The motion capture excuse would also hold more water if they didn't go for an actor only two years younger than David Hayter.
He wanted out for a long time, IIRC as early as MGS 2. 4 was originally planned to end with Snake and Otacon being captured and executed for terrorism to put the final nail in the franchise's coffin, with Kojima only dropping the idea after his entire writing staff protested.
I think you hit the nail on the head with his dissatisfaction being why 5 felt so different. It barely feels like a Metal Gear game even if the stealth is at its all-time best, but you can definitely see some proto-Death Stranding DNA in it in retrospect. He was clearly experimenting with new gameplay ideas, which might explain why the game went so far over budget and ended up unfinished.
That's good to know, thanks! It still ran fine with mods before, it was just the initial load to the main menu that was affected. If you didn't experience anything then hopefully it was fixed.
Tap for spoiler
And it would have worked perfectly with Hayter as both parts. He's a voice actor; he can do a second voice of Ishmael pretending to be someone else. As for Venom sounding the same, well, hypnosis/mind control and plastic surgery are basically magic in this universe anyway (see Decoy Octopus, Liquid Ocelot, or hell just Ocelot in this same game).
Though that'd be torpedoed by Kojima's feud with Konami over crediting and its result of every scene in MGS5 listing (spoiling) its participants with a credit byline. In that case the intro could have used a different voice for Ishmael, and then the forced replay later that shows what actually happened could switch to Hayter.
I do, but I also know he'd been trying to get rid of Hayter for a while by then even though he was the voice of Snake, so the excuse rings hollow.
Remember when he got rid of David Hayter, the iconic long-time voice actor of Snake, main character of his most popular series, just so he could replace him with some Hollywood actor doing a generic gruff guy impression? Then said actor ended up being so expensive that there was barely any dialogue... in a Metal Gear game?
How's the game with mods these days? The last time I tried them was when support was fairly new, and adding even a few levels would bloat the game's launch time to unbearable levels (several minutes on an SSD).
TL;DR: their argument is that using AI trained on an actor, even with said actor's blessing, is unfair because it shuts out other actors who used to get work imitating that voice.
To paraphrase an old tweet: "parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts".
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
Moms for Liberty, a heavily funded astroturf organization linked to GOP leadership, wasn't especially subtle in its strategies, pinpointing a handful of swing districts in purple states, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, and targeting school board elections, which are usually low turnout and easy to win. Once installed, Moms for Liberty members started banning books and Pride flags, as well as protesting that teachers were "grooming" kids with "smut," which usually meant either a history book or acclaimed, age-appropriate fiction. The idea was to create moral panics around sex and race that could tip national elections towards Republicans.
From the article.