Hideo Kojima says he split Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain so that something would be available for the Japanese next-gen launch.
Many have been complaining that Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, with its reported paltry two-hour length, is just content that has been cut out of the much longer Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in order to whet our appetites for “the real thing”. Lead developer Hideo Kojima agrees, stating that he never intended to split the games, but did so in order to ensure that some form of a Metal Gear Solid game would be ready in time for the PS4’s launch in Japan.
“Ideally,” Kojima told IGN. “I would have wanted to release the prologue and the main game together, at the same time.” However, with the Japanese launch of the PS4 rapidly approaching, Kojima wanted something to present to his Japanese fans.
“It was impossible for us to have [the full game] ready by the time the next-generation platforms launched,” he explained “I felt that a lot of people would want a Japanese high-end game. So it wasn’t necessarily a strategic move where we thought too much about it.”
He added that releasing Ground Zeros in March “is a position we took on to give people a taste of what we’re working on … this wasn’t the plan all along.”
So there you go. What do you think of games like Ground Zeroes and the Gran Tursimo prologue? Is it justified for developers to expect us to pay for a mere teaser of the full game? I’m going to sound like a crotchety old man here, but back in my day, we would call this kind of content a “demo” and it would be free.
Source: IGN
