Basically, players "felt bad" or "were annoyed" by the author's choice, complained, and thus a change was made (in this case, nobody at Konami cares about authorial intent after all). From a story standpoint though, it does run counter to the author's intent of having Quiet's loss impact the player. From a gameplay standpoint, having the ability to reclaim access to Quiet is useful, especially in an open-world sandbox game. In the case of MGS V, you can look at it from two perspectives. Since then, you've had a number of plot-driven games like Life is Strange where you see groups who don't like the ending feel as if they've been empowered to demand a new ending based on what they wanted from a story. Yes, Bioware didn't change ME3's endings in the end, but rather elaborated them, but you could see where things could go from there. Okay, I am one of many who thought the ending of that game sucked, but the idea of pressuring a developer into changing an ending, and that actually succeeding, raises all kinds of dangerous precedents. The flashpoint of this obviously was Mass Effect 3.
Playing on PC you also have the option to mod her back in - I couldn't bring myself to it - but it's a better option than playing the same mission 7 I think the point is, and there was a great Bombcast segment about this, is that that the ability to patch a game after launch and change elements of the author's initial work and authorial intent can undermine gaming a story-telling medium. I've already come to peace with the "phantom pain" of her being gone after losing her like 100 hours into my PC save. Currently, if you replay it after she leaves, it brings her back to the brig of mother base, and her persuasion thing gets permanently stuck. A better way to handle it, maybe, was if they just fixed the bug with her extreme mode mission. If that makes sense?Įither way, having to play the mission 7 times though is still some super silly Mortal Kombat play-as-background-character rumor nonsense. Let's say you're playing side op #3 after beating the game, maybe that "happened" before she left and you had her "back then". In my mind she's still super gone unless the story acknowledges her "return". The missions in the game are disjointed by design though and you can play many of them in any order, so I don't really see it as her "coming back".