Speculation: Was MGSV meant to be episodic?

[starschwar]

It always struck me as odd that the game displays a trailer... for content that's immediately accessible thereafter.  Or... in the case of the Paz subplot, already previously available.  And the disarmament cutscene.  I wonder - was the original plan to ship the game, let it conclude after the fight with Sahalenthropus, and then have subsequent story beats doled out as updates / DLC?   I think that might explain why the last stretch is so oddly paced, fragmented and to many, feels incomplete.

[Departed]

I think the only thing that wasn't included with Kojima's original vision was Kingdom of the Flies. The actual pacing of Chapter 2 is pretty much identical to Peace Walker, since in that game, to unlock the Zadornov missions, you also had to do a lot of busy work. What most people don't realize since the game is in no rush to broadcast it is that the modified versions of the repeat missions in Chapter 2 aren't required to unlock the remaining story stuff. It's weirdly paced where you have to do three of anything to get the remaining story content missions. Three side ops, three main story missions, whatever comes to mind.

I broke it down once but the narrative framing of MGSV is that Chapter 1 is the entire three act storyline, and Chapter 2 is the epilogue, since apart from Eli, everything else is just about tying up loose ends. To this day, I'll never understand why Kojima chose to label the segments of the game the way he did, but it is what it is.

Personally, I'd have loved it if there was DLC content, because MGSV was the perfect sandbox for it. Even if there was clearly some bad blood between Konami's higher ups at the time and Kojima, there was definitely profit that still could've been made with worthwhile paid story content, or updating the game with new in-world content to encourage some proper exploration.

Honestly, part of me wonders if Konami would ever consider just finishing Kingdom of the Flies and releasing that with MGS Master Collection Vol 3. Probably not, but I do think that would net them enough extra sales to be worth the venture.