SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Before it was revealed as Metal Gear Solid V at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, the game previously known only as The Phantom Pain had already been extensively teased with blatant clues pointing toward the involvement of MGS series creator Hideo Kojima. So the fact that this is actually the fifth game in the much-loved Metal Gear Solid series shocked nobody in the house. Nor did the MGS5 debut sequence, which was already running wild and free on YouTube before today. Still, the real-time trailer's mix of beauty and high-action shimmers with high-poly, sweat-shimmering faces, devil horses flying on wings of fire, military squads in bulky armor, and enough lens flare to blind JJ Abrams.

But before charming GDC's audience of game developers with a long talk about the game's engine, Hideo Kojima and the design team at Konami snuck a different kind of surprise into the trailer: the target platforms. Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 logos stood alone at the end of the video, strangely leaving out the next generation systems that would seem best-equipped to handle its complex rendering.

Kojima himself cued the game's debut in characteristically silly fashion: first with a delay of a few minutes, and then by entering the room with his face covered in the same bandages seen in that odd Phantom Pain interview. That turned out to be a double-joke, as one of the game's main characters—a mysterious helper who introduces himself to Snake by saying "Call me Ishmael"—wears that facial bandage disguise as well.

In the on-stage live demo, the Ishmael sequence takes its sweet time, revealing that Snake (looking not quite as old and haggard as in his MGS4 days) has just woken from a nine-year coma and needs to escape a hospital. This means the frail Snake, his arms thinner than a catwalk model's, has to crawl and suffer his way down hallways. Though it looks agonizing to control, the time spent on Snake's struggling animations—and his lengthy transition to finally standing upright—pays off in emotional resonance. At this point, Snake is confronted with a devil woman in a straightjacket and another a devil soldier walking through a wall of flames.

Kojima insisted that the game would be an open-world adventure, with this introductory sequence as its sole "on-rails" tutorial—quite an assertion from a man who revels in never-ending MGS cut scenes. His assertion that the Fox Engine would handle so much detail on current console platforms was also a bit tough to swallow, simply because of the level of detail displayed in the GDC demo. Shadow and light. Realistic fabric. Ridiculously detailed wireframe models of faces, whose features looked even cooler in super-zoom form. Objects like tree trunks with high detail and never-repeating textures.

Top MGS developers spoke at length about how they worked on the game's photorealistic graphics, but for all the chatter about the engine, none of the developers spoke to the limitations of, say, 512MB of RAM on an Xbox 360. Real-time demos of the engine mostly revolved around Kojima's meeting room, rendered to help the team focus on realistic lighting. Plants, fabric, people, and other in-game objects would be brought into the office, then rendered in the game to nail realistic color reproductions on TV screens.

It's hard not to be skeptical that all the elements of this game—its expressive faces, its giant scenes, its rides on horses through flaming forests while Snake blasts creatures with a shotgun—will be possible without the power of the next generation of consoles. But Kojima's emotionally charged "real-time" sequence already has the next-gen upper hand, no matter where it launches.