14 DAY TRIAL // On his trip to Australia for the weekend's GO3 Electronic Entertainment Expo held in Perth, MGS series creator talked about the upcoming and most anticipated title of the series yet, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He revealed that the fourth installment of MGS would use a lot of the good stuff seen with its predecessors: "I went back to the drawing board, back to scratch, and looked at what I did for Metal Gear 1 and 2, and for Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3," as Gamespot posts. However, there will be a new feature added to the game that has never been seen in any of the series' titles: "hide and seek!" - sort of a psychological moment for the upcoming battle. Don't laugh, you'll see that it's true, only put in different words... translated words at that:
"Now I can't make Snake go into space to do his stealth mission," Kojima continued, "and we've exhausted the concept of the place, so now I thought why not create a situation rather than a place? And then I thought of a battlezone or warzone as the situation where Snake has to sneak in. So MGS4's game concept is playing hide and seek within a certain situation."
By now you must be in a total blur, but hold on 'cause Kojima continues with his "hide and seek concept," which mainly comes as an advantage to the player, as he can infiltrate more than one group/army creating confusion: "To make it very simple, in the past Metal Gears, Snake was going into enemy environments--so everyone apart from Snake was an enemy. This time it's a warzone, so you have country A or country B, so Snake could interfere with either of the countries. It does not necessarily mean that everyone is an enemy to Snake. This creates a new tension in playing this new hide and seek." Pretty cool wouldn't you say?
Closing his speech, Hideo Kojima states that he believes in team-work. Also, that along with the evolution of technology "...game design will continuously evolve--it will not stop evolving. And at the same time, through the joint effort of many people, games will continue to be a collaborative art. And I believe in this concept."
The game is a PlayStation3 exclusive, launching in North America on 07/01/2007.