Looking Solid: Metal Gear Solid 5's Gamescom Trailer

If you came to me and said that there was an open world stealth game in development about dynamic infiltration of forts, with horses, and a multiplayer meta-game, I'd be giddy. That's what Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is. That it's also part of a series I haven't played since 1998's Metal Gear Solid, and that it's burdened - or strengthened - by Hideo Kojima's batshit lore, only serves to make it more interesting.

At this year's Gamescom, a new 22 minute demonstration was shown to attendant press, designed to depict how the same missions and multiplayer shown at E3 could be radically different based on the dynamic systems at work. A video of that demo is below, and it contains stealth-enabling horseshit.

At one point early on, Snake has his horse do a shit in the middle of a road in order to cause an approaching car to skid out of control. Yes. He then runs over and ties a balloon to their jeep, which hoists them into the air and sends them to Snake's base, where they can be put to work. A few moments later, he does the same to a goat. I don't know what that can be used for back at base. This is a concept which was apparently present in previous entries in the series but geez it's silly/cool.

Later, at 16 minutes in, they show an infiltration of another player's 'motherbase', where balloon-collected guards and vehicles are put to work. Again, this is a flip of something shown at E3, where the player was being infiltrated rather than doing the infiltration, and it shows a bunch of the game's stealth mechanics at work. If you love the look of all this, it's worth watching the E3 video and comparing how things play out differently.

There's no word on when the Phantom Pain will be released on PC, and the MGSV Steam page only says that it's coming soon. The console release is due before the end of the year, though PC players are due to first receive Ground Zeroes, the strange standalone first part of MGS5 which was released on consoles back in March.