caplag

Dumped voice clips are usually shown off with zero, or even negative or wrong context. Example being: Snake calling out to "Chico." Even with them not being in my spreadsheets, there are two ways to connect them to the also unused voice clip sets of Snake calling out to "Walker Gear" and "D-Walker."

The way subtitle strings are fetched for display is through the embedded filename marker string in the Wwise-converted .wem file. I made an open source CLI tool that prefixes this string to the names of those files if they have one. They are then lowercased (possibly because Wwise might lowercase all its strings?), hashed with StrCode32 and a string entry is looked for the game's own loaded .subp subtitle package files. In order, these are the embedded filename markers of each voice clip from above:

SNAK1100_4t2110_0_snak -> Chico. SNAK1100_4t2210_0_snak -> Walker Gear. SNAK1100_4t2220_0_snak -> D-Walker. SNAK1100_4t2310_0_snak -> Chico! SNAK1100_4t2410_0_snak -> Walker Gear! SNAK1100_4t2420_0_snak -> D-Walker!

No subtitles for these voices exist in the game's files, however, as you can tell by this gap in the .subp file hash dictionary. The Japanese dub versions of these voice clips are also just silence - there are no Akio Otsuka versions of all six of these lines, like a few other English-unique ones. What matters here, however, is that we've proved a pattern - this is a group of Walker Gear callouts, divided into short and long distance versions, each divided into variations - Chico, Walker Gear, and D-Walker.

There is another connection to use as proof here: you can make the player play voice clips in-game arbitrarily with the "Player.CallVoice()" function.

The game uses the Dynamic Dialogue event type in Wwise to play character voice clips. An Event is called with names of states from specified groups as arguments, returning a Sound (Voice) object to play. All character Dialogue Events in MGSV use the "chara" and "condition" state groups. "chara" is obviously the name of the speaker character, say, Snake, Miller, Enemy Soldier A or B, etc. The "condition" specifies what that character has to say.

This is useful for programming character voices, specifying the character speaking and the voice clip they should say. The Player.CallVoice function can be called with the specific dialogue event, the "chara" argument and the "condition" argument, but also simply with the "condition" argument, taking the rest from what's known about what the player is already.

I have unhashed a big chunk of "condition" hashes in the "DD_Player" Dynamic Dialogue event based on a few examples found in the vanilla game's Lua code, and the current notes, though not actively updated, can be found here.

Some still use hash collisions, as I still haven't figured them out yet, and they're easy to generate from Wwise's FNV hash implementation - all the strings being lowercased before being hashed by Wwise certainly helps. They all vary in format, but most of them start with "PL" for Player, a letter for the type of group of voice clip, and then various, mostly rounder numbers. The "condition" string names for the voice clips above are as follows: PLW0010_1 -> snak1100_4t2110_0_snak -> Chico. PLW0010_2 -> SNAK1100_4t2210_0_snak -> Walker Gear. PLW0010_3 -> SNAK1100_4t2220_0_snak -> D-Walker. PLW0020_1 -> SNAK1100_4t2310_0_snak -> Chico! PLW0020_2 -> SNAK1100_4t2410_0_snak -> Walker Gear! PLW0020_3 -> SNAK1100_4t2420_0_snak -> D-Walker!

So even with these "condition" strings, the pattern from before emerges once again!

But what does this mean? Well, as the previous post has shown, "Chico" was a nickname for "Walker Gear." But was it for the entire type, like the generic term "Walker Gear" itself, or a specific one?

It's likely to be the former, but the latter is interesting to consider - both Walker Gears "first (mentioned by name) by Huey" in the HELLBOUND mission and the previous "Chico in a Walker Gear" from the Nuclear Disarmament cutscene are the prototype model, WG-PP. This could be simple asset reuse as it would be the first, original model made. Funnily enough, the same Walker Gear model is taken apart for the development of the Battle Gear. So my personal theory is that if there was a specific one, the "Chico" Walker Gear is specifically the first one, the prototype from Huey's lab in the Soviet Base Camp. This voice clip could have been used in the mission to call over to it.

The "Walker Gear" voice clips could similarly have been a more generic term for hijacked enemy Walker Gears.

And "D-Walker" could have been used to communicate with it, just like we do in the final game with the generic common whistle or the Mode commands in the Call Menu.

There's also a few funny anecdotal story implications to consider. In Peace Walker, Amanda's men refer to unmanned gear as "hombre nuevo," despite her disapproval. Chico in Ground Zeroes, when awake and carried to the RV on the coast, says that he wants to start over, as "... Hombre nuevo."

The character in the unused concept art that he would have actually, literally become nine years later could also be what he means. It's just a funny connection.

