It's been known for a while that Metal Gear Solid V would be yet another of the Cross-Gen titles coming out, releasing for both PS3 and 360, but PS4 and XBone as well. It's also been known that Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, the prologue to the actual meat of MGS V, The Phantom Pain, would be releasing beforehand due to it being a prologue and all. That was roughly all the information that we knew to this point, however, and that finally changed today....kind of.
The release window has narrowed from "2014" to "Spring 2014" which is, of course, considerably more focused, but it's clearly still not ready for an official release just yet. We also have prices....in a sense, and this is where things get a bit tricky. Current gen prices for the packaged versions of the game (meaning PS3/360 disks) will be £30, which roughly translates to about $48, assuming they don't do that thing they do where they just exchange £ and $. Current gen prices for digital versions of the game, however, will be £20, which roughly translates to about $32. And then there's an entry for the price of the Next-Gen downloadable versions, which is the aforementioned £30 or ~$48. So, what's the price for the Next-Gen packaged version? Uhh..
Well, apparently there won't fucking be one.
It's already been confirmed elsewhere from the linked article - Ground Zeroes is going to be Digital-Only on the PS4/XBone and I have only one thing to say to that: Fuck that.
Next Gen games are going to be fucking huge - Killzone: Shadow Fall is just south of 40 GB as a compressed file (down from a hefty 290 GB) as an example - and I can't imagine that Ground Zeroes, the first Open-World Metal Gear Solid title is going to be an exception to that, prologue or not. My thoughts on digital-only games has been well-covered at this point (even if I understand that it's a necessity -sometimes-, and can acknowledge that there are varying degrees of problem areas to it) but I think we can all agree that downloading 40 gigs is simply unfeasible for a majority of the people playing games out there. Not only is there speed issues to consider (since we're not all blessed with the ability to pay for wonderful internet), but there is that whole pesky issue about Data Caps that has not gone away by some sort of magic or sorcery. So it's at this point that I would like to ask Developers to kindly pull their heads out of their goddamn asses.
I'm going to reiterate the very point I made back when Microsoft assumed the internet was magical and ever-present around the entire goddamn world: It's fucking not. Internet infrastructure is actually pretty piss-poor in the United States (not to mention neighboring Canada and Mexico) since the farther out from a major city you get (not even the semi-major cities) there is a drastic drop-off in speed, capacity and what have you. Everyone in the industry seems to forget this constantly, because, and I'm just guessing here, a lot of developers are based out of major cities. I can see how it's possible that it's easy to forget what you -don't- have to deal with, but that doesn't make it any better. Still, I think even some of these people would have an issue downloading 40-50 Gig games on the regular. So hopefully this little idea of "Digital Future" stays in the future now as it has done so already, because we just are not ready for it yet.
I mean, seriously, Ground Zeroes is going to be fucking huge even if it's supposed to be a 'short' game are we kidding anyone thinking otherwise
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