Someone May Have Found a Level Editor in Metal Gear Solid V’s Code

2015 was a great year for gaming, but it wasn’t without its hurdles, as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s release was riddled with controversy of the internal dispute between series creator Hideo Kojima and publisher Konami. As a result, a major portion of the game’s campaign is missing, leaving the game unfortunately incomplete. There may have been even more that didn’t make it into the final product, however.

A user over at MGSForums was scouring through MGSV’s code and happened across a file that seemed to reveal a Level Editor hidden within the game. Upon examining the code a little more closely, he noticed that the line of code he found was able to alter the game world’s boundaries and memory, which is an indication of a what could be a Level Editor.

Digging even deeper, though, the user even found files naming things like a Project System, Light Capture System, Rail System, Route System, Tactical Action System, the default Metal Gear Online-type player character’s equipment, and even a Mission Manager. The keyword here especially is “Project,” as this is what typically refers to a player’s designs in progress in a given game with an Editor mode.

While the odds of any of this being confirmed are very slim, it’s certainly interesting to wonder what MGSV would have been like with an Editor thrown into the mix, letting players design their own levels and even assigning customized missions. What’s particularly strange, though, is that we may have already seen this Level Editor before:

Interestingly enough, back in 2014’s Tokyo Game Show, there was an Editor mode being shown when demonstrating Metal Gear Solid V, as seen in the video above. In that demo, the audience was shown a simple and intuitive way to change the game’s elements, designing the scenario and all its details with ease within the Fox Engine.

It’s possible that this Editor was solely to be used for that demonstration at 2014’s TGS, and that a mode like that was never meant to be available for the standard consumer with a final copy of the game, but there’s no confirmation of any of this. Nevertheless, it’s bizarre that Editor files would still be inside of the game’s code. An Editor mode could possibly have been in the early stages of development, with that TGS demo showing how it would have operated. With the amount of secrecy behind the whole Kojima/Konami debacle, we may never truly know exactly what could have been.

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