Peace Walker Wi-Fi Recruiting

Not many people seem to have written about it. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker has an interesting feature where you recruit new soldiers using Wi-Fi access points. Here is a video.

Peace Walker contains an X-Com-like base management part. You need to recruit new soldiers and assign them to different teams. This gives you access to new, better weapons.

Soldiers are usually recruited by basically kidnapping them during missions. But the soldiers recruited this way often have very low skills. An alternative way of recruiting unlocks at some point. The game scans the Wi-Fi access points in your environment and generates soldiers from them. You can recruit the soldiers by doing a hand-to-hand combat training mission against them. I have been using this feature a couple of times, here are some observations.

• Forcing players to take out the PSP – You will “use up” the access points at home quickly and will soon be doing recruiting sessions on the go. Because there is a mission associated with recruiting, you will be forced to play the game on the go. On the one hand, this is inconvenient. A passive “street pass” option would seem less troublesome. On the other hand, players will be encouraged to play the game on the go. This has the potential to make the PSP system and the game itself more visible. Other people might ask the players what they are doing and learn about the game this way.

• Lack of Transparency – The way the function works right now, you just select the menu options and the recruiting mission magically appears. The fact that the soldiers are generated from Wi-Fi access points is not addressed at all. It’s not clear where the soldiers are coming from. This lack of transparency reduces the function to an arbitrary, anonymous soldier generator. Increasing transparency could encourage players to experiment more. Maybe the Wi-Fi at Starbucks generates a kick-ass medic. I’d like to know so I can share this with my friends.

• Disparate Wi-Fi Functions – Actually, you can do a lot in Peace Walker using Wi-Fi. You don’t only recruit solders but you can also trade solders and equipment, play co-op missions and play versus matches. Each of those functions is hidden in a different, separate menu. The next level of this system would be to pull all those functions together in one menu. Walking through the city and collecting soldiers, I should be able to accidentally meet a Peace Walker players and play with them or exchange gear.

• Easing Players Into Online Functions – There is an interesting feedback loop that encourages players to use more online functions. Once you start recruiting soldiers, you actually get quite a lot of them. You will soon max out your teams and you will be forced to weed out some of your staff. It feels like you are wasting recourses if you just fire them. So you are automatically interested in reaching out to friends to see if they can find any use for your obsolete staff members.

These are just a couple of observations. I heard that the usefulness of the system and the resulting experience varies depending on the Wi-Fi density of where you live. If you played the game, feel free to add on your own observations. I’d love to hear them.