Metal Gears fans were shocked at Leipzig when Hideo Kojima announced that Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear: Online will be two separate games.
Kojima Productions Assistant Producer Ryan Payton finally decided to clarify the reasoning behind such an unusual setup.
Payton pointed out the two games began and remain as "separate projects, separate teams, separate budgets" and that Metal Gear Solid 4 will included an online "starter pack".
"The original plan was to have Metal Gear Online come out long before MGS4. We thought of this from, seriously, two years ago. The original plan was to make MGO its own series that's not going to be dependent on the story mode of Metal Gear. The problem was that if we have a new Metal Gear, like Metal Gear Solid, it's going to come out every three years, and we can't have an online going in between that timespan. So it was going to have its own franchise, say, Metal Gear Online 2 coming out in a year-and-a-half or two years from now or something."
"We were open to do that. The idea was two different SKUs coming out, maybe like, Metal Gear Online in time for Christmas and then MGS4 sometime early next year. That was the original plan, but with delays all of a sudden it came out that both games will be mastering around the same time. So we've got this problem. [Consumers] are going to perceive that we're double-dipping, because if we ship two $60 games at the same time, on the same day."
Both games share the same graphics, physics engine, sound, and controls but Payton insists that MGS4 is "a pretty big bargain, because we had no intention of including online in that $60 MGS4 pack to begin with."
"We're running into an issue where we feel like Metal Gear can stand alone as two separate products, and honestly, you're not going to pay $120 to get both, we know that for sure. We have to tweak the pricing. That's why we couldn't announce a release date at TGS. You know, Halo 3 is over delivering, and we're going to over deliver, too. I'm not worried about the review scores, I'm not worried about backlash, because we're going to include enough online in the MGS4 package, and people are going to dig it."
