As soon as the trailer for the mysterious and seemingly new IP, The Phantom Pain, was revealed during last year’s Spike Video Game Awards, many gamers called it a bluff and hypothesized that The Phantom Pain was actually Metal Gear Solid V or at least another installment in the revered franchise. It was allegedly being developed by a Swedish-based developer called Moby Dick Studios and to be published by Konami. Speculation and dissected trailers were aplenty after the announcement to say the least. Fast forward to GDC 2013 and what do you know, The Phantom Pain is indeed the fifth installment of Metal Gear Solid, shocking almost nobody.
The full title will be Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (see what they did there?) and it will again be led by the vision of Hideo Kojima. If you can recall, there was another Metal Gear Solid title announced that had an accompanying trailer featuring Big Boss called Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes — that was actually Metal Gear Solid V footage as well. So Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are the same game, both boiling down to essentially two different trailers for MGS V. As to whether or not this weird ramp-up to the official reveal was a brilliant marketing technique or a waste of time is up for debate, but it can’t be denied that it’s nice to have it be officially revealed rather than us constantly speculating.
[Update] Contradicting what Kojima stated during the GDC panel, Konami has confirmed to Joystiq that Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are two separate games.
The Phantom Pain trailer that was shown last December will actually be the game’s tutorial level, seeing a weak and seemingly hallucinatory Snake wake up from a nine month-long coma. The GDC demo had Snake crawling around a lot, a logical mechanic as laying down for nine months straight tends to make walking again a tad bit difficult. The game will have open-world environments (as shown in the Ground Zeroes trailer) and the demo that was shown off today is confirmed to be running on a PC. Fortunately, the logos for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 were shown, confirming that it is indeed heading for current-gen consoles. It should also be no surprise that it’s not a Sony exclusive, seeing as the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance came to Microsoft’s console.
How excited are you guys for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain? Did the official announcement blindside you or did the ramp-up dull it? Let us know in the comments below.
[Update] Check out Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain‘s GDC 2013 debut trailer and gameplay demo in the videos embedded below.
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