Konami has announced that the first expansion pack for Metal Gear Online, titled 'Gene Expansion', will be out on July 17th in Europe.

The downloadable expansion features three new maps. Konami's offering the wide streets of 'Coppertown Conflict', the underground tunnels of 'Tomb of Tubes' and 'Virtuous Vista', which is described as “a sprawling outdoor locale, and ideally suited to medium and long-range combat techniques.”

Also on offer is the new 'Survival' mode, in which players have to stay alive for as long as possible through a series of stages. Once you've had a crack at that lot, you'll be able to trade in all your newly-earned points for Stuff in the startlingly-named 'Reward Shop'.

For those who like to play with ready-made characters, Meryl and Johnny from MGS4 have been thrown in. They will be allocated at random once their use is enabled. If you like cooking up your own characters, you'll be able to create women like a practitioner of Weird Science.

The pack will be €9.99 or about eight of our English pounds... well, £7.97 right now, but who knows what with hyper-inflation just around the corner.