A day out of his employment contract with Konami and Hideo Kojima already has a new studio and a publishing deal with Sony. It's great to see the celebrated game maker and many of his staff land on their feet after a tense parting with Konami… so with that sorted, what the heck are they making?
Kojima and Sony have been typically cagey about the new project, saying only that it will be the start of a new franchise. A Sony community manager confirmed in a since-deleted Q&A that it will be released first on PS4 - and gave a specific "no comment" to questions about PlayStation VR - though it will also hit PC after an unspecified exclusivity window. The announced agreement applies only to the studio's first game, so it's not clear where any further titles from Kojima Productions will land.
The rights to Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hills (and Zone of the Enders and Boktai and Policenauts and Snatcher) remain with Konami, so Kojima Productions' first game will have to start over from square one. The game will be "something completely new" according to the Q&A. That said, it may have a familiar look: Yoji Shinkawa, lead artist and illustrator for the Metal Gear and Zone of the Enders series, is on board with the new Kojima Productions.
Yoji wearing the T-shirt too. pic.twitter.com/A1qJhqI8S3December 16, 2015
You can glean a few more details about the game by diving into the many job listings on Kojima Productions' new website. First off, it will probably still have big guns, and it may even have giant robots: a weapons/mechanical artist position asks for experience in both mechanical and military designs. Several programmer roles request experience with "crowd AI," so the game may explore more populated areas than Metal Gear's usual military bases and half-deserted villages. A network programmer will also ensure that it has online features of some kind, though I didn't see enough in the listings to make me suspect a full-on multiplayer mode like Metal Gear Online. Not to mention they're already filling a full artist role just for cinematics, because this is a Kojima production, dammit.
Also of interest is the fact that Kojima Productions is looking for game designers with experience in Unreal Engine and Unity, two of the most commonly used engines in game development. That doesn't mean it will actually use either of those engines for its new game, but it is further evidence that Fox Engine, which was created by Kojima Productions to power both Metal Gear Solid 5 and the Pro Evolution Soccer series, is staying at Konami.
Hopefully we won't have to wait too much longer to hear more solid details about Kojima Productions' new project. I've been hoping Kojima would turn his idiosyncratic sense for design and narrative to an all-new project for years, so I'm very interested to see how this odd course of events shakes out.
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