Hideo Kojima is jovial and giggly in front of his home crowd at the Tokyo Game Show, addressing the crowd in Japanese and leaving gaps between his words for the two other people on stage at Sony’s stand – a voice actor and a host in a hat – to make incredulous noises in his direction. They laugh a lot, and they’re joined in their mirth by the 200-strong audience gathered around the PlayStation 4 stand to see the next Metal Gear Solid running on next-gen hardware.
MGSV is subtitled The Phantom Pain, but the section Kojima showed at TGS has a separate suffix – Ground Zeroes – and acts as a prologue to the events of The Phantom Pain. It’s set one year after the events of PSP’s Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and it’s that game on which MGSV most looks to draw for both story and mechanics.
Always moisturise before a sandstorm, folks.
Snake starts the mission on a rocky, rainy hillside, overlooking the Camp Omega base. A few moments earlier, the base had played host to the horrifically burned Skull Face, leader of the XOF military group that stands as a perversion to Snake’s own FOX Unit. Through cutscenes we watch as Skull Face patrols the base, stopping at a prison cage containing a young man, Peace Walker’s Chico. Skull Face throws him a Walkman and prowls off, climbing aboard a helicopter and barking cryptic orders. We’re still not quite sure who Skull Face is.
We do know who Snake is, though. He’s the Big Boss incarnation of the character, the same Snake who played the lead role in Snake Eater and Peace Walker. He’s got most of those games’ tools – including support from Peace Walker’s Kaz Miller – as well as a new set of toys. Most game-changing of these is a set of binoculars that allows players to tag spotted enemies, keeping them visible through objects and walls in what seems like a clear nod to Far Cry 3’s camera. Kojima shows how this change will make Snake’s sneaking missions easier, scanning the base from a hilltop before engineering a route into the compound that dodges most of the red figures now clearly marked onscreen.
This is one of many disturbing images coming out from Konami.
Most, but not all: on his way in, Snake is spotted by an untagged guard. Time slows down for a moment as Snake draws his pistol, loosing a round into the spotter’s neck. The guard falls and Snake hoists his body out of the open into nearby long grass so he won’t be spotted by roving patrols. This addition fudges the distinction between MGS’s alert states, and combined with the introduction of the binoculars it looks to make the series’ brand of stealth simpler to plan and execute. Add in Snake’s Lycra catsuit, Ground Zeroes’ moody nighttime lighting, and a new voice provided by Kiefer Sutherland, and you could be looking at a particularly stylish new Splinter Cell.
But these sneaking aids are more of a necessity given the extent to which the game has opened up. Even in the Ground Zeroes mission, a segment that Kojima explains is deliberately linear so as not to spook the player away with the kind of freedom he’s planning for The Phantom Pain proper, there are countless ways in and out of the compound – holes in fences, side entrances, even front doors. Kojima places the blame for this shift purely on technology, explaining that each MGS game moved steadily further away from a central base as console technology advanced to the point where he could finally render the world outside.
Snake can now call in a helicopter extraction.
As for ways back out, Snake can now call in a helicopter for extraction. The landing zone can be chosen by the player, but Kojima explains that if enemies on the ground have explosive weaponry, that chopper can be brought down. In his Ground Zeroes demo, he asks the pilot to set down on a cliff, far enough away that he can sling the rescued Chico into the chopper before turning around and warning off pursuing guards with a few rounds from Snake’s assault rifle.
The helicopter extraction – and the existence of Kaz Miller – indicate a return for Peace Walker’s Mother Base, the structure that acted as home for Snake’s Militaires Sans Frontières organisation. Players will have access to such a base, but Kojima is typically coy about exactly how it’ll work, suggesting only that players will be able to specialise their homes – allowing multichopper support on extraction, for instance.
Until you mentioned it, we hadn’t even noticed the product placement.
How players will recruit for their private army, or if they even have one, is yet to be made clear. In Peace Walker, Snake would tie balloons to chosen victims, forcibly whisking them off to a new job at Mother Base; in Ground Zeroes, he has no such option for subdued soldiers. Instead, he can knock them out, cut their throat or interrogate them – with the last option allowing him to clarify the location of assets or objectives in the large, open-plan areas.
It’s those open areas that are MGSV’s most exciting element, and the reason why Kojima has every right to be giddy on stage. Snake was previously hamstrung by technology – both in-game and in the developer’s real world – but MGSV looks to give both super-soldier and super-developer the tools to complete the tactical sneaking mission they’ve always wanted.
The post Metal Gear Solid V: Snake’s world opens up appeared first on Edge Online.
