Key Highlights:
- Metal Gear Solid 4 makes its way to modern consoles and PCs with the Master Collection Vol. 2.
- Peace Walker is also included as part of the DLC bundle.
- This marks MGS4’s first foray out of the PS3.
PlayStation’s ongoing State of Play had quite a few surprises to go along with it, including a remake for the God Of War trilogy. Konami also had a significant presence this time around, bring classics back into the fray.
This included the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Volume 2, which most notably includes Peace Maker and Guns of the Patriots, which refer to the PSP title and PS3 exclusive respectively.
Metal Gear Solid 4 Finally Breaks Free From The Shackles Of The PS3
Often considered as one of the killer games for the PlayStation 3, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots was a third person, stealth espionage video game from MGS series creator, Hideo Kojima.
Metal Gear Solid 4 also served as the grand finale for Solid Snake’s saga, one of the main protagonists of the Metal Gear Solid series, first making his debut in 1987’s titular Metal Gear Solid for the original PlayStation.
The game can be credited for single handedly saving the PS3 from dropping into irrelevancy, and is alone responsible for many young gamers jumping into the MGS and PlayStation bandwagons.
Also Read: Everything You Need to Know About God Of War: Sons Of Sparta
Metal Gear Solid 4 was also a licensing nightmare, since it featured multiple real world references whose rights had probably expired by then, which made porting it over to other platforms (including the PlayStation 4 and 5) impossible.
A good example of this would be in Snake’s music player, which is an actual iPod. It’s hoped that the remaster doesn’t change these things.
What To Expect From The PC Port Of The Game
At the very least, we should expect the ability to run the game at 60 frames per second, with higher resolutions than usual, along with updated controls and texturework.
That being said, MGS4 was developed for the PS3’s Cell processor, a notoriously complicated piece of hardware that was very difficult to develop games on. There weren’t a lot of games that took advantage of the horsepower, as a result.
In most cases though, the game would underperform on the PS3 when compared to the Xbox 360, and often by a large margin.
It’ll be fascinating to see how the port turns out. It’s also heading to the Nintendo Switch 2 and consoles like the PlayStation 5, so Konami will have some significant amount of work cut out for them, making the port in general nothing less of a technical miracle.
The only way to currently play Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern systems is by emulating it using a suitable program such as RPCS3 which is a dedicated PlayStation 3 emulator. Despite the whole translation thing going on, Metal Gear Solid 4 runs surprisingly well on modern PC hardware, including low power handhelds such as the Steam Deck.
That being said, nothing beats a proper port that just works out of the box.
Peace Walker Also Returns
Also included within the announcement was a remaster for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, originally a PlayStation Portable exclusive. While the game did receive a much needed PlayStation 3 re-release, it is still quite dated and requires (once again) the use of a PS3 emulator in order to play it.
It’s fantastic to see Konami return to the franchise and prep it up for restoration and preservation.
