MGS V: Ground Zeroes at Bafta Inside Gaming

The Bafta Gaming awards were held this week at the Tobacco Docks in Wapping, but before all the evening festivities, there was the Inside Gaming festival. Held in the very same halls the ceremonies would later take place in, a handful of yet to be released games were available to play by the public for the very first time, one of these games was Metal Gear Solid 5 Ground Zeroes.

Cyborgs and Snakes and Gold Faces oh my!

While there was a bunch of titles on offer, I spent the majority of my time around the Ground Zeroes booth, mainly due to me being in cosplay as Big Boss. As well as myself, there was a pretty big group of cosplayers as well as a lot of the Metal Gear Solid community members who went dressed as themselves. After we'd been there a while and all had a go on the game, series creator Hideo Kojima turned up for a visit! Unfortunately because he was going to the award ceremony he wasn't there long, but long enough for most people to get to say hello and take selfies with the legend himself. We were later told he was very impressed with all the fancy outfits people were rocking.

Everyone say Snaaake!

Onto the game itself, while I only got a short time with it, I was very impressed with what I saw. We were playing on PlayStation 4 so obviously the graphics were pretty darn great! The controls feel good once you get used to the button layout, it's changed a bit since older MGS titles to make it more user friendly.

Metal Gear has traditionally been about slowly stealthing your way through a level, the best players never even get spotted let alone set off an alert, but now you can sprint around, jump into a jeep and race about or get into a huge turret and blow people up if you'd rather play that way. The open world aspect really has changed everything about it, every single person I watched play (and I watched quite a few) all played the game completely different to how I did on my run through. I tried to sneak in but was spotted by a soldier in a guard tower, after trying to run away and hide, I realised the guards would actively follow the traces that I left behind, and with no cardboard box to hide in, they ended up finding me. That's where my time ran out, I'm thoroughly looking forward to playing the full game which is due to be released on PS3, PS4, Xbox One and Xbox 360 on March 21st. Look out for our review of the game in the coming weeks.

Check out those seats!

So was you one of the many that attended? What did you think of the event? Let us know in the comments or over on our Facebook or Twitter.

The photo's featured were taken by Ace Ashun officially for Konami. For more photos from the event, the full Flickr album can be found here.