Kojima-San Criticises PS3 Hardware News

Since its unveiling back in 2005, PlayStation owners have held onto Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots as the title to finally demonstrate a vision that only the PlayStation3 can achieve. However that may not be the case.

Speaking to Next-Gen, Konami's Hideo Kojima provides some extremely frank and surprisingly criticisms of the PlayStation3 hardware, suggesting that the original concept for Metal Gear Solid 4 had to be scaled back significantly as a result.

Revealing that the game concept has largely remained intact, Kojima-san provides a startling revelation about the visuals of MGS4. "Game-wise, it's pretty close to the original vision: you sneak into the battlefield and can choose whether to do a stealth game or interfere with the battle more directly. But the graphic side, things like motion-blending and the size of the map, totally was not accomplished to my original vision - to my satisfaction.

"When we first showed the game engine at Tokyo Game Show," Kojima-san claimed, "the staff were really proud and happy. PS3 was a dream machine, y'know, and we were going to work on this and that - we had so many ideas.

"But when we actually started developing the game, we realized there were a lot of restrictions and so it turned out how you see it today. The original vision was to go ten steps further, the reality was just one step, which isn't to say we didn't progress.

"I remember saying three years ago that we wanted to create something revolutionary, but in reality we couldn't really do that because of the CPU. We're using the Cell engine to its limit, actually. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing the PS3 machine, it's just that we weren't really aware of what the full-spec PS3 offered - we were creating something we couldn't entirely see."

So Metal Gear Solid 4 pushes the PS3 to it limit but is still likely to disappoint on some level; let the bitter, fanboy fuelled, debate commence.

The full transcript of the interview will be available on www.next-gen.biz later in the day.