Another interesting thing to think about is who named it "Chico," and why.

(Koichiro) Ito suggests: パラントロプス -> Paranthropus (a genus of Sahelanthropus) ウォーカー -> Walker BabyWalker

(Hidenari) Inamura suggests: ナカリピテクス -> Nakalipithecus (an extinct great ape before Sahelanthropus, with a link to a now-defunct November 2007 post from Kyoto University) ピースウォーカー -> Piece Walker

(Shuyo) Murata suggests taking the name from a fighter plane. Then it says "PAT" for some reason.

A few more suggestions are デューイ(-> Dewey) or ルーイ (-> Louie), in reference to Dr. "Huey" Emmerich and Donald Duck's nephews.

A discussion from Mr (Yuji) Shinkawa is cited with the suggestion メタルギアレッグズ->"Metal Gear Legs." It's noted that the Mecha Team had no proposals at the time.

Some more suggestions follow: バリアブルギア -> Variable Gear タイニーギア -> Tiny Gear ベイビーギア -> Baby Gear VxG - > Variable xxxx Gear, "x" likely marking another word to fill in, as Ito suggests, with Variable (可変) Exoskeleton (外骨格) Gear (伊東), or ExGear, for short. A Star Wars-like abbreviation is also brought up.

In the end, ウォーカーギア -> "Walker Gear" was picked. But, aside from this column, there's another supremely interesting part of this spreadsheet - the "Official name (Japanese)" column of this row, aside from the name we know, also says this:

Some maps, mainly excluding unused ones and the Cloaked in Silence DLC maps (Rust Palace, Azure Mountain and Coral Complex) and the very basic default map seen during free play, still have defined and placed "docs" gimmicks in their "attack" (SABOTAGE) "ruleset" (game mode) packages, using a customized copy of a generic intel file model seen in The Phantom Pain, the one with a blurry screenshot of Miller on it. They seem to be registered in some script tables, but are most likely simply left deactivated.

In my recent mod where I try to reinterpret the SABOTAGE game mode into a single player side op in The Phantom Pain, I have reused those voice clips, also in TPP's soundbank for some reason, and the idea for this "login obtaining" phase by having the player either read an intel file the usual TPP way or interrogate a VIP (not any enemy for balancing reasons of course) before they can hack any of the terminals to deactivate the EM barrier and destroy the missile.

I'd asked id-daemon, the only person I knew who had ripped cutscene animations from MGSV before, to take a look at these files. They manually guessed the most of the tracks meant for Eli in the "post-credits" scene from Kingdom of the Flies, and it matched!

The "demo-jan20151" spreadsheet is how I identified these .fsm files at first.

Sadly, I'm not super proficient in animation formats, but we have mostly reverse engineered the .fsm and .sand formats, leaving only specialized tooling left to reconstruct the missing .sand files in the way of actually playing these cutscenes in-game, which I thoroughly believe is feasible with enough educated guesswork and a good previewing environment.

If you'd like to know how to help, visit our MGSV modding Discord server!

While it does belong to Eli and not the XOF soldiers, the only leftover of whom is a dummy .fv2 Form Variation file named "wss3", I still used it for my recreation of the white top helmet of the XOF soldiers from Kingdom of the Flies.

In one piece of concept art in the Art of Metal Gear Solid V, we see the kids being led away by the Diamond Dogs onto a helicopter. So presumably, either you or the Diamond Dogs later recover the children, with whom Eli communicates in Kikongo.

As for the "post-credits" scene, nothing of the sort or even New York are mentioned here. The document just plain ends here. That's beside mentioning that the Phantom Episode puts it right before the end credits, and not afterward, like it's described here.

While not shown or referenced in The Phantom Episode video on the Blu-Ray of the Collector's Edition of MGSV, in the "demo-jan20151" spreadsheet, the last phase of the battle against Sahelanthropus manned by Eli is described to have involved him quoting the cutscene in MGS1 between the two phases of the boss fight against Metal Gear REX, before using Sahelanthropus's Archaeal Blade to make it enter Seppuku mode, which enriches the depleted uranium in its armor, causing a nuclear fusion reaction, essentially initiating its nuclear self-destruct sequence. The player would have had to shut down Sahelanthropus before it completed. This is why Sahelanthropus is split in half in the cutscenes afterward and in Metal Gear Survive.

The cassette tapes Sahelanthropus [1] / Sahelanthropus's Armor Material [1] and Sahelanthropus [2] / Sahelanthropus's Armor Material [2] explain this mechanism in full. The "motherbase" spreadsheet notes that the first tape is unlocked when the mechanism becomes known, and the second, after listening to the first, and maybe "*Following the (Kingdom of the) Flies segment?"