Metal Gear: Rising avoids complication

Metal Gear: Rising will be less complicated than previous games in the stealth series.

The game, due out on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011, won't include established characters, developer Kojima Productions has said.

"To answer your question about returning characters, we're probably not going to show too many characters in Rising because, since it's a new part of a series, we don't really want to refer to and dwell upon the Metal Gear saga so much," creative producer Shigenobu Matsuyama told games™ magazine (reported by Connected Consoles).

"We want newcomers to the game to come in and play freely without needing to know and understand the background of the whole Metal Gear Solid universe. We don't want to have it all tied up with the story from MGS2 or MGS4 and make it too complicated."

In June Matsuyama said Rising, which stars androgynous sword-slicer Raiden, will spawn a standalone series.

"I've been asked a lot, 'Is this going to be a side-story or spin-off to the MGS series?', but what I'm positioning is that there will be a Hideo Kojima game that is MGS, but what we are planning as Kojima Productions is have this Raiden Rising as almost a standard so that there's a MGS and the Rising going back-and-forth in the future."

Rising is set between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4, and will reveal how protagonist Raiden changed from his first appearance in MGS2: Sons of Liberty to the cybernetic ninja seen in Hideo Kojima's PS3 opus MGS4: Guns of the Patriots.

Trailer's below.