METAL GEAR SURVIVE

Konami reveals its first post-Kojima Metal Gear Solid game

Konami has revealed its first Metal Gear Solid game since the dramatic departure of series creator Hideo Kojima. Metal Gear Survive is a four-player co-op game that takes place in an alternate timeline immediately following the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. At the end of The Phantom Pain’s superb mini-prequel we see Mother Base being destroyed by Skull Face and his XOF soldiers, and this is where Metal Gear Survive picks up. A wormhole opens in the sky and sucks the shattered remains of the base and surviving MSF soldiers into it, transporting them to an alternate reality. The soldiers find themselves in a strange, alien-looking landscape crawling with weird zombiethings with crystals lodged in their bodies.

“This is where the co-op comes into it,” Konami brand manager Richard Jones told Eurogamer in an interview. “You’re not alone. There are other people there with you, and in order to survive you need to work together as a team.”

Setting Metal Gear Survive in an alternate timeline is a tidy way for Konami to develop a new Metal Gear game without meddling with the long-running story established by Kojima. What happens in Survive won’t be canon, although they promise it will stay true to the series.

“There will be stealth,” says Jones. “But we’ll also be incorporating the whole theme of survival.”

Without any real information about what the game actually is, it’s unclear what playing Survive will be like. But if Konami is taking the rich stealth systems from Metal Gear Solid V— and perhaps some of the survival elements from Snake Eater— and throwing in co-op, it could be great, even without Kojima’s guiding hand. But that’s pure speculation at this point.

Reaction to the announcement has been, predictably, quite negative. There’s a strong anti-Konami sentiment on the internet at the moment, with many fans automatically writing Survive off as a cynical attempt to milk the series. But we’ll reserve judgement until we’ve actually seen the thing running. Metal Gear will never be the same without Kojima, but that doesn’t mean a talented team of developers can’t make something good under its name. Unless it ends up like the Silent Hill series after Team Silent disbanded. Let’s hope not. Andy Kelly

the alternate timeline is a tidy way to avoid meddling with kojima’s long-running story