Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain Less Cutscenes, More "Pure Game Storytelling"

Kojima Productions designer explains the change from lengthy cutscenes to player-driven narrative.

In a recent interview, Kojima Productions designer Jordan Amaro described how it will be "reducing the amount of cutscenes" in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.

Amaro explained that this is being implemented to accommodate the variety of gameplay options within The Phantom Pain's open world.

"When you are in our environments, you need to observe, use your binoculars, mark the guys and say, okay, what do I do now?" Amaro said. "There's no obvious road."

He also described his difficulties transitioning to this design philosophy from his prior experience at 2K, Crytek and Ubisoft.

"I would start working on missions using my westerner's knowledge," Amaro said. "I was designing with the player as my main preoccupation. All I did was for the player, the player was at the centre of the game.
And I was getting it all wrong, this goes against the vision for MGS5."

With creating The Phantom Pain's gameplay "not just about the player," Amaro said that Kojima Productions is now able to focus on creating an environment in which players can craft their own stories through the
game's systemic mechanics.

"We get rid of all the narrative burdens, like, Sam Fisher or whoever has to go through this emotional state or has to reach that guy," Amaro elaborated. "We just go for non-dependent objectives, and we just
get rid of all that narrative burden and just focus on what makes the mission good at the core level.

"We hope to reveal Snake's character through the players' actions in those spaces that are smart to traverse. That's pure game storytelling, although it's still primal because the odds are what they are."

The Phantom Pain will be much bigger than its prologue, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, and it might not be out till December 2015.