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At last week's GDC, Kojima Productions revealed its fifth entry in the Metal Gear Solid series, The Phantom Pain, also incorporating the previously announced MGS title Ground Zeroes. Precisely how the two fit together is currently uncertain, although Hideo Kojima himself has suggested on Twitter that Ground Zeroes acts as a prologue to The Phantom Pain and that the two are bridged by a period where the game's protagonist is left in a coma. Then again, Kojima is a master of misdirection, so who knows? The one link between the two we are sure on, however, is that they are both running on the ambitious new FOX Engine, initially unveiled with Ground Zeroes last year, and that the game is set to feature a radical overhaul of the traditional MGS gameplay set-up: Snake's new adventures take place in an ambitious series of open-world environments.The trailer and gameplay demonstration for The Phantom Pain were followed by an extensive presentation which cut right into the heart of this new engine. Titled "Photo-realism through the eyes of a fox", the statement of intent is ambitious: Kojima is searching for ultra life-like imagery, the Holy Grail of graphics technology. But it's important to stress that it's not just about the rendering. His games are defined by the convergence and balance of both art and technology.
"The more that technology evolves, the more we have to understand our physical surroundings," he said. "To make a quality product the artist's eye is essential. Simply recreating reality would result in a traced image. This is what we mean by photo-realism through the eyes of a fox."
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