Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes revealed, hints at open-world elements

As many of you already know, the Metal Gear franchise is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. What better way to celebrate than with a new game in the series? At the Metal Gear 25th Anniversary event in Tokyo, Konami and Kojima Productions announced the latest installment in the series, and they're calling it Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes.

Not too much is known about this new game at the moment, and above you see the only screenshot that has been shared by Konami. GameSpot was there to see the game in action, and it's reporting that Ground Zeroes brings a number of a changes to the famous stealth series. It would appear that Ground Zeroes is an open-world game, but it's difficult to make that call with only one live demo on the books.

GameSpot also seems to think that Solid Snake is making a return in Ground Zeroes, but that's also difficult to call as the character was only called "Snake." Since there wasn't any prefix mentioned, it could definitely be someone other than Solid Snake, so we'll have to wait until Konami dishes new details to find out more about the game's main character.

Whoever he is, he was shown summoning a helicopter for transportation and can drive a Jeep to his next objective, which lends to the belief that this will be an open-world title. It's also worth noting that the game won't end when you're discovered. If such a thing happens, Snake will be able to use all of his equipment to attempt an escape, which is another new feature Ground Zeroes is bringing to the franchise.

One thing that was there in force was the Fox engine. The game apparently looks great with the Fox engine backing it up, but then it would have to be a solid engine as Kojima says that the possibility of next generation consoles was considered while building it. Speaking of gaming platforms – we don't know which platforms Ground Zeroes will be gracing. Kojima played through the demo using an Xbox 360 controller on a PC, so it could be that PS3, Xbox 360, and PC will all be getting it. There hasn't been any release date announced either, so it seems that we'll be left waiting for a lot of new information. Still, for now at least, we imagine that Metal Gear Solid fans are happy with the knowledge that a new game is on the way. Click the thumbnail below to see the full first image for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes.