10 Years Later, Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is Still a Stealth Masterpiece

For glaringly obvious reasons, Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes doesn’t get the same amount of attention from the masses that most other games in the series do, chief among them being the plain and simple fact that it wasn’t a full game. Far from it, in fact- originally meant to be a section in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, due to how long the development cycle of the actual, full fifth numbered instalment in the series was taking, director Hideo Kojima decided to split Ground Zeroes from the main experience and release it early, billing it as a playable prologue leading up to the main event.

It was a short experience, to say the least. Players could easily blow throw its main story in a couple of hours, and that, combined with the fact that it was sold at $30 at launch, meant that many felt there just wasn’t enough meat on the bone. And when The Phantom Pain launched a year later, the two-hour experience that preceded it became even hazier in everyone’s memory. But even though it was not what you would call a “full” game, looking back, it’s hard not to recognize Ground Zeroes as a stealth masterpiece in its own right, even now, a decade on from its launch.

It was, for starters, the first game to give us a taste not only of what the new (or new at the time) Fox Engine could enable Hideo Kojima and his team to do, but also of what an open world Metal Gear game would look like. In hindsight, many might argue that the potential of both those things ended up being wasted, with the Fox Engine spending years being underutilized before dying out, and The Phantom Pain’s “fully realized” open world experience coming with more than its fair share of caveats. Back in 2014, however, Ground Zeroes served as an excellent demonstration on both fronts nonetheless, painting an exciting future of a full-fledged open world Metal Gear experience powered by the fancy new Fox Engine. Even now, Ground Zeroes looks great, but back then, it looked nothing short of spectacular.

Beyond those buzzwords, however, Ground Zeroes’ biggest strength lay in its incredible level design, where it succeeded in ways that even The Phantom Pain couldn’t. One of the biggest complaints that even the most devoted Phantom Pain fans have with it is how little it uses indoor environments. Though it boasts some of the best stealth mechanics and gameplay you’ll ever see in a game, it ended up losing a lot of the tight, controlled design style of its predecessors when it almost entirely swapped out meticulously handcrafted indoor environments with large, open ones.

Ground Zeroes, on the other hand, struck the perfect balance between both styles. It was, of course, set in an open world map (albeit one much smaller than either of The Phantom Pain’s maps), with players being given the freedom to traverse and explore it at their leisure, but vast swathes of it were also characterized by structures and buildings that players would be weaving in and out of. Constantly having to study your environment was crucial, because stealth took on entirely different styles depending on whether you were out in the open or in one of Camp Omega’s more confined indoor locations.

To The Phantom Pain’s credit, it did have a handful of notable sections where players were tasked with infiltrating more tightly designed interior locations, but where Ground Zeroes delivered a much more concentrated dose of that across all of its offerings, in The Phantom Pain, that side of the experience felt significantly more diluted. Maybe that just goes to show how difficult it is to achieve that sort of perfect balance in a significantly larger open world setting, but in hindsight, it’s hard not to look back at Ground Zeroes wistfully and think about how much more fantastic The Phantom Pain could have been if its design philosophy had been more similar to the prologue that preceded it.

It’s also worth pointing out that though Ground Zeroes was by no means a full game, it was still one that players could get plenty of hours out of. Sticking to the critical path and doing nothing else, you could easily hit the credits in a couple of hours, if not less, but Ground Zeroes came with plenty of optional content for players to dive into. On top of seven main missions, the game featured a number of Side Ops, Extra Ops, unlockables, and more, all of which could keep you occupied for well over a dozen hours (and let’s be honest, at a time where every game seems hellbent on being a hundred hour behemoth, doesn’t a small, tightly designed, super polished experience sound like a much needed breath of fresh air?). On top of all that, camp Omega had no shortage of secrets for players to find either, and as the particularly rabid Metal Gear fans would tell you, the game was also hiding its fair share of surprisingly pivotal narrative tidbits, many that would turn out to be crucial pieces in the larger puzzle of Metal Gear Solid 5’s story.

And, of course, you also always had the option of just messing about in the open world to your heart’s content. Obviously, there were some restrictions in place here. Owing to its very nature, Ground Zeroes’ open world sandbox wasn’t quite as endlessly replayable as The Phantom Pain was, but even in its much smaller map, thanks to the strengths of its emergent gameplay mechanics, simply fiddling around with the systems and seeing how they would react was a constant blast. From traversing the map with vehicles to testing the limits of the enemy AI, from exploring areas at different times of day (courtesy of the aforementioned Side Ops) to experimenting with Snake’s toolset, there was an abundance of ways to make your own fun in Camp Omega.

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is now a decade old (which feels ridiculous to say- but that’s a different story), and the further away we get from its release, the more we appreciate what it did. Combining tight level design, a stellar open world sandbox filled with reactive emergent systems, and an excellent sampling of what an open world Metal Gear game could be, Ground Zeroes ended up a much better, stronger, and fuller game than a supposed two-hour prologue had any right to be.

Obviously, we’re not going to put it in the same bracket as the series’ mainline entries, because a game that’s been specifically designed as a prologue is never going to be able to hit the highs of a full, new release. But as a proof-of-concept, Ground Zeroes was nothing short of spectacular, to the extent that in some areas, it was even stronger than the full game that Kojima Productions went on to build on top of it. Looking back at Ground Zeroes, it’s hard not to wonder what could have been if Hideo Kojima and his team had been able to fully execute on their vision for Metal Gear Solid 5– but then again, “what if” is something we end up invariably wondering in most cases where MGS5 is concerned. If nothing else, we’ll at least always have Ground Zeroes to give us a glimpse of what the perfect open world Metal Gear Solid game could have looked like, had it been allowed to exist in the real world the way it does in our dreams.

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