So Konami announced a new Metal Gear game during Gamescom. That was a thing that happened. As the first in the franchise without Hideo Kojima at the helm, there’s obviously a lot of pressure on Metal Gear Survive to perform.
Unfortunately, it seems fans aren’t entirely enamoured with the idea of a multiplayer survival game in place of a conventional single player stealth adventure – check out the trailer below, if you haven’t seen it yet.
Obviously one of the things that draws fans to the Metal Gear series is its ridiculously complex storylines and rich background, so what’s going on in Survive?
Eurogamer recently met with Konami brand manager Richard Jones to talk through the plot, and it sounds like a stretch – even by Metal Gear standards.
Jones explained:
So as you can see from the trailer, Survive is set after the events of Ground Zeroes. The Mother Base that had been built up during the Peacewalker storyline gets sabotaged from within and destroyed; that all collapses into the sea. Boss and Miller managed to escape, and they go off and have a few adventures which obviously we all know from The Phantom Pain. Unfortunately, not all of the Mother Base staff get off alive, so some of them are left stranded. But, before anything else untimely happens, they end up being pulled through a wormhole. So, an unexplained wormhole opens up and pulls the staff, parts of mother base, other items and all sorts of detritus through.
Wormholes? Okay – I’m prepared to suspend my disbelief. It is a videogame, after all, and I’m sure as a plot device a wormhole can be used to lead to all kinds of crazy adventures.
Jones continued:
When your soldier wakes up, they are in a desert landscape. A very forbidding, foreboding, alien-looking landscape with lots of twisted wreckage and lots of things that have fallen through this wormhole. So you’ll find half-formed, half-destroyed structures and all kinds of interesting stuff there. But it’s not only the structures that are being pulled through; a lot of staff have also come through. So this is where the co-op comes into this game.
So basically, it’s a co-op game in which we have to work together to survive against a number of weird and wonderful threats such as zombies which we saw in the trailer.
In terms of actual gameplay, Konami didn’t reveal much during the chat with Eurogamer. They were told that there would be stealth, and a vast array of new weapons – but that was pretty much it.
In regards to price, it was confirmed that Metal Gear Survive wouldn’t be a full priced game, implying a little less content (although I can smell the microtransactions from here).
It’s unfair to judge Metal Gear Survive at this stage of course – it could be a really interesting game. It’s just a shame that it isn’t the Metal Gear VI we were expecting.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.