Metal Gear Solid 5 famously released in two highly disproportionate parts, with its short (but highly replayable) prologue Ground Zeroes releasing roughly a year before the full-fat Phantom Pain.
This has always struck me as an odd decision. Prior to Ground Zeroes’ release, Hideo Kojima claimed he split off the prologue because he wanted to give fans something to play. Yet I’ve always believed pressure from Konami played a big role, especially given how The Phantom Pain itself was noticeably unfinished (though still brilliant) when it launched, and Kojima’s departure from Konami shortly after the game’s release.
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Getting Ground Zeroes to work in The Phantom Pain requires a bit of prep. You’ll need to install Snakebite Mod Manager and the latest version of Infinite Heaven, which is a location & mission addon system. You’ll also need to download the US Naval Prison Facility map. Oh, and you’ll need to own both TPP and Ground Zeroes.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed the mod, it will add the Ground Zeroes mission to the mission list on the iDroid in the helicopter. The mission will also trigger automatically after players complete Episode 1 of The Phantom Pain, suggesting it acts more like a flashback than a prologue.
It somehow even includes fulton support in Ground Zeroes, which apparently was a nightmare to get working because GZ has ceiling collision issues that don’t exist in MGSV: TPP. The mod comes with a full list of known issues but most (not all) are relatively minor things like shaders not working properly in cutscenes or missing audio, which hopefully over time we’ll see a few fixes for.
This is, of course, a mod that includes an element of guesswork. We know that GZ was always supposed to be a part of MGSV: TPP, but Kojima’s never spoken in-depth about exactly how it would have been implemented, and whether we would have played the existing prologue, flashbacked to GZ, and then returned to MGSV: TPP.
Amusingly enough this has some in the MGS community speculating about whether we can ever expect a mod with the fabled mission 51 for MGSV: TPP. This was mentioned briefly in some of the MGSV: TPP extras, and an unfinished cutscene exists, but nothing else that modders could use: mission 51 will always be the true phantom pain. The bigger question is that, now modders have shown how it’s done, will Konami try anything interesting with the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2, which includes both games.
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