Looks like Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is a heck of a lot closer to release than originally thought. The game, revealed at the 25th Metal Gear Anniversary event in Japan, has taken over all weekend gaming news as the game to watch. To further satiate the appetite of gamers clamoring for more information and details about the game, Konami released 10 whole minutes of in-engine footage from Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes.
Now, things get hairy here because the time frame and technology featured in the trailer make it difficult to pinpoint who is who and what's really going on. While there are English subtitles it's hard to place what's actually happening and who's doing what given the very vague dialogue. It's obviously after MGS: Peacewalker and MGS 3: Snake Eater but beyond that I'm not enough of a Kojima fanboy to be able to lay out the guesswork based solely on cameos and Japanese voiceovers.
You can try to lay out your own timeline by watching the video below and seeing where it fits within the Metal Gear Solid mythos.
According to the original information for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, the game is running on the brand new Fox Engine, which Kojima has been working on for years.
He actually handed over Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to a separate team to devote his time to Ground Zeroes and the Fox Engine, which is why Revengeance is the way it is.
Supposedly, Kojima claims this game will release on current gen consoles, but we all know that there's no way an open-world game with a heavy reliance on memory-hungry AI and particle-based weather effects, using real-time dynamic graphic features that were on display in that video are capable of running in real-time for the current generation consoles. I'm sorry but 512MB of shared memory does not grant you the kind of seamless graphic fidelity present in that video. Nevetheless, even Kojima admitted that the game was running on a PC for the demo.
What's more likely is that this will be a launch title for the next-gen consoles and will have a sub-standard port available for the Xbox 360 and PS3, similar to what DICE did with Battlefield 3, giving PC gamers a far superior port while the other two consoles were left with the proverbial scraps.
No doubt about it, though, this game looks flatout amazing and I can't wait to see more of it. Also, this is to the Fox Engine what Battlefield 3 was to Frostbite 2.0. It looks drop-dead gorgeous.
