Metal Gear Solid 5 News: Creator Hideo Kojima Discusses Series' Story

The creator of the Metal Gear Solid series has finally explained how the game's critically-acclaimed story came to be—a lack of planning. 

Hideo Kojima, who has helmed the series through several generations of consoles, revealed that he has had to make the overarching story of the Metal Gear Solid series as complicated as it is beause he simply did not plan for this many games to be made when he conceived the first game in the series. This may lead to inconsistencies in the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 5 as Kojima tries to fit the prequel game in the middle of the canon of the franchise.

"When you do that sometimes the veins [of stories] get lost, change, or get stuck. From there I need to create new bloodlines so the story can keep going," Kojima told Game Informer. "One thing that I try not to do is sacrifice certain things just so I can keep the original story intact. Sometimes I need to accept these inconsistencies in order to be able to achieve what I want for the story."

Kojima said he prefers games with simple stories rather than the type of story seen in his most popular franchise.

"Having a complex story is not my intention at all," Kojima revealed. "It's nothing I ever shoot for or try to do. Ideally what I want to do is, for example, make a story that's seems very simple, it's very easy to understand on the surface, and once you zoom in there's a lot of details and a lot of things that you can see there. But overall, ideally I try to stay within a story that once you zoom out the main story is rather simple."

Perhaps due to the burden that crafting the series has had on the director, Kojima said that he has considered stepping away from the series and letting others take over, but so far the process to find his successor has not yielded any results.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is set to have a prologue chapter, Ground Zeroes, release in March on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One that will introduce fans to the open world of the main game.