Kojima: The Phantom Pain "over 200 times bigger than Ground Zeroes"

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima said that Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain will be "over 200 times bigger than Ground Zeroes" in a recent group interview attended by Eurogamer in Japan.

When asked about keeping players engaged with the series during its long-running gaps between installments, Kojima said: "I'll be honest here: this wasn't necessarily a strategic move. The Phantom Pain is roughly over 200 times bigger than Ground Zeroes... I knew we couldn't hit a game that big for next-gen launch date [22nd February for the PS4 in Japan], and we didn't have any Japanese titles that were available for launch... At that time Ground Zeroes was almost complete, and a lot of fans asked for a product out there, so that's the decision I took."

"If I can't make The Phantom Pain on time, but the product is there I might as well deliver it for the people," he added. "So that was the reasoning behind this move, though I didn't do too much thinking on what would happen after that."

Kojima further explained that he wanted Ground Zeroes to get people excited about big-budget next-gen games: "A lot of people are losing interest in these high end games," he lamented.

"They're mainly interested in these mobile games, these social games, and with next-gen coming up I wanted to show people that this was still fun, that this was still something that's worth playing... that's part of the reason I decided to move ahead and just put out the product."

We'll have more input from Kojima regarding his quarter-century spanning relationship to his most enigmatic series going up shortly. In the meantime, you're welcome to read my impressions of Ground Zeroes.