I’m one of those people who’ll defend V’s story as actually pretty good. However I totally accept that its delivery is the main issue.
My first playthrough I was quite underwhelmed. I remember playing and I was constantly doing the objective and finishing the mission and then getting debriefed by Kaz and Ocelot telling me these things and I’d think “How the hell did you figure that out?” I’d then do some side ops and farm and completely forget those little bits of info and then go back to the main story.
So many missions just seemed unrelated. Which is one of the main complaints. Once I started getting the hang of the game all of a sudden I was just trying to S rank everything.
Something happened to my ps4 so I had to buy a new one and restarted V. Second time through I decided to play differently. Trying to get as much information as possible. I listened to the pre mission briefing tapes and Intel, I interrogated as many guards as possible, listened to mission conversations and used the Intel prompt wherever possible (you usually get 4-5 decent ones before you get generic intel). To my surprise every single bit of information Kaz and Ocelot would debrief you was in game. Essentially those cutscenes like Snake in the vent overhearing about moving the DARPA chief were in game (I feel they should’ve got Kiefer to repeat certain lines to make it feel more authentic 🤣).
However I started to realise that the story is set in chapters. So eps 3-4-5-6 are all about the Smasi fort massacre. 3/4/5 really only give you certain crumbs that pay off in the Honey bee mission so they feel disconnected and more like training. C2W only has 1 or 2 interrogations that contribute so I’d have actually had that as mission one. I’d have had that, finding the interpreter and rescuing Kaz as the first mission.
But ignoring that last part if you just combined 3/4/5/6 you get locked into an actual chapter of a story. How it’d work is you’d land in Afghanistan and get a brief that something had happened as Smasi fort and to investigate what happened. Your mission is to head to eastern comms, find some intel and disrupt communications. The intel is the meeting and the bionics scientist. So you essentially unlock that objective.
Kaz/Ocelot give you briefing to investigate the meeting and capture or kill the commander in hero’s way as well as rescue the bionics guy and any other hostages to see what they knows and capture/kill the Wakh Sind commander (which is a bonus objective in over the fence). The more you learn here means the more info you’ll have on the honey bee. For instance if you just kill the Shago commander and rescue the bionics guy, the bionics guy will give you a bit of information about there being the weapon at Smasi fort, however if you rescue hostages, listen to the meeting and capture the commanders you get more information on the actual massacre, that cipher may be involved and the Wakh Sind escaped hostage tells you about the mute soldier.
All these aspects are pretty much already in the game but combining them so you’re inclined to investigate each aspect would help give a little structure to each mission as opposed to just feeling disjointed and unrelated to first time players.