Fan Discovers Level Editor in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain may have marked the end of series creator Hideo Kojima's relationship with publisher Konami, that hasn't stopped hardcore fans from uncovering what could have been. And no, this is in no way related to the open-world stealth game's missing chapters. Rather, a user by the name of Saladin on MGSForums.com has discovered a level editor hidden in the game's code.

According to a detailed post, the functions of this previously undiscovered editor is pretty robust.

"It even changes the game word's boundaries and memory depending on the current state of the editor mode. If it's enabled, the Editor mode sets it to high. If it isn't, it resets it to regular," Saladin claims. "It doesn't load a location, but it sets up one. Most likely an empty world."

It then goes on to showcase several lines of code that bring to light a mission editor, tactical action system, and route system to name a few. This was a feature Kojima hinted at in the past but did not come to fruition.

All in all, a surprisingly find for a variety of reasons. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain showed that Kojima had what it takes to bring the series into the open-world with superlative design sensibilities and it appears that he was on the cutting-edge of trends such as user-generated content.

"Just to clarify, this mode was not intended for the user, but rather the developers. This is evident by the huge boundaries of memory and world size editor mode allocates," Saladin remarks in another post.

Pity that we will probably not see this feature activated in the game for end users what with Kojima's departure from Konami as well as most of the team responsible for it.

In a time when Forge and SnapMap are welcome additions to Halo 5 and Doom respectively, a level editor in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain would have given fans a reason to keep coming back.