To clarify, will Ground Zeroes be part of The Phantom Pain or released separately?
So you can think of it that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the big game and within that the first prologue to it is Ground Zeroes.
As you saw in the trailer, The Phantom Pain provides a vast world where the player can really go anywhere and get lost. But for past Metal Gear fans used to a linear experience it would probably be hard for them to get used to that without having a prologue and a way to get used to it. So Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes is an interpretation to really give them a very short, smaller version of that scale.
In The Phantom Pain there are real-life day and night cycles but in Ground Zeroes the weather doesn't change and it's at night time. This is to help the past Metal Gear fans to get used to the fact that it's now open-world.
But will it be released separately?
We can't talk about how we're going to release it because we still haven't decided yet.
Kojima-san, you are famous for breaking the fourth wall in your games. How might you use to features of the next-gen consoles to do this in MGSV?
Specifically for the next-gen and Metal Gear Solid V, it's not necessarily about breaking the fourth wall, but we do have a big surprise for the players in this game. We have challenged and pushed ourselves with something that movies can't do but only games can do. It hasn't been done before.
Is open-world something you always wanted to do? Were you limited by the console hardware?
It's not necessarily about the hardware - GTA was able to do it on PS2. The first reason why I wanted to go open-world is because I wanted to create a world that had a lot of freedom and allowed users to create their own gameplay.
We're developing alongside the Fox Engine and we wanted to make sure that we were doing the most difficult and challenging thing, which is open-world. We want to create a standard for our team and then later on once we finish developing MGSV on Fox Engine we can use it for other games within Konami and it will get better and better graphically.
The other reason for the game going open-world is that we wanted to use multiple devices for this game. So using tablets and smart phones you can also enjoy MGSV and create user-generated missions within the world. That's another reason we had to go open-world - if it was linear we wouldn't be able to do that.
Will MGSV have an online multiplayer mode like the previous game?
Yes, we plan on creating Metal Gear Online. Multiplayer right now is being created at our LA studio as well as us. We're working closely to create a vast multiplayer for all the fans.
