Kojima Productions is always secretive about what it’s working on. At the moment, it’s not fully clear if the company is working on one Metal Gear game or two. There is Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, the new game Hideo Kojima debuted in summer 2012 that is already in production. Then there’s The Phantom Pain, a mysterious game shown in a trailer at December’s Spike Video Game Awards which was barely masked as the work of Kojima Productions. Are they the same game? Two separate games? Hideo Kojima works in mysterious ways. Based on a huge number of new job listings with Kojima productions, though, it’s clear that gamers won’t be playing either game any time soon.
Kojima Productions posted twelve job listings for senior creative positions with Kojima Productions Los Angeles. The postings include: Senior Game Level Designer, Game Designer, Concept Artist, Senior Character Artist, and many others.
All postings were put online ahead of the 2013 Game Developers Conference where Kojima Productions will be recruiting. These positions are all for a new Metal Gear title.
“Project engineers for the latest Metal Gear Solid targeted for high-end consoles and PC” as well as “engineers to help develop next-gen game engine technology for use with the ‘FOX Engine’” are the primary tasks of all these new employees.
The “next Metal Gear Solid” may not refer to Ground Zeroes. When he debuted the game last summer, Kojima emphasized that that game was not just intended for the next Xbox and PlayStation 4, but also the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Since an actual gameplay demo of Ground Zeroes was demonstrated at the time and The Phantom Pain was shown later in a mercurial way, it’s highly possible that the latter game is in fact a separate product entirely that is still only in the concept phase of development. Hence the need for high-level artists for every facet of the game.
Though the listings don’t betray any other details about Kojima’s future games, we at least know that the Metal Gear Solid in question will include online multiplayer. One of the openings is for a Senior Multiplayer Game Designer who has at least four years of experience designing multiplayer modes for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games. The two most recent Metal Gear Solid games, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, both experimented in multiplayer modes but neither found large audiences.
Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in The AV Club, Salon, Edge, and many others. He is patiently waiting for Namco to finish Klonoa 3.
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