Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4458546-20130808000528/@comment-1210805-20130808144337

There are a lot of flaws in the author's thinking, and indeed, probably in many of our own. We know Metal Gear as a franchise isn't going to end any time soon, it's Konami's biggest franchise, their bread and butter, it's the mainstay product produced by Kojima Productions and it's expanding. Hideo Kojima has long wanted to work on something else but they haven't had much in the way of time and resources to do so, but that's changing. They're building a new studio, they've made a new engine and they're even working with other studios. They've even begun to change their branding. For years they themselves referred to it as "Metal Gear Solid", as does the press and the bulk of the fans, but we're starting to see them revert to "Metal Gear" as the franchise with Solid being the largest part.

The Fox Engine is designed with the intent of making development easier and faster. They're working to ditch the three year dev cycle. They're embracing the idea of branching out into new stories, Rising being the start of this approach. Ultimately there's only so much they can do with many characters. The Boss really only has WW2 to make a completely new story, Gray Fox could probably squeeze out a Rising title and a couple of Solid ones if you really pushed it, Liquid might have one, really the only characters that currently have an indefinite amount of time to go on are Raiden and Bladewolf. When it comes down to it, the only way they'll keep the series going without just remaking every existing title or rebooting the series into a different canon is to start introducing new characters with the intent of eventually giving them their own games, and honestly, I think that's what we'll be seeing.

So, are we going to wait until 2017 to see a new Metal Gear game? No. Are we going to wait until 2017 to see a new Metal Gear Solid game? Possibly but not as likely as that article makes it seem given the current trends. It's really going to depend on what happens with MGSV.