If you hadn't already guessed, Hideo Kojima is a perfectionist. His ambition is endless and his goals are sky-high.
So even when he creates a masterpiece in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots , he still looks back with a critical eye and goes, "well, we could've done some things better."
In speaking to OPM UK , the MGS guru said that although it may sound strange, he didn't achieve everything he wanted to achieve with the fourth installment. Said Kojima:
"One of the things I wanted to do was not just show pretty graphics, but represent things that you normally can’t see. So for example, if you burn something and the chemicals affect other things, or if water spills on the grass then at some point maybe a flower would grow and pop out of it. Things that normally haven’t been shown before in a game."
Some people will say the storytelling was actually one of the game's downfalls, in that it felt too much like a movie. Kojima is well aware of this accusation and added his own reflection on the subject:
"I feel that maybe I didn’t accomplish all that I set out to do at the start of the game. Looking back at it, we pushed the graphics rather than some of the other things we wanted to do. From that perspective it became like a movie-game – it has that reputation of being like a movie in the form of a game. So that’s where it came from – maybe it was a bit of a misstep, and I could reprioritise things moving forward. That’s something I learned from 4."
We certainly agree that more can be done to refine the plot and character development in future entries, and we still say he doesn't know when to end a scene. But even so, we will always maintain that MGS4 was indeed a revolution and a revelation .
Related Game(s): Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
