Sometimes, months of teasing leads to nothing, and other times it ends up being something great. Lucky for Metal Gear fans, this falls into the second category. After seemingly endless viral campaigns, tongue-in-cheek jokes, and intentionally poorly kept secrets, Metal Gear Solid 5 has finally been announced. Made you wait, didn't they?

Hideo Kojima spilled the details at his GDC panel, revealing the game in full. So, what is it? When is it coming out? What systems will it be released for? We have answers for some of these and speculation for others. We've mixed together everything we know about the game, pulling both from the new trailer and the previously-released footage of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. Speaking of which...

Updated on 4/1 with new information

Ready for an announcement you never, ever in a million years saw coming? Turns out The Phantom Pain isn't a real game, and Moby Dick Studios doesn't exist. Oh, and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes? That's actually not what the next Metal Gear Solid game is called, either. We know, you're surprised. You likely don't feel any emotion at all right now--that's shock, it's fine. When you're over it, read the next paragraph.

Turns out all that stuff was part of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain... maybe. Kojima has clarified, saying: "But what we can say is that Phantom Pain and Ground Zeroes will be two parts of a whole, and Ground Zeroes will come first. It will kind of be Phantom Pain on a smaller scale. It will be open-world, but not quite as big as Phantom Pain. It will allow you to jump in, learn how to sneak real-time in that open-world, and later on, after [players] kind of get used to that, then Phantom Pain will come along and they’ll be thrown into this huge, gigantic open word. It’s a two-step process, the game design, and together these things will comprise Metal Gear Solid V.”

The beginning of the trailer shows Big Boss/Snake, dead on a stretcher. Doctors are yelling, Master Miller is freaking out (more on him later), but there's no pulse. After some work they're able to bring him back to the land of the living, and his heart starts beating. He was out for too long, though, so despite being alive, Snake is in a coma. A coma he'll stay in for nine years.

What happens during those nine years? Though the trailer doesn't say, we're able to connect some dots and figure things out on our own. It's possible that during this time Snake's former commander, Zero, executed a project called Les Enfants Terribles, creating several clones from his DNA: Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, and Solidus Snake. The timelines don't match up perfectly, so maybe that happened during a different coma (?), but we don't know for sure.

Snake wakes up after his long nap to find his hospital under attack. His bandaged guardian (named Ishmael) tries to lead him to safety, but after nearly a decade of sleep Snake is gaunt and emaciated. Snake is stuck crawling, not because he’s sneaking, but because he can’t stand up--even after Ishmael gives him a shot to help speed up the process.

So, in other words: Tutorial time! Snake crawls through the hospital, seeing weird monsters and ghosts and other crazy sights. They could be hallucinated because of the shot Ishmael gave him, or he could still be shaking off the effects of his coma. Or they could be real, because this is Metal Gear Solid and why wouldn't there be a ghostly guy on fire riding a unicorn?

For all the cool moments in the trailer, the biggest disappointment was what was missing, namely the English voice of Snake, David Hayter. Hayter first took on the role in the original Metal Gear Solid, and had been playing both Naked and Solid Snakes in every appearance up to 2010’s Peace Walker. But the moment you heard Snake speak in the newest footage, it was missing Hayter’s distinctly gravelly approach. As Hayter would later confirm on Twitter, he’s been replaced, but why?

The new voice wasn’t even acknowledged at the reveal, so fans are left to figure it out for themselves. It’s worth noting that in the Japanese language trailer for Ground Zeroes, Akio Ōtsuka was playing Snake just as he had since Snake first spoke, so why the English-language switch? Did Kojima just want a change? Was there some behind-the-scenes strife? Or should we hold out hope that Kojima and Hayter are both trolling us and he’ll ultimately be the real voice in the final game?

Yeah, we've heard this before. Hideo Kojima is claiming that Metal Gear Solid V is his last Metal Gear game, and that he'll pass the franchise off to his staff after this one. Before you get too worried, you should remember that he said literally the same thing when Metal Gear Solid 4 was announced. Kojima saying he's making his last MGS game is like The Rolling Stones saying they're on their last tour.

He claimed that the reason he's making it at all is because he wants to reinvent the series before he leaves. That's why it's Metal Gear Solid V (V is for "Victory," in his mind), and that's why he's leaving David Hayter in the past.

MGS5’s narrative split seems to be pre- and post-coma, and before Snake heads off to dreamland, he’s seen assisting a familiar face in the accompanying hospital bed. Master Miller a.k.a. Kazuhira Miller had teamed up with Big Boss prior to the Peace Walker incident to form Militaires Sans Frontières. In the trailer’s big attack on the MSF home base, Snake appears to be in better shape, pulling Miller over to a retreating helicopter. Sometime between landing and lift off that changes, with Snake waking up alone nine years later, missing his left arm and Miller nowhere to be seen. But who is Miller?

We know that Miller would later turn on Big Boss, teaming with Solid Snake to help the younger serpent defeat his former friend in the original Metal Gear. He must have moved on after Boss’ coma, but why didn’t they reunite once Snake woke up? Was Snake a whole new man when he awoke? The type of man ready to trick his friends, build a sovereign nation, and threaten a nuclear attack? Is Miller’s absence a sign that this Snake has finally become the Big Boss that twisted Foxhound into such a dangerous machine?

