Kojima the hack fraud

[Guest]

Did they actually? Or was it a combination of Konami being shitty + him running so far behind schedule that Konami was desperate for him to put out anything in a playable state?

I mean, it's mostly the latter. Ground Zeroes was supposed to be like Tanker from MGS2 or Virtuous Mission from MGS3, but Kojima was taking too long to put anything out so Konami lopped off the prologue for MGSV and sold it as a separate game. But Kojima always intended for it to be one game.

[Kugelfisch]

If he'd spend less time smoking weed and being a starfucker he'd have made it in time and finished it.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

They should've just hired Platinum Games to make another Revengeance. Probably would've been done quicker.

[Kugelfisch]

I am in full support of that!

[Guest]

If he'd spend less time smoking weed and being a starfucker he'd have made it in time and finished it.

Kinda hard to get on with your work when your boss has physically separated you from your team and shut down the office email so you have to meet with your co-workers outside of work to discuss the project

[Kugelfisch]

It's not like it has been that way from the beginning of the game's development. Him dragging his ass has also been going on for ages.

[Guest]

Game started development in 2012, came out (such as it was) in 2015. Four year development is about optimal for a big budget AAA game. If Konami didn't fuck with Kojima he probably would have put it out on target. It's not like it was some Duke Nukem Forever type development hell catastrophe.

Konami just weren't interested in spending the kind of money Kojima wanted. Konami's company ethos was to spend as little money as possible for as much ROI as possible. I'd say fair play to them if they didn't also treat their employees like shit.

They should've just hired Platinum Games to make another Revengeance. Probably would've been done quicker.

Except they never would have done that, because hiring Platinum Games would involve paying them

[rabidtictac]

Kojima's always had the problem of overspending and under-delivering though, hasn't he? I heard MGS1, MGS2 and MGS4 were all unfinished to some degree.

He reminds me a little of Kurosawa, and if you want to take that as a compliment then that's fine. Kurosawa, even at his hottest, would continually overrun his budgets. He'd ask for the world, he'd get it and then he'd spend more and more and more, way beyond what he was given. That's a big part of why he got to a point in his later career where nobody wanted to finance him to make movies. Films like Kagemusha and Ran were a result of the international film community stepping in after Japan left him behind.

There's always a balance between what bean-counters want and what the artist wants. But the thing is, the bean counters, while often wrong, are not ALWAYS wrong. It creates bad feeling when you're always delivering late or always running over budget. Sure, Konami are fuckers. They rip people off and chase after pachinko money (basically gambling addiction) while disrespecting the loyal fans (customers) who put them on the map in the first place. But Kojima is kind of a fucker too. MGS2 was a big middle finger to anyone who enjoyed MGS1 and wanted something similar. MGS4 was two massive middle fingers to the (by that point) years of gamer feedback saying that Kojima games were too wordy, too hands-off and trying too hard to be hollywood movies.

Kojima hasn't made an legitimately great game since MGS3. Peace Walker is good but heavily limited by PSP architecture. As much as I shill for the PSP, map size and mission size limitations are a huge deal for an MGS game.

[Kugelfisch]

Who's to say he would've finished MGSV in a reasonable amount of time? We will never know for sure but his track record isn't great.

[Guest]

My main gripe with kojima is that mainly his writing, his characters feel artificial and shallow because he only has two means of moving the plot along- Expansion and Monologue, by the truck load, and all of it in your face . If he could just get some else to edit and condense his shit, I don't think I would mind the story of his games so much.