With a new development team at the helm and an emphasis on fluid action, Metal Gear Solid: Rising is being positioned as a new standard in the long-running franchise. Mineshi Kimura, the game's director for Kojima Productions, told journalists at a Rising roundtable discussion during E3 that the game would be a counterpart to Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid legacy, with possible future installments going "back and forth" between Rising and more traditional Metal Gear games.

"But for Rising, we're gonna position it where people might know Metal Gear Solid, but they were reluctant to buy it," Kimura said. "[They might say],'Stealth is not my style,' or they didn't have the hardware because they only had a 360. We would like to target this audience where it's kind of potential Metal Gear Solid users and again, as I said earlier, the story will be based between MGS2 and MGS4." He added that players who were not familiar with the franchise's Byzantine plot would still be able to become involved and have fun with the game's "Zan-Datsu" cutting concept.

"'Zan' means to cut, and 'Datsu' means to take," explained creative producer Shigenobu Matsuyama. "We probably would offer a more wide range of play style so that you can aim where you want to cut and how deep you want to cut in order to achieve what you want to take. So, the play style will be quite in more depth than just cutting and killing."