Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Trailer

It’s official now. After keeping eager fans and others in the gaming industry wondering as to the meaning behind the two supposedly different games being developed by his studio, lead developer and director of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Hideo Kojima, has finally put all the pieces together. As revealed by the intriguing cinematic just released, The Phantom Pain and Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes are in fact part of the same game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

As much a trickster as he is a creative genius, Kojima started the guessing game just last August when he revealed Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes – an open-world game set in the Metal Gear universe.

Not long after in December, a trailer for a game called The Phantom Pain was revealed at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, but it was not directly linked to the Metal Gear series or even to publisher Konami. It was alleged to be a game developed by a previously unknown Moby Dick Studios. And if that wasn’t enough to arouse suspicion, Spike TV’s Geoff Keighley conducted an interview with the badly injured and suspiciously evasive head of the studio Joakim Mogren who was caught off guard when Keighley probed about the game using the Fox Engine built by Kojima Productions.

With ‘two games’ worth’ of elements now being connected to the same title, a new wave of unanswered questions will be asked, attempting to connect the images from the highly cinematic trailers with their greater associations in the Metal Gear Solid universe. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is planned to release for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, but no firm date has been announced yet.