Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-212.35.14.225-20150704132426/@comment-1672596-20150909153053

Doulomb wrote: Portable Ops and Rising are non-canon as explicitly stated by Kojima. They take place in alternate timelines similar to Snakes Revenge, Ghost Babel and Ac!d. He also said that Portable Ops was canon to the overall saga around the time Ground Zeroes was released. Now think about it, MGSV's story had been fully written and finalized by the time Ground Zeroes was released, the only thing they had left to do was implement the gameplay and do various tests, and finish up voice acting. If Kojima really wanted to make it non-canon, he would have flat out stated it was non-canon at that time rather than saying the story is canon, until conflict of evidence regarding certain parts of the game make those parts not canon.