Konami just finished their pre-Gamescom conference with some nice nuggets of information involving Metal Gear Solid V and the mysterious P.T. download on PSN.
On the MGS5 side of things, the huge announcement was that both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain will be coming to Steam. After being a franchise exclusive to consoles, particularly to Sony’s, it’s a nice change of pace that fellow PC gamers have a chance to take part in what appears to be a quite stellar game. The mods that will come out of the PC version should be quite entertaining as well.
The demo shown was the same one that was shown during E3, but it did show how different each playthrough approach can be between different players. In this demo, the AI adapted from the previous playthrough that was full of headshots and most of them can be seen wearing helmets. How far this AI will go remains to be seen, but adaptive AI is something that should have been here many many years ago. Thankfully, it appears Kojima Productions is up to the task. Also present in the game was the new box techniques, which can be seen below.
From watching the demo being played a couple times, it’s clear that it is indeed a Metal Gear game. It looks and feels as you would expect and with the addition of an expanded open world type feel compared to previous iterations, it could be heralded as the best MGS game if the whole game matches the demos prowess.
The show ended with some brief information about P.T. and confirmation that it is indeed a Silent Hill game being produced by Kojima and Del Toro as speculated earlier. The Playable Teaser, which can be downloaded on PSN, is downright terrifying. Every time I moved around a corner I let out a slight gasp as to what I might see. Horror games have kind of fallen off a cliff as of late, especially on the console side of things, but with such a dynamic duo as Kojima and Del Toro, they may finally be back. As for the fictional studio, 7780s Studios, Kojima explained its origins. When you translate Silent Hill into Japanese, it is the name of a prefecture that has a size of 7780 metres squared and the s at the end, stands for Silent Hill. Also, another Easter Egg, the eerie backdrop that’s used is a photo from the backyard of one of the employees. That image is below.
Metal Gear Solid 5 The Phantom Pain is set to release sometime next year. As for Silent Hills, while not even actually getting a reveal, is impossible to speculate. A 2015 release would be great, but don’t be surprised if it’s a 2016 game.