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After five years, players finally unlocked Metal Gear Solid V’s secret ending

This is the first time Metal Gear Solid V's nuclear disarmament ending has been unlocked legitimately

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has a secret ending that only unlocks when every single player of the game has eliminated nuclear weapons from their in-game bases. While the cutscene triggered on PC as a result of a glitch two years ago, it’s never been unlocked legitimately – until this week.

Each version of MGS5 has a separate nuke counter, which you can track through the fan-made nuke watcher site. The PlayStation 3 version finally dipped down to the magic number of zero on July 27. While the nuke count quickly bounced back up to 40, the total disarmament lasted long enough for the special cutscene to trigger and be captured, as you can see below.

Community efforts, like those on the Metal Gear anti-nuclear subreddit, have been pushing to legitimately earn the disarmament scene for ages, across every platform. The Steam version of MGS5 still has nearly 20,000 nukes, while the PlayStation 4 version has around 2,500. It’s unlikely that those versions will come down far enough to trigger the cutscene anytime soon, but I would’ve said the same about PS3 just a few months ago.

The disarmament cutscene triggered on the Steam version back in 2018 due to a glitch or exploit – Konami simply said the servers had received “incorrect values”, but provided little additional detail.

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For now, we can enjoy the legitimate efforts of PS3 players to bring about world peace. Uh, in the limited context of philosophically-driven stealth games, that is.