This Infamous 'Metal Gear Solid 5' Mission Is Literally "Impossible" To Beat

Sometimes, it can really feel like games don’t actually want you to complete them. Having finally started Elden Ring over the weekend, I can attest to that. But really, some titles are home to some very hard-to-earn achievements and hidden secrets - you only have to look at this recently released indie title which takes 10 years to Platinum to see that.

In case you weren’t aware, Metal Gear Solid 5 players have been aiming to finish one particular mission for years - the quest for complete nuclear disarmament. This isn’t just something one player can achieve on their own - all the nukes from every corner of the game’s online servers need to be eradicated in order to unlock a hidden cutscene (which was datamined a few years ago), creating a seemingly impossible achievement. Well, after all this time, it seems that it may have been completely unattainable from the beginning.

Before we go on, be sure to take a look at this mind-blowing fan-made remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 below.

As reported by VGC, a new video from Did You Know Gaming has claimed that achieving world peace in MGS 5 is a lost cause. They spoke to a group of players called “The Anti-Nuke Gang”, who discovered that any nukes tied to banned accounts can’t be disarmed. Whether or not this was an intentional move from Konami isn’t known, but the result is simple - the mission just can’t be done.

Aside from being a really neat hidden achievement, the reason that so many players have been trying to complete the nuclear disarmament mission is because some believed doing so may unlock more content, beyond that datamined cutscene. The game, as it stands, is divided into two chapters (Chapter 1: Revenge and Chapter 2: Race), but a third title card, titled Chapter 3: Peace, was also uncovered in the game files. This, on top of a rather cryptic tweet from Konami in 2015, reading “the truth can be found for Peace”, has had people desperately trying to uncover the game’s secrets. 

Earlier this year though, speaking about the mission, Hideo Kojima tweeted (translated by Google): “This was a social experiment.” So, it seems like that’s the end of that, which isn’t a very satisfying conclusion to this tale. But hey, at least we still have the datamined cutscene, right?