that range from 100 MB coins for $1 to 6000 MB coins for $50.You can pay for different insurance periods, ranging from one day for 50 MB coins, to 14 days for 300 MB coins.It just seems like a really sleazy way to wring more money out of players who already paid $60 for the full game, especially after publisher Konami said players shouldn't worry about microtransactions.It was sad enough when the game's creator Hideo Kojima left publisher Konami, which in recent years seems to have lost interest in all the Konami game series you love. We're not going to see Kojima's Silent Hills, nor another Metal Gear, but at least he left on a high note. His latest, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, is one of the highest rated games of the year, even if evidence suggests that Konami stopped Kojima from fully realizing his vision.We could have remembered Big Boss, the game's hero, fondly, but with decisions like this, Konami is retroactively degrading a great game. As a recent Konami trademark filing suggests, the fact it will inevitably turn Big Boss into a pachinko slot machine mascot, just like it has done to Castlevania, and Silent Hill, doesn't help.
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