Back in early 2014, Game Informer published an interesting video interview with Julien Merceron, “Worldwide Technology Director” at Konami during the development of Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain.
In the video, called The Westernized Tech Behind Metal Gear Solid V, Merceron explained some of the features of and ideology behind the Fox Engine, which, at the time, was being developed alongside GZ and TPP.
Merceron pays particular attention to what, given the title of the video, you might expect: the western design elements and philosophies that KojiPro hoped to weave into MGSV.
The main points are these:
- Japanese game design prioritizes cinematic storytelling (i.e. embedded narrative), places a premium on visual fidelity and clarity (owing at least in part, I would imagine, to a need to display kanji at low resolutions back in the day), and tends toward handcrafted, curated scenarios.
- But Kojima and his team have taken an interest in the way game-development tools, technologies, and workflows are handled outside of Japan, and are driven to create a game that incorporates these.
- Therefore, MGSV will attempt to defy the expectations of a Japanese game by incorporating development workflows inspired by international studios and game design inspired by international games.
- The Fox Engine will help to support this goal through several “key pillars,” including physically based rendering, multiplayer capability, support for open-world design, and on-the-fly editing.
While this interview clarifies KojiPro’s intentions with regard to MGSV, the information that Merceron shares is not entirely new.
Rather, it’s an explanation of the practical application of the ideas that Kojima himself explained at the end of his keynote presentation at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2009.
Emerging from a uniquely game-designer-centric environment, Japanese games have tended to prioritize gameplay built on pure game design: prescribed rules and scenarios that are crafted and curated carefully for the player, Kojima explains. When rules and scenarios are crafted and curated by game designers in this way, games can achieve levels of polish and perfection that would not otherwise be possible, but can at the same time become rote and prescriptive.
Instead of relying only on designer-curated rules and scenarios, Kojima says, KojiPro will attempt to meld this classic Japanese style of design with a design inspired by foreign games: more systemic, more open, more free, more chaotic, owing to the more programmer- and tech-centric environment of western game design.
It’s not difficult to see how the seed of these ideas grew ultimately into The Phantom Pain. But in the GDC 2009 talk, Kojima doesn’t mention MGSV specifically. This is both because it wasn’t announced at the time and because, as the Raiden graphic at the end of the presentation indicates, Kojima is actually foreshadowing a different game entirely: Metal Gear Solid: Rising.
Had the game made it to market as planned, Metal Gear Solid: Rising may indeed have represented KojiPro’s leap into a more internationally conscious method of development. “Slicing through anything” — from architecture to fruit to internal organs — was the concept meant to steer the game’s direction and serve as its systemic basis. Meanwhile, powered by the cross-platform Fox Engine, MGSR would have embraced the multiplatform strategy of the western world and targeted a release on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, countering the trend in Japanese console games to target a single platform at first. A pincer attack to bring about a paradigm shift in development.
But, as the ultimately canceled game’s staff members lament in the short documentary The Truth Behind Rising, this systems-based groundwork of being able to cut anything never successfully meshed with the team’s design.
So MGSR never came to be, and while its rebirth as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance ultimately produced an excellent hack-and-slash action game, its essence and its ambitions were lost in transit. To make the game work, Platinum Games, with whom KojiPro joined forces to produce Revengeance, largely eliminated the systemic elements that were standing in the way of the game’s fun factor, and instead shifted focus to developing a more traditional and straightforward melee action game according to established principles.
KojiPro’s experiment in assimilating global practices not to replace but to reinforce Japanese design ultimately failed.
It wasn’t the first time.
At least not if this 2014 Joystiq article featuring Kojima is to be believed.
The article explains that in the early 2000s, likely immediately following MGS2, Kojima and his team attempted — and failed — to come up with a design for a game in response to Grand Theft Auto III.
There’s little information about this failed project — what it was, how long the KCEJ team worked on it, whether it really got off the drawing board at all, things like that. My belief is that this was a very early concept for MGS3. The signs are there, and MGS3’s greater interest in systemic interaction and unpredictability is telling, even if the final product ended up being mostly linear instead of wide open. But all of that’s just speculation on my part.
What isn’t speculation, or what at least comes with a little more basis in reality, is Kojima’s burgeoning interest in the practices and products of international game development starting from this time.
It’s a thread that unravels over the next couple of years if you take a look at old interviews with Kojima.
Like this one from Gamespy, in which, all the way back in 2003, Kojima expressed an interest in the tech-first style and philosophy of international game developers, and was already identifying, at a time when I image few others were, that this ran counter to the Japanese approach and even called into question the role of designers like himself.
Over time, interest turned to imperative. By 2009, the year of his GDC talk, Kojima, and plenty of his contemporaries, were seriously contemplating the role of classic Japanese game designers in an industry whose most impressive recent projects were flirting with a trajectory that would, one day, maybe, render the methods they built their careers with obsolete.
It’s not irrelevant, then, that, at the same time all of this was playing out, the Metal Gear series began to backdrop its military-political drama with the fraught climate of the Cold War and its tension of east vs. west. Nor is it irrelevant that the series started to fixate both ludically, with a greater dedication to systemic play, and narratively on the prospect of bringing east and west together in harmony, the dream of “[making] the world one.”
MGS3 tells the story of characters who in one way or another hope for a world wherein the dissolution of borders engenders neither subjugation nor chaos but instead harmony.
The primary project of MGSV is in my estimation nothing less than the attempt to realize this hope in the face of repeated failure.
By Kiyan. Hit me up on twitter @dra9onsMGS.
Other stuff:
- A 2009 article from Engadget in which Kojima conveys his desire to produce a game from an overseas developer, quite probably foreshadowing his role on Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.
- A 1up article from 2011 in which Kojima speaks on the divide between Japanese and international development styles from a business perspective.
- A 2010 article from Escapist on the same topic. This time Kojima discusses game world design.
- A 2012 Eurogamer article in which Kojima touches on “technology, gameplay, and world view.”
- A destructoid article where former Tales of series produced Hideo Baba contradicts a lot of his contemporaries at the time, basically saying that Japanese developers should focus on what has set Japanese game design apart. I actually think that this more accurately describes the direction things have generally gone since then, rather than what Kojima said at the time, and that this is a good thing, but that’s just me.
- Interesting interview shared by the twitter account BadHumans.
Metal Gear Stuff 