MGS4 goes "back to the drawing board"

At last weekend's GO3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Perth, Australia, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima spoke to a keen audience about how he will push the series forward with MGS4 on PS3.

"I went back to the drawing board, back to scratch," he said, according to Gamespot, "and looked at what I did for Metal Gear 1 and 2, and for Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3."

He goes on to explain: "Now I can't make Snake go into space to do his stealth mission, and we've exhausted the concept of the place, so now I thought why not create a situation rather than a place? And then I thought of a battlezone or warzone as the situation where Snake has to sneak in. So MGS4's game concept is playing hide and seek within a certain situation."

Kojima detailed his vision of a game that places the player in a the middle of a war between two armies. "To make it very simple, in the past Metal Gears, Snake was going into enemy environments--so everyone apart from Snake was an enemy. This time it's a warzone, so you have country A or country B, so Snake could interfere with either of the countries."

Interestingly, he says that this "does not necessarily mean that everyone is an enemy to Snake," suggesting Snake will have to work with or even sneak past allies - which makes us think of the CIA level in the original Splinter Cell game. "This creates a new tension in playing this new hide and seek," he promises.

Kojima also hopes to give Sony's shiny super console a fair old work out in some interesting ways, "for not only what you can see, but also psychological effects, or psychological battles, where it can affect your gameplay."

MGS4 is bound to kick ass, so whatever "psychological" stuff Kojima is thinking up, we hope he can get it done and whacked onto a Blu-ray disc for us to feed our PS3 with pronto. Q4 2007 is the current ETA.