Metal Gear Solid V won't be "limited to one console", says Kojima

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has teased the idea of Metal Gear V: The Phantom Pain incorporating itself around multiple devices.

Speaking in an interview on IGN, Kojima said that he considered the idea of multiplatform development after Metal Gear Solid 4, and created Peace Walker around the idea of a game players could access whenever they wanted.

"When making [Metal Gear Solid V prologue chapter] Ground Zeroes," he said, "I wasn't thinking along the lines of 'what went wrong last time?' or 'what improvements do i need to make?' That's not really the way I work. I try to think 'what do I want to do?' Then I try to make that happen. With Metal Gear Solid 4 we were somewhat limited technology-wise. At that point, I wanted to work on multi-platform development, which is why I started work on the Fox engine. I wanted to make something in an open world. Snake infiltrating in the rain, all those things I wanted to make six years ago, I think those are becoming a reality here in Ground Zeroes."

"MGS 4 was a turning point: the engine, the multi-platform, and online elements. Moving forward I wanted to have a Metal Gear Solid that you could play on whatever you wanted. And that's how we created Peace Walker. Now we're presenting something again that's console-only, but that's not actually true of Metal Gear Solid V."

"Metal Gear Solid V will have many more elements that aren't limited to one console. You'll be able to play the game on whatever you want, whenever you want."

Kojima acknowledges that hardware restrictions will be a factor to these ambitions, however. "There are always hardware limitations though. Technology will always impose restrictions. Although so many things can be done with next-gen hardware, that means we have to make some hard choices. And that's the soul of the creative process--making choices and deciding what to do with your time. One thing that has helped us deal with many of those hard choices is the Fox engine."

Elsewhere in the interview, Kojima discusses the relationship between Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, and talks about the challenges of making Metal Gear Solid V an open world game. "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a huge game with a vast open world. Ground Zeroes serves as the prologue episode. For Metal Gear fans, it may be a bit confusing to step into that huge open world of Phantom Pain, so Ground Zeroes is the first step in between, where players will experience a more compact and controlled prologue episode."

"Metal Gear, so far, has been a somewhat linear game. We expected players to go through the game in a certain way, and we placed enemies accordingly. When we turned MGS into an open world game [with Metal Gear Solid V], it turns out the player wound up in situations where they could be spotted from any direction 360 degrees around them. Sometimes, you wouldn't know where you were spotted from. We first wanted to give the player a notice--you were spotted here at this angle, and also to give them one chance to defeat the enemy within a certain time frame. Then it wouldn't be counted as the player being spotted."

"That's part of the gameplay modifications we're working on now. One thing I want to make clear is that this will not make the game much easier. With the stress and tension levels that players will experience going through the game, I can guarantee that it's not going to make the game easier for anyone."

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain will be released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Kojima Productions has not set a release date.