Just announced at the Game Developers Conference by Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima himself... the next Metal Gear Solid. V: The Phantom Pain.
The game was officially revealed with an amazing trailer running in realtime on the studio's new FOX engine. The game was running on a PC build, Kojima said, not saying which consoles this will be on. UPDATE: A press release about the game from the publisher Konami says the game is slated for PS3 and Xbox 360. No mention of next-gen platforms, which we've followed up and asked them about.
The trailer opens with what appears to be Snake, hero of the long-running third-person stealth-action series, falling into a coma. Doctors struggle to revive him. But then it switched to show what looked like an old Snake shooting people from a helicopter.
The footage we saw combined material from the Phantom Pain stealth Metal Gear trailer and the Metal Gear Ground Zeroes trailer.
What's it all add up to?
"FOX vs. XOF"
Metal Gear Solid V.
Snake's been in a coma for nine years. Kojima said that Snake's movement is constrained because of that coma. The opening parts of the game will therefore be linear. It will then switch to an open-world type of game.
Here's the trailer:
Credits:
Oh, and did you like the song in the MGSV trailer? It's "Not Your Kind of People" by Garbage.
And here's the gameplay demo they showed right after, capped by Games HQ:
This was capped from GameSpot's livestream of Kojima's GDC press conference. Watch that here or here.
The trailer was shown to hype the game, of course, but also to hype Kojima Productions' FOX Engine. To show off its potential for realistic visuals, Kojima and his colleagues showed off some images from some items rendered in the engine. These are not photos.
Photos vs. FOX engine:
The FOX engine does some nice lighting. Have a look:
Want to see something really cool?
The 2012 trailer for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes took place at night.
Today, at GDC, Kojima's crew showed what that trailer looks like if they raise the sun into the sky in the FOX Engine.
The presentation had begun with Kojima showing up wrapped in bandages. That was a reference to both the bandaged protagonist of the Phantom Pain trailer and to the alleged developer of that game, Joakim Mogren of the fictional Moby Dick Studios.
The Phantom Pain trailer had debuted in December during the Spike Video Game Awards. It never mentioned Metal Gear Solid V, but its logo showed some negative space in the shape of the words Metal Gear Solid V. It was a fake—an obvious one and a fun one, a sly, classic bit of Kojima misdirection.
Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes had first been shown in September during a 25th Anniversary celebration for the Metal Gear games. Oddly, Kojima then claimed that GZ was a prequel to MGSV. Unless we heard wrong, that's a somewhat less fun bit of misdirection. Regardless, that game was described as a more open-world style of Metal Gear.
Bonus mystery! Is Kiefer Sutherland doing the voice for Ishmael, the guy who has been watching over Snake while he's been in a coma? Check out this part of a gameplay demo shown at the conference.
Bonus update! Hideo Kojima Tweets:
"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."