Announced 17 August, 2016 Metal Gear Survive will be the next entry in the Metal Gear franchise. Will it be Metal Gear in name only or will it actually have something to offer. I’m not holding my breath.
So far critical fan base reception of Metal Gear Survive has been lukewarm at best. But I have come across a couple people that are not seeming to hate on it but rather to at least give it a chance. At the announcement trailer all we really had was a proof of concept trailer and a name. Now thanks to an interview with Eurogamer we have Konami’s brand manager, Richard Jones, to shed a little light on whats to come.
According to Jones there actually is a plot narrative they are following.
[testimonials user=’Richard Jones’ email=” name=’Richard Jones’ position=” photo=”]”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.”[/testimonials]While I obviously need to know where they are going to take my beloved franchise I can’t help but feel like this is an honest attempt from someone hired to just move the franchise on from what happened. This game is revealed to not even be planned as a full priced feature experience. It’s being touted as a Co-op experience with Jones stating “You’re not alone; there are other people there, and in order for you to survive and in order to be successful, you need to work as a team.”
This is why I’m not getting my hopes up. Since the beginning of my love affair began back in 1998 with Metal Gear Solid 1, Stealth has been at the utmost importance for this franchise, certainly not Co-op. While I may be intrigued in giving any good game a chance, I’d really like to know what the architect (Hideo Kojima) has to say on whether he thinks its even viable. The Konami Brand Manager had this to say on stealth, “There is stealth in it, I know when you’re watching the trailer it’s all very action-packed and it doesn’t really elicit that feeling, but there will be stealth and one of the really interesting things that we will be exploring and playing with is how stealth and co-op can actually co-exist.”
While no gameplay footage was shown, the proof of concept trailer says enough. This is the Fox Engine (developed by Konami and Kojima Productions) and the Metal Gear franchise assets thrown into a Co-op blow em up game with zombies and new weapons. Whether we like it or not, this looks to be happening and it could even be fun. What it does not feel like to me is anything resembling Metal Gear. Only time will tell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYC815tMU9w
