I don’t think it will be the same without Kojima. Did everyone forget how Konami completely gave up on gaming a few years back?
Well, they never really did. They just more or less stopped making A-AAA games and got rid of Kojima. The Castlevania remasters and the pachinko shit continued. I want to say their football game also continued?
But… they are getting back into “gaming”. So even those who “remember” no longer have anything to complain about?
The other aspect is their nasty break-up with Kojima. Which was VERY much amplified because of how many game journos are massive Kojima fanboys and how the rest more or less said “Well, labor rights are good to care about”. Because, ignoring the Kojima love fest, Konami:
- Stopped funding someone who wasted massive amounts of money motion capping horses and making women strip down so he could motion cap them in the nude (yup)*
- Finally let said problematic asshole recast the fan favorite voice actor… but didn’t give him an unlimited budget so Jack Bauer only got paid for like six lines of dialogue (in fairness, the audiologs had a LOT more Kiefer).
- Fucked around with security and opsec to make it really hard for staff that would soon be laid off to find new jobs on the company dime. This is fucked but “only kind of fucked” by Japanese corporate standards.
- Released a game without the last mission. Because The Island of Eli or whatever the fuck has no indications of being this massive “half the game” that people claim and was likely going to be about 5-20 minutes of gameplay and cutscenes comparable to when mother base got zombied.
But also? People still get super excited for a quantic dreams, ubisoft, or blizzard game. So worker abuse and sexual abuse are not factors in terms of whether a publisher/dev is “good”.
So yeah. Getting the fan favorite back is going to go a long way. The MGS1-3 remasters are god awful (and somehow worse than the HD Collection a decade or so ago?) but considering the big complaint people have with MGS-Delta is “the color balance is not warm enough”, time will tell.
*: Seriously, I think the absolute best thing that ever happened to Kojima was that he was mostly “heads down” during the #MeToo phase of the pandemic. Although, part of me REALLY wanted him to get a Silent Hill just because, of the ideas we know he had, it would lead to the greatest holy war of all time as the Silent Hill fans and the MGS Fans fight it out. And Bloober would still be too stupid to stay quiet and would catch all the strays.
I feel like a lot of these problems could be fixed with proper management. Just because Kohima creates interesting worlds in video games, doesn’t mean that you should let him do everything he wants. It seems like Konami themselves creates that environment. But also, maybe they are actually going to try hard to recapture what MGS meant for a lot of people. I personally like the mixture of very serious plot with completely insane elements, like zombies, vampires, ninjas, and a white haired black guy with a monkey addicted to coca cola that sells you guns.
