The first part of Metal Gear Solid V wasn't always going to be on next-gen consoles—in fact, series creator Hideo Kojima says it could have been a PSP game. Then we might have been waiting even longer between the game's two parts.


Speaking to Kotaku through a translator at the PS4 launch event earlier this week in Manhattan, Kojima explained why he chose to split up Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain into different games, to be released totally independently. Ground Zeroes, after all, is a prologue to the main game.


"Honestly, I really wanted to release Ground Zeroes right after Peace Walker," Kojima said. "Whether on PSP or PS3. But then we had development issues, some delays with Metal Gear Rising as well. And then we learned about next generation coming, so it ended up being the way it is now."

Ground Zeroes will be out this spring as a $30 release for PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PS4. Phantom Pain will be out... eventually. To some fans, this feels like an outrage—why should we have to pay $30 for a prologue?—but Kojima says they split up the games for the fans, not to spite them.

"Of course it would be ideal to release Ground Zeroes and the main part of the game all together," Kojima said. "But at the same time given that this week we have the next generation of game consoles coming out, a lot of the fans wanted to play something sooner. And given that the main game is a rather big game and still in development, it will take a little bit more time to get it out. We decided to listen to the fans and put at least the prologue out there so people will get the experience."

In other words, don't expect to be playing all of Metal Gear Solid V for a long, long time.