Earlier this week, Rockstar Games entertained many gamers across the world with the first Grand Theft Auto 5 gameplay footage. Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, however, said on Twitter he was a bit sad watching it.
Why is it depressing to Kojima? Because he's currently making his own open-world game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
Metal Gear Solid V will be the first game in that series to embrace open-world gameplay. Previous games gave players some freedom to explore and find alternate routes but MGS5 takes things to a whole new level. The E3 demo showed Naked Snake traveling across a desert via horse, jeep and other modes of transportation. Along the way, they encountered enemy patrols that they had to either sneak past or fight. Players were given an end destination, and it was up to them to decide how to get there.
Still, I don't think anyone's expecting MGS5 to have the level of freedom that GTA 5 will. Rockstar has been refining their sandbox gameplay formula over several games, adding more features with each new installment. They're going all out with this game. GTA 5's world is supposedly larger than the worlds from GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption and GTA: San Andreas combined. That would make it one of the largest open-world games ever. On top of all that, GTA 5 tells three intertwining stories at once.
Furthermore, MGS5 centers around covert ops missions in hostile territory. Snake's simply not going to have the same amount of activities available to him that say, a criminal in sunny Los Santos has. He won't be able to go on a hunting trip or play a few rounds of golf. If there's any scuba diving, it won't be recreational. Kojima Productions will be spending more time on making sure the stealth-action is as tight as possible.
The fact that Metal Gear has never gone open-world before counts for a lot. The tendency with open-world series is that the first game provides a vast environment to explore but a minimum of activities. Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 2 both come to mind. So much energy is expended on simply implementing the open-world structure. It takes a sequel or two for the developers to get around to actually filling out that map. Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed 2 were huge steps forward for those franchises.
Grand Theft Auto V will be released this September on Xbox 360 and PS3. Metal Gear Solid V is being developed for an unknown release date on PS4, PS3, Xbox One and Xbox 360. Regardless of which game turns out to be the better open-world experience, I don't think either of them is going to suck.
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