The long-awaited return of the revered Metal Gear series, in the form of the game 'Phantom Pain', has been projected to arrive early 2015.

Fans have been relentlessly teased with the game's short lived prequel being released last year, and the in depth trailer at the Tokyo Game Show. Hideo Kojima, the game's creator, has also not been shy with update pictures on his personal Twitter account.

However, recent news would suggest the projected release date may have been pushed forward slightly in Kojima's statement to Gamepur.

"The phase of adjustment takes place before the phase of difficulty setting or debugging. Putting together all the elements based on the plan. Checking like is it alright? is it fun? or good in balance? and fix those is the most important phase for action game. It's close to editing phase in term of film making but for game development this is the beginning of the main part." says Hideo Kojima.

The report goes on to say:

"Kojima also talked about how tutorials are difficult this time. In a linear game you would start the player in a small area and gradually expand what they can do, but you can't do that in open world stealth. Ideally the player can go wherever he wants and can discover things himself."

"'Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes' was meant to be a some sort of tutorial for 'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain' i.e. allowing players to play test and get used to new gameplay style with limited portion of the main game (The Phantom Pain)," Gamepur writes.

As Kojima's excuses continue to pile up, the expectancy of the game's release in Q1 of 2015 is become less and less likely.

With E3 2015 coming up, we expect the official release date to be stated there. If this is true, the earliest the game could be released would be close to the Fall of 2015.