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

By Adam Rosenberg November 4, 2013

metal gear solid ground zeroes price cut ps4 xbox one — Image used with permission by copyright holder

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.

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.

Editors' Recommendations

Former Digital Trends Contributor

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

Gaming

Delisted Metal Gear games are returning to digital storefronts

Characters wield guns in Metal Gear Solid 2.

It looks like Konami is going to relist some Metal Gear games onto digital storefronts again after having previously taken them down. The news comes by way of a tweet from the official Metal Gear Twitter account.

"The 'METAL GEAR' series released on July 13, 1987, celebrated its 35th anniversary today," the account tweeted. "We are preparing to resume sales of titles that have been temporarily suspended."

Gaming

Best PlayStation Plus Deals: Save on Essential, Plus and Premium

Best PS Plus deals

While the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 are excellent consoles, especially for those who don't want to invest in a gaming PC, you tend to lose out on a lot if you don't have one of Sony's online subscriptions. You see, a PlayStation Plus (PS Plus) subscription offers, is access to online multiplayer, and without it, you can't connect to online servers and play with other folks, which is a bit frustrating. Luckily, a PS Plus membership does offer some additional features, such as free games every month and access to some older PS games, all of which depend on which of the three tiers you subscribe to: Essential, Extra, and Premium.
What is PlayStation Plus?
Along with online multiplayer and other in-game network features, a PlayStation Plus Essential membership grants you access to exclusive discounts and other promotions. Perhaps the most notable benefit of PlayStation Plus is that every month, Sony gives subscribers one PlayStation 5 and two PlayStation 4 games that are free to download. You have one month to add these free PlayStation Plus games to your library.

After that, these titles are yours to keep so long as you have an active PlayStation Plus subscription. The free-to-download games are generally pretty good (they are often some of the best PS4 games that have been out for a little while), and these alone justify the cost of PS Plus even for people who don't do a lot of online gaming.

Gaming

Where to find Burnt Books in Fallout 76

Raiders in Fallout 7 fighting near fire.

Crafting is as important a mechanic in Fallout 76 as shooting and looting. As is the case with every Bethesda game, you will be collecting every item in the world that isn't nailed down to use for parts until you're over--encumbered. Being a live service game, you will often also be tasked with hunting down a specific material or item as part of a daily or weekly challenge. One fairly common one is to find burnt books. There are a few smaller stashes of these singed paperbacks around Appalachia, but one location in particular is the mother lode. There are no libraries in the wasteland, but we know the location of the secret stashwhere you'll find all the burnt books you could want.
Where to find burnt books

There are several locations that have a handful of burnt books, but there's one that has well over 100 in a single location. To fill your bookshelves in a single trip, head over to Summersville and go to the house at the location shown on the map. Take out the ghouls outside and enter the house. Whoever lived there must've been quite the book enthusiast as there are stacks of burnt books to loot on each floor of the house. Once trip here and you will complete your quest and stock up on as many burnt books as you need.