Snake already had to deal with losing an eye, but when he wakes up in his hospital bed he has to come to terms with losing his left arm and nine years of his life. His prosthetic hook seems fairly realistic for what we're assuming is the early-to-mid-1980’s, but at the trailer’s end Snake is sporting a new arm capable of holding a cigar and revving a motorcycle engine. Is that even possible?

Setting aside the fact that anything is possible in a world as nuts as Metal Gear’s, there’s a long tradition of cybernetic attachments in the series. Gray Fox, Raiden, and Revolver Ocelot all lose an appendage that’s replaced scientifically, and Revengeance even had a whole system of unlocks based around chopping off cyborg arms, so there’s definitely a precedent for this. As for the timeframe, Chico already featured a tech implant of some type in the Ground Zeroes trailer, and dialogue in Metal Gear 2 for MSX did imply that Big Boss had cyber-attachments, so it’s all very possible. And again, Metal Gear is crazy.

The XOF appears to be a US military group, though their allegiance is questionable at best based on what we’ve seen from the Ground Zeroes footage and Metal Gear Solid V trailer. The organization appears to be in direct conflict with MSF and FOX. With the disfigured man removing all markings and proof of XOF from Camp Omega, it’s clear he doesn’t want his organization out of the shadows just yet.

One of MGSV's slogans is “From ‘FOX,’ two phantoms were born.” This could allude to the MSF and XOF, Cipher and the Patriots, or even the specific leaders of the two groups. The statement also hammers home once again that Metal Gear Solid V will be the tale of multiple beginnings. The question that remains is: Just whose beginnings are we going to witness?

Footage from Ground Zeroes showed that some of the game would take place at a US prison camp on the tip of Cuba called Camp Omega. Miller dubs the site, “A slice of American pie on Communist soil, and out of U.S. legal jurisdiction.” It appears as if Camp Omega is a bit of a Guantanamo-like location, what with all the bag-covered prisoners.

Both Chico and Paz are being held there, and Boss is tasked with rescuing them. This all ties in nicely to the theories of close time proximity to Peace Walker. Paz was found in the Caribbean, Mother Base was last seen roaming the waters of the Caribbean, and Cuba is--you guessed it--in the Caribbean.

Early in the Ground Zeroes footage released a few months back, a disfigured man visits a young boy in a cage. Though it’s not immediately apparent who it is, the boy’s resemblance (greenish eyes, brown hair, the fact he still looks like a 12-to-14-year-old) to the Sandinista soldier from Peace Walker is too uncanny to ignore. For anyone still clinging to the hope that it’s Solid Snake, he was only just born in 1972, and even with accelerated aging, he wouldn’t look like a teenager in just three to five years. Also, it helps that during the gameplay portion of the demo, Kojima stated that the boy in the cage was indeed Chico.

Chico is somewhat different now, as he appears to have undergone surgery to allow him to plug headphones into his chest. Uh, what? There’s no real indication from the footage as to why such a thing was done to him. He’s rather eager to listen to the cassette player given to him, though. Could this tape be the last recorded words of Paz--or even Chico’s sister Amanda?

Boss and Major Zero just can’t seem to get along. After Boss walked away from FOX in MGS3, Zero recruited Paz to act as a double agent for the KGB and CIA, and to infiltrate MSF on behalf of Cipher (the organization that would grow to become the Patriots). After learning Paz may still be alive, Cipher has her detained at Camp Omega to find out if she has been compromised.

It’s also during this time that Cipher organizes a UN inspection of Mother Base, the home to Boss’ Militaires Sans Frontieres. The coincidence is too large to ignore, and only further exacerbates the growing tension between Zero and Boss. It’s no surprise that the Patriots, even in this early incarnation, are hard at work making things difficult for a member of the Snake family. Though we still don’t know what Cipher has to do with XOF, and what their goal is in MGS5, these guys are behind every twist and turn in the franchise--so they are clearly going to be up to something. All that said, MSF has someone on the inside of Cipher tipping them off. Could we once again reunite with EVA?

Kojima has claimed that the footage shown off for Metal Gear Solid V is, indeed, running on current-gen tech. That said, when it was shown off on stage Kojima was playing with an Xbox 360 controller plugged into a PC, which for the past year has been a wink at a next-generation release. He hasn't said whether it'll come out on the Xbox 720 or PS4 as well, but we're guessing it will.

That said, we're guessing it won't be out this year--and, knowing Metal Gear, we'd be shocked if it released next. Considering Kojima is still in the "messing with the audience and pretending the game doesn't exist" phase, we think we'll need to wait another year or two before we'll be able to experience Phantom Pain for ourselves.

After watching the trailer we recorded a Radar Reacts, running through different things we picked up from the trailer. If you want wanton speculation and baseless rumors, this video is for you. Let us know in the comments what you think about Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.

And if you're looking for more, check out the 100 most anticipated games of 2013 and gaming's greatest heroes.