Metal Gear Solid V details cleared up by Kojima

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain had one of the strangest reveals in recent triple-A gaming history, so naturally we had some questions even after its trailer concluded. Fortunately, series creator Hideo Kojima cleared up several points in an interview with GameTrailers.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain


First off, the game is indeed coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3--Kojima refused to comment on any next-gen console support, but we'll see some form of The Phantom Pain on existing consoles.

Also, how do Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain fit together? They're not just two names for the same thing, but they are still kind of, uh... Take it away, Kojima:

“We can’t comment just yet on how these things will be distributed and sold," he said--though Gematsu was told they are both the "same" game. "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.”

Finally, Kojima said he wants this to be his last Metal Gear game (we've heard that before). But before he lets his staff at Kojima Productions take over, he wanted to reinvent the series and make it a contender against Western action games--V instead of 5, as in Victory. That reinvention includes recasting Snake's voice actor.

If--like us--you still feel clueless about this whole thing even after reading our 12 things you need to know about MGSV, just pretend you're playing a Metal Gear Solid game right now.

Of course! It was nanomachines the whole time...

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.