Metal Gear Solid may not be unfamiliar with torture, but MGSV’s scenes of it look to be the most brutal and hard to watch yet. Following the uproar over Grand Theft Auto V’s playable torture scene – which players cannot opt out of – Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima has stated that despite the narrative weight of MGSV’s toture scenes, which thus far seem to include at least a couple of depictions of waterboarding as well as what we can safely assume is cattle-prod enhanced interrogation, will be kept as cutscenes.
“"It's something that needs to be done," Kojima recently told Eurogamer. "As the expressiveness of video games goes up, if you want to go beyond that it's not something you can avoid.”
Given that Kojima has previously stated the themes of the next Metal Gear range from revenge to race, heavy subject matter like torture doesn’t seem out of place here. But keeping players from feeling too uncomfortable, as many felt being an implicit party to GTAV’s torture sequence, is also important.
"I didn't want to go as far as having playable torture,” Kojima added.
Whatever the case, it would appear that Kojima’s claims that he wants MGSV to “change the industry” – which, coming from Metal Gear’s “70 percent movies” auteur probably means tackling narrative taboos and subject matter that most games wouldn’t touch (any expected design brilliance notwithstanding) – have a lot of potential to ring true here.
What exactly that will entail, or how it will play out, is something we won’t know until sometime late next year. For more on the story, check out the link the below.
Via Eurogamer
