So, Kotaku recently posted a piece about the length of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, in which they claim the main story mission of the game is only two hours. This is information they’ve gotten secondhand from the lovely folks at Game Informer, who have actually played the thing. This is also pissing a lot of people off.
But not me. Not yet.
See, while I agree that two hours of gameplay is a bit weak for a $20-$40 game (depending on your platform), I doubt Ground Zeroes has only two hours’ worth of gameplay.
I got a PlayStation demo disc way back in 1998, which contained maybe the first 20 minutes of the original Metal Gear Solid. Thing is, I easily spent at least six hours on that demo. The gameplay options were so varied and so unlike anything else out at the time that I could lose myself in it. I would mess around with guards by tapping on crates or leaving footprints in the snow. I would sneak up behind them and snap their necks. I would scour every inch of the environment with Snake’s sweet goggles.
A lot of other people are comparing Ground Zeroes to the tanker mission in Metal Gear Solid 2. That’s another example of a very tiny segment of a game that could be almost endlessly replayable for those of us who like experimenting with the quirky Metal Gear toolset.
So, for me, two hours of Ground Zeroes is probably going to easily get me $30 worth of play time.
Also, consider the fact that this is just the “core story mission.” What else is included on the disc? Well, PS3 and PS4 versions get the extra Shadow Moses content, for starters. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were several side missions, or maybe even a new collection of VR missions.
So before you bitch and moan about the length of the game, you should probably find out exactly what it includes.
Then again, this is coming from a guy who bought the Legacy Collection after already owning two copies of the HD Collection, so you might want to take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.
