Stealth and open-world have never really merged together successfully in the video game industry until Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain proved the world wrong back in 2015. While it felt like an incomplete game, in terms of story, its unique twist on its main genre and the open-world genre make it one-of-a-kind.
True enough, there's nothing quite like it to this day. Thankfully, it's moddable enough on the PC platform to keep everyone interested, and with the Snakebite Mod Manager it's easier than ever for both new and old fans of this unique game to add a little more to it.
Updated April 11th, 2021 by Gene Cole: Official support for MGSV is long gone, but there's still a huge community around it that continues to add mods that change and improve the game. Modding is easier than ever thanks to tools like the polished and easy-to-use Snakebite Mod Manager, meaning any returning PC player of the game can get a whole new experience from their game to this very day.
10 Quick Start
This might not seem too valuable to players who already have a save data, but many things can go wrong with The Phantom Pain's autosave and many people may want to play it on PC after having first owned it on console. Starting it can be exhausting, though, as the first hospital level where you wake up can take a massive amount of time.
Thankfully, there are some easy mods like Quick Start that will let you start right from Mission 2, meaning you skip a massive amount of tutorial and story content that you may not need again. This doesn't even need the prior-mentioned Snakebite Mod Manager and simply needs you to replace the save data in your steam files, making it an easy way to get rolling into this game from scratch with other mods once you've refreshed yourself.
9 Anyone's Improvements
While this might be readable as a series of improvements that anyone could agree with, Anyone's Improvements is actually a compilation of mods from a skilled modder named Anyone. These give tons of upgrades from reduced item Development Times, to offline rewards, to even some more unique soldier skills for your base members.
It essentially improves the balance of the game, with perhaps the best being an increase to resources you find so that you won't have to grind as frequently. It'll change the game fairly substantially, but in ways you won't necessarily notice if you haven't played the game before.
8 More Animals
Many people may not find the animal hunting sections of The Phantom Pain to be their cup of tea. Many are in extremely hard-to-find areas, and their spawn rates can be unbearably low if you aren't spending a large amount of time farming them.
This is what More Animals Afghanistan and More Animals Africa aim to fix, as it increases the spawn rates to make it feel much more like a natural wild area instead of an occasional burst of animals. It makes this entire section of the game substantially more playable, and enjoyable at last if you'd never tried catching wildlife before.
7 FOB Character Enabler
Tons of features in The Phantom Pain are tied into the multiplayer, and one of these includes the ability to play as your other action-oriented main characters. Quiet and Ocelot are only usually allowed to be used during FOB missions, and FOB Character Enabler lets you take on some actual missions with them.
This is a fantastic upgrade, as you can enjoy Quiet's sniping abilities and jumping while Ocelot has his weapons on hand for faster shooting. It's something that would be wonderful in the base game, but thankfully this mod gives you just as much freedom.
6 NO MORE TIMERS
One of the worst aspects of The Phantom Pain's Mother Base system is the research. It's time-gated through the game's base management system and makes players wait or do something else until they forget the upgrade or lose enthusiasm for it.
No More Timers fixes this small problem by doing what it says on the title. Every new item or upgrade can be acquired instantly. Most players have already spent too much time collecting resources for them, so getting them right away makes the game a much faster and more rewarding experience.
5 Beyond Ultra Settings
For a 2015 game, The Phantom Pain held up quite well and looks decent enough compared to the shinier next-gen titles. Still, some players might want to give the aging game a new paint job with the Beyond Ultra Settings, which adds just a bit more fidelity to the game's appearance.
The mod is a small touch-up to the already photorealistic graphics but adds considerable details such as missing shadows and more distant foliage. The best part is that the performance cost is little to none, meaning you won't need a fancier machine to enjoy these improved visuals.
4 Morbid's Side-Op Expansion Pack
Morbid's Side-Op Expansion Pack is easily one of the best mods in the game thatp rovide new content, rather than just improving prior missions. It's a mod that adds more missions that are unique and more varied than the vanilla ones, totaling to over 50 new ones to take on.
This is even more than commendable considering how varied missions there originally were, and how most of them were repeated over the course of the game. It does require another mod called Infinite Heaven, but this adds a ton more new content as well that's worth just as much attention.
3 Immersive S++ Staff And Recruits
S++ soldiers and staff are the cream of the crop of this game, and extremely important in the endgame of The Phantom Pain. There are already several mods that add them in bulk and even make them ubiquitous but that could ruin the sense of progression and feel a bit cheaty.
Immersive S-Plus-Plus Staff and Recruits balances this out a bit by introducing more S++ or S+ prisoners with a natural feel, making them available as rewards for greater challenges rather than filling your base with them. This makes them appear more frequent yet still retains their rarity and the sense of accomplishment tied to recruiting them.
2 The Ultimate Phantom Pain Mod
When it comes to customizing The Phantom Pain experience, no other mod offers the same extensive number of options as The Ultimate Phantom Pain Mod. It's a collection of optional tweaks the players can choose to implement for tougher espionage, most of which you'd normally expect in DLC.
That includes New Game Plus, realistic time scale, hardcore enemies, custom weather, custom revenge system, and more to give it far more replicability beyond your first run of the game. It's an extremely simple set of inclusions, but they add a huge amount of depth to a game that already is astonishingly large.
1 No Deployment Costs
Deployment costs are another bothersome resource hog for the game which only seeks to prolong the grind. While it does make sense from a logistics perspective, it's not enjoyable for gameplay especially if players want to stay in the open world for long stretches.
That's why the standalone No Deployment Costs mod lets players have that feature without having to install bigger mods that tweak gameplay. With these mods, players can stick to doing what's fun in The Phantom Pain, whether it's kidnapping potential recruits or knocking child soldiers unconscious.