Metal Gear Solid 5 PS3 players hit quite a feat the other day by achieving complete and utter denuclearization… or not. After closer inspection, it appears as though this could be yet another false positive as many factors put this perceived accomplishment in a different light.
Steff, the account that posted the original “legitimate” denuclearization video, has quite a unique PlayStation profile (as pointed out via DM by Reddit user GatorsNc). Metal Gear Solid 5 is the only game on their account, which is also only four weeks old. And it gets even weirder once you dive into their actual trophies in the game since they don’t line up at all.
Not only is it odd that they haven’t done one Side Op or captured a single guard, but they also somehow got the “Accomplished” trophy for doing all of the game’s missions on July 1 without getting any of the individual trophies for completing story missions. This includes the trophy for finishing the prologue.
There are other fishy aspects in the video, too. At the 3:16 mark, you can see that the game says they decommissioned exactly a million nuclear weapons. Whether this includes just Steff (as GatorsNc has claimed) or is a cumulative total of the PS3 community, this is very unlikely for a few reasons. Disposing of a nuke that isn’t yours in MGS5 takes a lot of effort, but developing them takes a fair bit of time and resources as well: 750,000 GMP, 75,000 fuel resources, 50,000 minor metals, and about 24 real hours in the game.
You can only make a nuke after Mission 32 as well, which is pretty far into the game, further limiting any potential nuclear powers. Konami also used to give totals of the nukes on each platform (the page now just redirects to the MGS5 home page) and there were nowhere near a million nukes on all the platforms combined. And according to PSN‘s trophy data, only 5.9% of PS3 players have even made a nuke to begin with.
Konami also said it was “investigating the matter,” but has not reported back with a conclusion. However, even if it is another goof by Konami or some outside forces, it’s hard not to see this as anything but yet another false positive. Given that this cutscene would have played for others upon booting up the game on PS3, it’s suspicious that the only account to upload a video of it would be one surrounded with so many peculiar details.
We’ve reached out to Steff and will update this article if we get a response.
