14 DAY TRIAL // By now, everyone knows that Hideo Kojima made a rather shocking announcement at the Leipzig games convention this year, revealing that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Online will be launching as separate products. This was bound to create quite a stir, as gamers may feel ripped off at the thought of paying double the price for a game, just because Konami presumably thought of selling the online experience alone, but Ryan Payton clarifies that it's not the case.
1UP.com recently got hold of Kojima Productions Assistant Producer Ryan Payton for an interview in which the man shed some light onto why they made the decision to split up the game in two and sell them separately. The thing is, as Payton himself claims, MGS 4 and MGO have always been two different products:
"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."
Good point, what can I say, but what about the price? Well, imagine what's it like to hear this from a gamer's perspective, Payton admitted that "if all of the sudden publishers started breaking up the single player and the multiplayer, I think people are going to feel ripped off." Which is very true again, but still doesn't clarify the price issue.
This statement however, does: "... 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." So although they haven't revealed a certain price yet for MGO, it surely looks like gamers are going to pay less than $60 for the online experience.
Payton also confirmed that the two games are using the same engine to handle graphics, physics, sound, and controls. Still, he assures that the gameplay experience will be very different.