Konami Just Revealed The Future Of The Metal Gear Franchise

Well here's something nobody expected out of Gamescom 2016: Konami just announced a brand new game in the Metal Gear series and, based on the reveal trailer, it's going in a very different direction from what fans have come to expect.

We're not talking Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance "different," but Metal Gear Survive sure doesn't look like any Metal Gear game we've seen before. The trailer was posted to IGN earlier today, confirming this is indeed the first MGS to be developed following the departure of legendary series creator, Hideo Kojima.

Okay, so, from here on out, there are going to be some light spoilers related to the Metal Gear universe. If you haven't played Ground Zeroes yet, consider yourself warned. Though, given what we're seeing here, I'm not sure anything I have to say will have much to do with whatever Metal Gear Survive turns out to be.

At the end of Ground Zeroes, The Boss' entire world is blown asunder as a terrorist attack results in the destruction of his base and the vast majority of his army of mercenary soldiers. As Boss and Co. fly away -- a scene pulled directly from Ground Zeroes -- we see a shot of one of the soldiers the hero of the recent MGS games had to leave behind.

All of the mass destruction seems to be going by the book, until a freaking hole in space and time is ripped open right above the base. At this point, the soldier and all of that wreckage appear to be pulled into another world, where said soldier must do battle with a creepy alien baddie. He's saved at the last moment by a group of soldiers who have survived on this world for a while and, as a group, they march to a cliff where the former Mother Base has crash landed.

The trailer goes on to explain that, in order to get back home, the soldiers will have to fight as a team against a horde of alien baddies.

To be fair, even Kojima's Metal Gear games are overflowing with insanity, but he's never gone quite this far into "wait, what the hell?" territory.

If nothing else, you've got to admire Konami's courage to try and continue their last remaining major console series without Kojima. It'll be interesting to see how folks respond. But I've got to give credit where credit is due. If you're going to have a nasty falling out with a director and continue a series they've worked on for more than two decades, you better do something completely different. Metal Gear Survive is absolutely something completely different. And considering the series it's coming from, the fact that it has us scratching our heads says something about just how different it really is.

And yes, in traditional MGS fashion, the trailer ends with a stinger, this time seeming to hint at an alien version of a Metal Gear unit of some sort.

So look for that in 2017!