During a recent press event taking place just weeks before Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is released on March 18th/21st, Hideo Kojima was interviewed, revealing to IGN: “Ideally, I would have wanted to release the prologue and the main game [of Metal Gear Solid V] together, at the same time.”
Looking at Metal Gear Solid V, Ground Zeroes represents the prologue and The Phantom Pain is the main game, with Kojima explaining why Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are separate releases (via Eurogamer):
I’ll be honest here: this wasn’t necessarily a strategic move. The Phantom Pain is roughly over 200 times bigger than Ground Zeroes… I knew we couldn’t hit a game that big for [PS4’s] next-gen launch date [of February 22nd in Japan], and we didn’t have any Japanese titles that were available for launch… At that time Ground Zeroes was almost complete, and a lot of fans asked for a product out there, so that’s the decision I took.
If I can’t make The Phantom Pain on time, but the product is there, I might as well deliver it for the people. So that was the reasoning behind this move, though I didn’t do too much thinking on what would happen after that.
Another reason why Kojima wanted to release Ground Zeroes early is because he’s seeing a shift away from big-budget titles to mobile/social experiences, and he wants this game to get people excited again about the new consoles:
A lot of people are losing interest in these high end games. They’re mainly interested in these mobile games, these social games, and with next-gen coming up I wanted to show people that this was still fun, that this was still something that’s worth playing… that’s part of the reason I decided to move ahead and just put out the product.
Elsewhere with IGN, Kojima spoke a little further about how The Phantom Pain is about 200 times bigger than Ground Zeroes, saying that he’s worried “players will start complaining that they can’t clear the game, [because it’s] too big to clear.” Not wanting to go into specifics about The Phantom Pain, Kojima only added, “I cannot disclose the amount of missions, but we’ll have a lot of missions in there.”
Would you have preferred Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain to be bundled together, or are you happy Ground Zeroes is releasing sooner as a standalone? Let us know in the comments below.
