‘Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes’ targets spring 2014 for release

By Adam Rosenberg Published March 31, 2014

Check out our review of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes brings its open world horseback stealth to PlayStation and Xbox consoles sometime during spring 2014, Konami confirms. The game’s story serves as a prologue to the events of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and as the press release also notes, Ground Zeroes “will serve to introduce key gameplay components that will be fully realized in” Phantom Pain. It will also “act as a bridge between the linearity of existing titles and the full open-world environments” of Phantom.

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Series creator and Kojima Productions head Hideo Kojima offers a little more detail in a prepared statement. “The advanced capabilities of the Fox Engine have allowed me to tell the new story in a new way. There will be a significant difference in what [The Phantom Pain] brings to the series, so we want to ease players into the new open world environment and its potential. As such, [Ground Zeroes] has been designed to introduce key elements, allowing them to fully benefit from all that the new game will offer.”

It sounds very much like Ground Zeroes is designed as a smaller game, and the pricing definitely supports that. Boxed versions of the current-gen release for PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 will be priced at $29.99 while downloadable versions will carry a $19.99 price tag. Meanwhile, the next-gen version of the game, coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, will only be available as a download… for $10 more. (The press release makes no mention of a boxed next-gen release.) That’s right: the next-gen, download-only version of Ground Zeroes carries a $29.99 price tag.

There’s no word on when The Phantom Pain will be released, though you can safely bet that it will be sometime after Ground Zeroes.

Former Gaming/Movies Editor

Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…

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