Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes was originally going to launch together with Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, creator Hideo Kojima has said.

Ideally I would have wanted to release the prologue and the main game together, at the same time.

However, the long development time needed for the full open world of Phantom Pain would have meant that the Metal Gear Series would have not updated until well after the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launched in Japan. For this reason, the decision was made to split the prologue from the main game.

[It was] a position we took on to give people a taste of what we’re working on…this wasn’t the plan all along.

I felt that a lot of people would want a Japanese high-end game. So it wasn’t necessarily a strategic move where we thought too much about it.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes will launch March 18 on Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.