The 2015 title Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain contains a secret ending that only triggers when all players dismantle their nuclear weapons, an almost-impossible task because of hackers and hoarders.
The said secret ending accidentally triggered on Feb. 2 even though the game is still populated by a countless number of nuclear weapons. Why? Konami, the publisher, has now apologized for the error.
"We are still investigating, but can confirm that the event was triggered while the nuke count hadn't reached zero," it tweeted on Feb. 4. "We would like to apologize for the inconvenience and reassure you that we will investigate the matter as well as take the necessary action to avoid this in the future."
Nuclear Disarmament Cutscene
This isn't actually the first time for the secret event, called the nuclear disarmament option, to be discovered. Players found it years ago when they ruffled through the game's files, whereupon they also discovered that the cutscene was only supposed to be shown when the nuclear weapon count reaches zero.
In the scene, Big Boss and mercenaries declare that all nukes have been destroyed globally. Previously, before players actually knew how to trigger the cutscene, they thought stealing other players' nukes would finally unveil it, so for a while, they worked toward that goal.
Eventually, they learned about the true way to unlock it, so a devoted number of players have been working hard to destroy all nukes they can find. Players on the Metal Gear Solid Anti-Nuclear subreddit responded to the news with rage.
Was It A Conspiracy All Along?
Others claim that it's all a big conspiracy, that Konami purposefully triggered the cutscene so as to drum up hype for the upcoming games such as Metal Gear Survive. Some, however, think that there was an overflow glitch in the code that caused the cutscene to trigger despite a huge number of nukes still present in the game.
There's still a chance for players to see the cutscene in the way it's intended to be triggered, however. Currently, the PlayStation 4 version has nearly 2,000 nukes present, while the Xbox One version only has a little over 300 as of this writing.
Check out some reactions from Twitter below:
I can confirm, I have received the Nuclear Disarmament scene in MGSV on Steam. Reports are out that its also been triggered on Xbox One. I just checked PS4 and did not receive the scene. No idea why its been manually triggered to go on Steam. pic.twitter.com/HtcznWXSFj
— Metal Gear Solid MGN (@MGSMGN) February 2, 2018
lmao konami has no idea how the nuclear disarmament ending tripped on pc — Hadouken Kamehameha (@trilllizard666) February 5, 2018
Apparently MGSV nuclear disarmament cutscene got triggered for Steam version of the game due to 32bit integer overflow. All we had to do in order to achieve world peace was to produce 2,147,483,647 nukes
— ABCross (@kamuidrome) February 3, 2018
Just go ahead an unlock it in all plattaforms, it's impossible to reach manually because you never fixed the Nuke tab or any related stuff on your servers, at least throw MGSV players a bone before you drop it and move on to only supporting SurviVe. — César H. Sandoval (@TekkZero) February 4, 2018
