Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain‘s base-building multiplayer mode incentivizes players to build nuclear weapons. They are the most expensive development project in the game, and they provide a huge defensive boost to players’ bases–but they can also dismantle them and work toward total disarmament. But this week, although there are still a ton of nuclear weapons out there, the game’s secret nuclear disarmament cutscene was triggered–and Konami doesn’t know why.
In spite of the fact that players have significant reasons to pursue nukes, including deterrence and prestige, Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima included a bit of motivation to urge them to destroy their stockpiles. He stated that if every player on a certain platform (PS4, Xbox One, or PC) were to dismantle their nukes, a special event would unlock in the game.
As you might expect, it’s very difficult to get thousands of players to coordinate toward a goal, and as of September 1, 2017, there were still over 9,800 nuclear weapons on the PC server. However, PC MGSV users discovered on February 2 that the cutscene had triggered prematurely.
Konami apparently still does not know what happened. Over the weekend, it took to Twitter to apologize for the mistake. “The nuclear disarmament event was triggered in the Steam version of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on [February 2]… We are still investigating, but can confirm that the event was triggered while the nuke count hadn’t reached zero.”
Back before the game released, Hideo Kojima explained that he hoped to communicate his anti-nuclear weapons, pro-disarmament feelings through a means other than normal storytelling. “As it’s difficult to make player feel ‘anti-war, anti-nuke’ like a movie can do, what I’ve tried was to make something only game can do,” he wrote on Twitter. Much like disarmament plans in the real world, however, this one has gone awry–and not for the first time. The cutscene was found by dataminers essentially as soon as the game was released. You can see it in the embed above.
[News via Polygon]
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