PSA: Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes Requires A Hard Drive On The Xbox 360

Xbox 360 owners, be forewarned: you will need a real hard drive to play Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes. There is a warning about this on the game label, as well as on Xbox Live and Konami’s support page. We will elaborate below.

You will need that hard drive whether you buy the disc or go digital, and even if it’s just a rental. The game is simply incompatible with your Xbox if it is a 4 GB model, a Core model or an Arcade model.

USB flash drive installation will also not work. The following is what happens when you try it:

The Xbox 360 Dashboard will allow you to go through the prompts to install it. You will then get a dialogue box asking if you want to install the game on a hard drive. If you answer yes, it will tell you to get a hard drive even if you have a flash drive connected. If you answer now, you will simply exit the game.

Of course, if you are a cut-and-dry gamer, you know this is by no means unusual and you would have already been prepared for this, but it is something worth noting and spreading the word on. Considering the Playstation 3 version did not come with such a warning, and that console only went as low as 12 GB, we may guess that installations didn’t go below 12 GB. Not sure why the Xbox 360 version would then reject 16 GB or 32 GB thumb drives, but then again, at their prices, you probably would rather have the hard drive.