Interest

Hideo Kojima Talks Game Design in Interview

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, the latest entry in the long-running Metal Gear Solid video game franchise, is set to release in the U.S. on March 18. In anticipation of the release, Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind the series, sat down for an interview with 4gamers.net, a major Japanese game website. The interview was quite lengthy, and covered many aspects of the game — its open-world design, its game engine, its revenge plot. But the most interesting portion concerned Metal Gear Solid V's difficulty level.

While remaining true to the franchise's tradition of infiltration and stealth, Kojima declared that the new entry will offer more freedom of movement: players will now be able to hide behind everything. While in the original Metal Gear, players had to take a fixed route to their destination, players can now "circle their way towards the destination or attack it from above or below." He explains that while moving without being caught is still central to the game, "how you avoid getting caught is up to the player, and we went out of our way not to guide you."

Regarding difficulty, Kojima brought up the example of old games in which the player would have to do lots of running jumps, and how adjusting a game's difficulty back then was as simple as lowering or raising the height of a jump. However, since there is no set path to completing a mission in Ground Zeroes, "adjusting the difficulty is a little different from the past." Although changing something like the degree of damage sustained from gunshots is an option, Kojima demurs from the prospect of altering the game's design much. "That's for the player to decide."

Metal Gear Solid V will not have an "easy" mode, and Kojima speculates that this might turn off more casual gamers. "Well, they don't have to buy it then."

[Via 4gamer.net]