After an ugly, public falling out between the Metal Gear series’ publisher, Konami, and its creative mastermind, Hideo Kojima, we learned of his fate almost immediately. Freed from shackles of a company that was more interested in Japan’s gambling market than anything involving video games, Kojima would shack up with Sony to make a PlayStation 4 game starring Norman Reedus as a naked man with a baby. The auteur might have escaped, but his most famous creation is still in Konami’s clutches, so the question remained: What’s next for Metal Gear?
Well, today, Konami gave us its unsurprisingly underwhelming answer when it announced, via IGN, the first post-Kojima game in the series, Metal Gear Survive. (Yes, the premise you’re about to read is real and not a joke plucked from the Gameological comments, although you certainly could have fooled us.) Picking up immediately after the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Survive posits that what’s left of Naked Snake’s Militaires Sans Frontières mercenary force was sucked into a wormhole and transported to a nightmare world full of zombies and other “massive threats,” such as the Metal Gear mech heard at the end of the announcement trailer (embedded below). The soldiers will have to work together and sneak-fight their way past these abominations if they stand a chance of making it back to our zombieless dimension.
Konami describes it as a four-player cooperative stealth game and “survival done the Metal Gear way.” From the looks of the purely cinematic trailer, that likely means the stranded commandoes will have to scavenge for weapons and supplies from the ruins of Mother Base, which were also transported to this alternate dimension and scattered all over the place. No other details about the game or the developers behind it—such as which Metal Gear veterans, if any, are involved—were announced. Metal Gear Survive is scheduled to launch on the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One sometime in 2017.