When Konami and Kojima revealed Metal Gear Solid 5 during Game Developer Conference, our understanding was that the supposed separate games in truth were both Metal Gear Solid 5.
Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain do comprise the Metal Gear Solid 5 narrative arc. But they are still separate titles that will ship as two distinct skus. Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes serves as a game-long introduction to MGS 5: The Phantom Pain. Ground Zeroes is set nine years prior to Phantom Pain, which is when Naked Snake/Big Boss wakes up from his nine-year coma.
“Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are two separate games,” director of public relations Jay Boor told Siliconera in an e-mail. “GZ will be a prologue to The Phantom Pain.”
On Twitter, Hideo Kojima posted the following: “‘Ground Zeroes’” is a prologue of ‘MGSV’. 9 years after that event will be ‘The Phantom Pain.’ MGSV is constructed w/ prologue and main game ‘TPP.’ The game play demo I presented today is the opening of ‘TPP’ which is tutorial that starts from crawling.”
Boor also told Siliconera that he “can’t comment on the SKUs unfortuantely [sic]. TPP is definitely 360 and PS3 though.”
Konami has been hard-pressed to use definitive language, so expect more clarification to come along with additional news on the title(s) themselves. To me, Kojima’s comment doesn’t rule out the MGS5 as a combination of the two titles. It seems, to me, very unlikely that two full-fledged productions of Metal Gear are in simultaneous development. And considering the scale and scope Kojima has described of Ground Zeroes, it seems even likely it’s just going to be a glorified introduction.
Check out these new Screenshots that have been recently released:
