Metal Gear!? Delta!?!?
Konami announced the previously-rumored Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake in this week’s third-party focused PlayStation Showcase, officially dubbed Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater. (I’ll be calling it “Delta” from here instead of using the symbol multiple times, which would be a pain.). Konami is saying little about it outside the hints in the teaser, merely clarifying how it will be a “faithful remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater originally released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2.”
The idea of an MGS3 remake is sound, but the teaser alone elicits concerns. Nothing close to the trademark touches series creator Hideo Kojima loved to bring to his trailers is featured. Kojima’s trailers tend to be on the longer side, even in teaser form, but even his worst examples are memorable. I can vividly remember the MGS3 reveal trailer from E3 2003, twenty years ago, to this day. It’s a tragic reminder of how old I’m getting, but also one for how remarkable his trailers have always been. It’s far from too late for someone at Konami to give it a shot.
This raises another question: Exactly who is developing this? The development team on the official website is referred to as simply that through the support message provided. It’s nice that they’re “working hard” on making Delta “a faithful recreation of the original story and game design, while evolving the gameplay with stunning visuals and a seamless user experience.” It would be nicer to know more about the developers. Not every team member from the original Kojima Productions that finished Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain left eight years ago, and rejoined the resurrected company that worked on Death Stranding. Those who remained are likely working on this. It’s also worth asking if Konami even has enough developers working internally to take on a AAA experience on their own — recreation or not.
The screenshots released after the presentation show that a real game is indeed in development, but those present their own problems. The project is aesthetically pleasing, perhaps hinting that they’re still using the Fox Engine. But they’re merely more pristine versions of the original game’s backgrounds with minimal visual alterations. They bring Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes immediately to mind, the iffy remake of the original game from the long-defunct Silicon Knights. The project recreated the environments from Metal Gear Solid, but implemented the 3D shooting and exploration elements from Metal Gear Solid 2 alongside them despite the environments and encounters not being balanced around their usage, which thus made the game considerably easier than the original. The concern is that they’ll reuse the same environments while implementing a control scheme from, say, the Metal Gear Solid V games to create a broken experience.
It’s one thing for Konami to confirm that all the original actors are returning, including David Hayter taking back the role of Naked Snake/Big Boss. But the wording on the tweet implies that they’re reusing the original voice acting from the PS2 game. The combo of this alongside the environments implies that Delta is more of a pristine remaster than a remake. It also implies that this will be less ambitious than even The Twin Snakes, which at least featured rerecorded (and changed, in a few cases) voiceovers. Granted, several TSS performances weren’t on par with the original counterparts (outside Mei Ling losing the lame stereotypical accent), so this might be understandable.
We’ll just have to wait and see precisely what this is soon. Plenty of showcases are planned for the not-E3 season throughout the summer, so perhaps gameplay could surface during one of them.
In the meantime, Konami is listening to all the voices who wanted them to preserve access to the older Metal Gear games through the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1. The package will include the original Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, the last one there including the updated versions of Metal Gear 1 and Metal Gear 2, bringing this to a total of five games. The non-MGS1 games in the package resemble the Bluepoint remasters, which they’re hopefully merely porting while preserving their excellent emulation. The first game will also ideally have excellent emulation. Konami is being hilariously silent about what platforms this will come to, but it should at least hit all the platforms MGS Delta will.
It is very interesting that this is being called “Vol. 1,” because I’m wondering what a Vol. 2 could include. Several games could be chosen, but it’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots that demands the treatment most of all. The game has thawed in PlayStation 3 Jail for 15 years now, and needs to release on a platform that won’t require an install for every damned in-game chapter. I’m not confident that Konami is willing to put in the resources to have it ported. Prove me wrong, fellas.
The Metal Gear franchise theoretically should be able to exist beyond Kojima. The issue is that previous efforts to do so have either come close to greatness but lacked ambition, like Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, the Metal Gear Acid games, and especially Metal Gear Survival, or have fallen apart during development like the original Metal Gear Solid Rising title. Rumor has it that Metal Gear Solid Delta will be the test to determine whether a post-Kojima team has the stones to handle a new game, so I’m rooting for them.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
