Metal Gear Solid V seems too beautiful for current-gen consoles

Before it was revealed as Metal Gear Solid V at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, the game previously known only as The Phantom Pain had already been extensively teased with blatant clues pointing toward the involvement of MGS series creator Hideo Kojima.

So the fact that this is actually the fifth game in the much-loved Metal Gear Solid series shocked nobody in the house. Nor did the MGS5 debut sequence, which was already running wild and free on YouTube before today. Still, the real-time trailer's mix of beauty and high-action shimmers with high-poly, sweat-shimmering faces, devil horses flying on wings of fire, military squads in bulky armor, and enough lens flare to blind JJ Abrams.

But before charming GDC's audience of game developers with a long talk about the game's engine, Hideo Kojima and the design team at Konami snuck a different kind of surprise into the trailer: the target platforms. Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 logos stood alone at the end of the video, strangely leaving out the next generation systems that would seem best-equipped to handle its complex rendering.