Konami
Metal Gear Solid V could have been an episodic game, Kojima says
In a tweet on the 9th anniversary of Ground Zeroes, the Japanese genius changes our perception of what eventually became Metal Gear Solid V.
Kojima enjoys Twitter. It is a social media of immediate effect, where he knows that everything he says has an enormous impact. His most important tweets are always divided into two, and they go in depth, in the form of pills, about past developments that won our hearts at the time. The public likes each release by the thousands. And the case we are commenting on is no exception.
Ground Zeroes, the experiment, the pilot?
In a tweet just yesterday, Kojima celebrated nine years since the release of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, the short (and replayable) preview of what would become Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. In it, he explained that it was originally intended to be a prologue, "an important introduction. In short, it presented the possibilities of the FOX engine and what we could expect next with MGSV. It was also a way to get feedback from players.
And then the Japanese genius arrives today and surprisingly refines what he said yesterday. If what he said was not a surprise, since Ground Zeroes has remained in our memories as an introductory prologue, now things change.
Today he tells us, retweeting his message from yesterday, that: "In fact, it was my big intention to launch GZ. The development of a full game takes for 4-5 yrs. Times change during production. So I thought of offering an episodic format, like a streamed drama, where one episode is produced and distributed. GZ was meant to be an experiment.”
The tweet presents Ground Zeroes as an experiment that, given the longevity of modern video game development, could have led to an episodic Metal Gear Solid V, with Zeroes as a sort of a pilot chapter.
We already know that it wasn't like that, and knowing what happened with Konami at the time, maybe it was better to drop that idea, because who knows if that MGSV would have remained unfinished due to the forced divorce between both parties. Just thinking about it makes you shudder, so it is the way it was left in the end.
Source | Hideo Kojima