Nearly 11 years after its release, Hideo Kojima has taken to X to express his feelings over the negative feedback that Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes received when it was released.
Hideo Kojima is one of the finest auteurs of his generation across all mediums. His calculated approach to cinematic presentation and innovation has accompanied the director across his multi-decade career. Metal Gear Solid is arguably his crowning achievement, and many of the entries are some of the most heralded releases in the annals of gaming history.
One entry has proved divisive. Although it’s looked upon more favorably in hindsight, Ground Zeroes was the subject of much criticism when it first launched.
Kojima Discusses Criticism of Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes
Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes was considered a “Prologue to the new gameplay” of Metal Gear Solid Phantom Pain, and it was originally supposed to be part of The Phantom Pain. However, as Kojima puts it in his statement on X: “The PS4 was released and there were only a few titles out, so just GZ was released ahead of the others.”
Kojima and Konami opted to release it as a standalone piece of bite-sized action, and Ground Zeroes looked and played incredibly—thanks to the new and improved Fox Engine. But its brief runtime was an inescapable negative at the time.
Reflecting, Kojima has said: “Although the episodes were short, we threw in as many gameplay elements as possible. Although it is recognized now, 11 years later, there was online negativity at the time saying, “Selling a demo version at a low price?” and it received the lowest rating in the MGS series.”
Already 11 years ago😅 This was originally planned to demonstrate the FOX engine and the gameplay of an open world infiltration game. I thought of it as an episode connecting PW and MGSV TPP, to be a bridge for both generations (console and handheld). We were considering
It’s clear that Hideo Kojima is proud of the work, and it’s fair because Ground Zeroes was a great—if not compact—MGS experience. The original plan would happen sometime later as Metal Gear Solid V: Definitive Experience was released. It bundles Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain into one complete MGS package.
Kojima has moved on from MGS with Death Stranding. A successor—Death Stranding 2—is due to release in 2025. Whereas the MGS series moves on without Kojima in Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater.
Andy is Insider Gaming's Senior Evergreen Editor and has been in the games journalism sphere in one way or another for over 7 years. His video game taste is as…
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It’s too bad the levels in the actual game were never as polished or feature complete as gz
I thought this article was going to be about MG Survive. Ground Zeroes was amazing.
That’s right tpp had many more features and improvements (polish) over gz…
Kojima is not a dev all he does is supervise and write not to mention he was an exec at Konami. The real people who made Metal Gear left Tomokazu Fukushima and Kazunobu Uehara among others who made other projects like Botkai and Zone Of Enders Kojima took sole responsibility for creation. Konami could bring them back for games same with Igarashi for Castlevania and the Bloody Roar guts for Bloody Roar.
People are dumb as f, the worst in the series was #2
Ground Zeroes should have been a free demo, that it was 40$ is pathetic, and then MGS5 after was completely unfinished is insulting.
Kojima is a hack, Death Stranding sucks.
I understood the pushback against Ground Zeroes, but I found it to be a very fun little package. It set up Phantom Pain well and established a great new villain. Was loaded with different ways to play and had tons of Easter eggs.
Too bad Phantom Pain failed to deliver in the promise that the story of Ground Zeroes (and the trailers) made. It also made the dark new villain that Ground Zeroes introduced more of a joke and gave a very anti-climactic showdown and ending with him. Couple that with the super-obvious Kojima twist of “you’re not REALLY playing as who you want to be! Hurr hurr!” and you get, to me, the most disappointing Metal Gear Solid game of all time (even more than 2 was at the time, although that got better in some ways with age). I honestly enjoyed Ground Zeroes more when it comes to story at least.
Ground Zeroes was great. It was The Phantom Pain that sucked. TPP just had you visiting the same locations ad nauseum in a barren, lifeless open world. It stands proudly as Kojima’s worst game ever. GZ was full of promise offering a refine location that kept gameplay tight and intense. TPP betrayed all of that and became an unplayable disaster that forever ruined the IP
Even 10 years ago when I had no dealings in online conversation pertaining to gaming I knew that MG GZ was a glorified tech demo, and I don’t mean that to be disparaging. Kojima did so in a creative way where I was allowed many hours of gameplay and story exposition well worth the asking price. I don’t agree with the hatred towards GZ but I can empathize with a certain crowd of people who aren’t familiar with the back end of game development and why they would feel they were sold short of a full experience. I’d recommend those people learn a thing or 2 rather than have lofty expectations.