I’ve been waiting for this game since back in 2008 when I finished the critically acclaimed Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Konami and Kojima Productions recently made Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes official at Metal Gear’s 25th Anniversary Event, and earlier today they showed first footage from the game at PAX 2012. Check it out after the jump!
The footage which we’ve embedded at the end of this post is running in real-time on a “current gen” PC whose specs – according to Hideo Kojima (the brain behind the Metal Gear Solid series) – are comparable to those of the PlayStation 3.
It’s a very long video, with almost 10 minutes of cutscenes and under 1 minute of gameplay. I would describe the footage here, but it would spoil the fun of seeing things for yourself which I suggest you do right now. Seriously, go watch it and then read the paragraphs below.
Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is powered by Kojima Production’s new FOX engine. It works across multiple platforms and is believed by many to be designed with next generation consoles in mind. As you can tell by the 11 minute footage, it looks absolutely stunning! I thought Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots looked really good, but this just blows my mind. The lighting effects, texture quality, facial animations etc. etc. is phenomenal!
Because it is based on a multi-platform engine, Ground Zeroes is set to release for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This is confirmed by the logos for the respective consoles at the very end of the video.
What’s leaving many gamers puzzled is how Kojima Productions will manage to get such a graphically intense game to work on consoles that are running on hardware that is almost six years old now. As mentioned before, the footage was running in real time on a “current gen” PC with specs comparable to a PlayStation 3; we’ll have to wait and see how it looks when running on consoles.
Kojima has stated that this is not Metal Gear Solid 5; it’s more of a prologue to it. From what I can tell, it’s based some time after Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker so if you haven’t played that game yet, I strongly suggest you do in order to more easily understand the story of Ground Zeroes.
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