Speaking to Eurogamer Portugal, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain director and series creator Hideo Kojima spoke about how boss battles would work in the upcoming prologue. He also explained why boss battles didn’t quite fit within the context of Ground Zeroes and how there would be more traditional bosses in The Phantom Pain.
“For The Phantom Pain, you’ll have some battles with bosses but as it is not a linear game, you don’t have to go through a certain part until you get to one of these battles that typically marks the end of a segment. As it is an open world game, there are many ways to achieve the objectives. There are many paths. It depends on which path you have to take. Sometimes you’ll have to fight a boss, sometimes not. What we wanted to do with Ground Zeroes, was explain to the player that the path to the goal was not compulsory. This is one of the purposes of Ground Zeroes.
“In Phantom Pain, we’ll have many missions where there will be bosses at the end of a mission as the objective of the mission. For this part, Ground Zeroes, this was not the objective. The main mission in Ground Zeroes is to help Paz and Chico. If we had a linear game, after we save them, we had a big challenge at the end.
“Probably some boss or some different challenge up there. So, you’ll be able to choose different paths. In the next game, there will be normal missions and other missions where you deal with a boss at the end or mid-mission. We don’t have a boss in this particular mission but there will be more in the next game.”
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is expected to be out in early 2015 for current and next gen platforms.