You know what is annoying? When you’re walking along minding your own business and then BAM!, you’re suddenly designing two new Metal Gear Solid games when you said you wouldn’t be doing anymore MGS games because you wanted to focus on other stuff. Happens all the time and it’s a pain in the butt. The most recent person to suffer this fate was Kojima himself as after declaring MGS4 to be the final MGS game he would work on he came out on stage at E3 and told everyone he was actually working on two new ones (we won’t count MGS Arcade).
How did this happen? Well it isn’t Kojima’s fault; he wasn’t planning on any of this. The designer says that, “At first, I was just going to create the overall guidelines and concepts for [MGS: Peace Walker], and leave it in the hands my excellent staff,” says Kojima. “I was going to have a hand in the project as a producer, and make titles other than MGS. But, I set the game in the South American country of Costa Rica and created a story with themes about nuclear deterrence and the cold war. It looked as if it might be very confusing to young people, because of generational differences. So, in the end I finally said, ‘I’ll do it.'” If an MGS game is not confusing with Kojima at the helm, I’d hate to see the twist and turns of one without him.
So that seems reasonable. You can accidentally start working on one game you said you wouldn’t, but how do you fall into two games? It could only happen if the other MGS game was nothing like previous MGS games. “It’s a completely different kind of action than what has appeared in the series so far,” Kojima said of MGS: Rising. “I’ll be working more deeply on the project than a normal producer.”
There you have it. Two games that Kojima planned to have nothing to do with, he is now pretty heavily involved with. I can’t help but feel that Konami might have pushed in in this direction just a bit too. Not so good to lose your rock star lead developer.
