THE PHANTOM PAIN

I woke up this morning in a bright new world, a world in which what may be Hideo Kojima’s final Metal Gear game [official site] is available on PC. It still seems like an impossible dream, that a series that has only sporadically stealthed its way onto our machines should be here day one, the same time as the console launch, so I was expecting something to go wrong. Performance issues due to the port from console to PC? A sudden stepback in visual quality as compared to ‘prologue’ mission Ground Zeroes?Remarkably, The Phantom Pain hasn’t gotten its cape into a tangle and seems to be running smoothly while looking devilishly handsome. There are some caveats and snags though, as always.

The most pressing concern, and one that will hopefully be fixed so quickly that I’ll feel like a fool for having written about it, relates to CPUs that don’t support SSE4.1; that includes the still-common Phenom II series. People with those CPUs are reporting crashes, often at launch. There is a possible fix but the developers are on the case already and reckon they’ll have a solution ready later today. Good work.

There seems to be some confusion as to whether all AMD GPUs and CPUs are affected but that’s not the case. As far as I can tell, the problem relates directly to SSE4.1 support. If you’re not sure whether or not your CPU supports SSE4.1, this might help.

There are also reported problems with borderless fullscreen, ranging from screen tearing to an occasionally visible mouse cursor for those using controllers. Switching to regular fullscreen appears to fix both issues.I’ll be looking out for any developments. I’ll be doing that instead of playing the game because sometimes this job is not kind to me. The horror of my situation is amplified by the hours I spent with Ground Zeroes on Saturday. It’s a proper stealth game and I love it.