Oh Kojima, you wily fox you. Today at the Game Developer’s Conference, Kojima gave a presentation during which he finally came clean about The Phantom Pain. Turns out, not only is Phantom Pain actually Metal Gear Solid 5, but the footage we’ve seen from both it and Ground Zeroes are from the same game. That’s right. both Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are actually the same game, and that game is officially titled Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Here is the first official trailer:
Alright, so story details are locked in the ironclad safe that is Kojima Productions right now, but we do now a few key details. For one, at some point Snake will fall into a coma for nine years, assumedly waking up with the hook on his hand for the duration of the game which we’ve seen from previous Phantom Pain footage. I believe the Ground Zeroes footage we’ve seen up to this point takes place during the first half of the game, with a drastic shift in story for the second half after whatever events that take place leave Snake comatose and an amputee. As far as gameplay is concerned, it’s been confirmed that the game is in fact an open world adventure.
So, we all knew something was fishy with those Phantom Pain trailers and phony interviews, and we also new Ground Zeroes was only a small part of MGS5, but now all the puzzle pieces have finally fallen into place. There’s no launch date yet for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, but we do know that it will be available for Xbox 360 and PS3. No word on next-gen console releases yet either.
What do you fine folks make of this? Are you surprised by the fact that these two previously unrelated games are actually a part of a larger project? Did you have your suspicions all along? Are you sick and tired of Kojima’s ridiculous marketing attempts and wish he’d just tell it to us straight? Let us know in the comments below.
Update: According to Siliconera, they received an email from Konami’s Director of Public Relations Jay Boor claiming that, “Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are two separate games.” Additionally, Kojima himself has tweeted that Ground Zeroes is a separate SKU that serves as a prologue to MGSV. I’m not sure what to make of this, after all the smoke and mirrors involved in the revealing of MGSV, I find it hard to take anything the studio says with anything less than a handful of salt. If this is true, the entire MGSV experience will be in two parts, with Ground Zeroes serving as the prologue and The Phantom Pain being the second half after Snake wakes up from his 9-year coma. If this is actually the case, how much of a prologue will we actually be getting? Because it seems unlikely Kojima Productions is capable of handling two massive AAA projects like this simultaneously. Perhaps Ground Zeroes will be sold for less then the usual $60 tag? At this point, we have more questions than answers, and I imagine that’s just the way Kojima wants it.
