Last week's State of Play revealed something quite remarkable: a port of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, enhanced for modern consoles. The original is an intriguing artefact from an era where Sony aimed high with its hardware but fell short in terms of execution - and perhaps MGS4 is the most obvious example of this, with often disastrous performance. The opportunity to remaster the game and liberate it from the confines of PS3 seemed like an obvious route forward - and yet it never happened. Until now, as MGS4 is one part of the new Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, Volume 2.
The immediate takeaway from the footage comes from the 60 frames per second target, the irony being there's strong evidence that this is what Hideo Kojima wanted from the original game to begin with. Early demos showed a heady combination of HD visuals and a flowing 60fps, but the final product was far from it. In fact, in the earliest days where I was experimenting with frame-rate testing (literally by losslessly capturing an HDMI feed, counting the unique frames and dividing them by 60), analysis results from MGS4 were coming in with averages in the early to mid 20s.
This was borne out in tests carried out years later, where the game's double-buffer v-sync was exposed. MGS4 would either run at 60fps (rarely), before plummeting down to 30fps, 20fps and even 15fps (or, rather, 66.6ms frame-times). The constant hard jumps between these levels of performance made the game very difficult to play and the visual inconsistency was off-putting.
So to see the game running much more smoothly is obviously welcome - but it opens up questions about how Konami's developers have done it. In looking back at the first volume of the Master Collection, the developers had past work to build on, whether it be emulation or Bluepoint's excellent HD remakes of Metal Gear Solid 2 and its successor. Aside from rumours of an early Xbox 360 port, we know of no existing work Konami has to draw from in order to port MGS4 - so it must be a fascinating story in how the game code was ported away from the Cell processor and in particular its SPU satellites.
And remember: this port isn't just for current-gen systems. Konami is also making MGS4 available on the first Nintendo Switch. From a technological point of view, that's a piece of hardware with much the same graphics power as the PS3 and a significantly less capable CPU. Let's just say we really want to see that.
Still, there are some elements of the reveal trailer that didn't stand out as particularly positive. Although in-game action targets 60 frames per second, some of the cutscenes do seem to be capped at 30fps. Are they repurposed video clips? That may be the case and that's a shame as dropping down to 30fps for narrative cutscenes after playing at double the frame-rate is jarring.
Still, what does stand out is the artistic quality of the original assets. Unlike many of its seventh generation console peers, Konami's work has aged gracefully - just as it did in Metal Gear Solid 2 and MGS3: Snake Eater. Resolution is temporary but class is permanent.
Foundational design choices and core art direction were excellent for their time and still look good today, so we're hoping that the native port will build upon this strong base and we can finally appreciate a game where there's strong evidence that its creators really wanted it played at 60fps - but just couldn't deliver that with the hardware of the time.
Also included in the second volume of the Master Collection is Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker - a game designed as a full series entry, but built with the technological limitations of Sony's PlayStation Portable in mind. Here, there are no real mysteries about the nature of the port: Bluepoint has already created an HD version for the PS360 generation and what we're seeing here looks similar. The original ran at a minuscule resolution at a locked 20fps, with very limited memory, so modernising this one to hold up on modern hardware is a nigh-on impossible task. But there's some fan service in this collection too with the inclusion of Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel - the original, story-driven Game Boy Color game.
Ultimately, we're obviously looking forward to this one. This collection can be seen as a testament to a renewed commitment from Konami to its classic franchises, finally affording Metal Gear Solid 4 the opportunity to realise its technical potential on modern hardware and allowing a new generation to access this historical work without its original compromises.
Comments 6
The 30FPS cutscenes were full motion videos in the original game (especially thinking of that one in Prague with the boats on the river) - presumably they've just been carried over as is? The file size would indicate they have - I believe that was what ballooned MGS4 in the first place to require a Blu Ray. A more consistent frame rate will certainly make the bike chase immediately before it a lot easier though!
It would be wonderful if Konami shared the secret sauce behind this release. Might have implications for other previously Cell bound games.
as soon as i saw this announcement i was looking forward to DF coverage!
I would love to know how/why they cut MGS2 to 30 fps but could also somehow bring MGS4 to Switch. I don't like the idea of key cards but I bought the "physical" MGS collection there for $20 when all the 3D games are downloaded when the cart is inserted. My Patience paid off with the Switch 2 patch finally.
@speak_easy The secret sauce is they have the source code and can simply port the game across properly. The previous MGS2/3 games in the master collection were the bluepoint versions for PS3/X360.
Ultimately this is a game running on 20 year old hardware. Even if it were ported with a host of inefficiences there is so much more performance available on most consoles a straight 1080p 60FPS should not be too difficult. Inevitably relying on upscaling to a 4K output.
Of course this is Konami we are talking about here, so a fumble is possible.
@PGR i suppose i have been left jaded after learning that a fee classic games have missing source code! LOL
For the two Switch consoles, I'm pretty sure the the only way to get something good out of an MGS 4 games that was a specialised build specifically using multiples magics tricks to get the most out of the PS3 hardware tech and in some cases, bypass or get around this console's limitations by achieving a technical marvel for that time. That's why it's so hard to port elsewhere, they rely heavily on the special and specialised hardwares strengths and work around it's weaknesses so at the ends they must have built codes snippets and specials algorithms to get the game done.
To port it and succeed, you have to get one of two things are all of those if you are lasy: Get an excessively powerful hardware that have enough power to emulated it without changing anything to the codes, Wich is not a way to go because it would take a console that would be too expensive, by a very lot, from what we have currently and be out of reach for any gamers out there, or take a look to the sources codes with people who work on it's original version and explained and guided new development teams on what parts of codes was done for and the usages they had to it and also revised the rest of the sources materials to adapted it to moderns ways of doing things and more efficiently, even used AI to help get ideas and directions to optimize everything from the loading of textures to the draw Technics in an efforts to make everything a lot more efficient with less codes while being more sharp.
Create codes to work around the old specials one and build codes that would replace those workaround with more efficients revised codes.
Even that would be not enough in some cases to succeed. Depending on which system you built your game, you may had to once again used specialised codes and works around to circumvent the hardware limitations and/or specialized way of doing things.
Depending on how Konami want ton invest into this collection, it would really surprised me that they would pay multiples teams and let them building it on such limited devices that would required a very deep and strong rework of the game... At that pace, you would consider to remake the whole thing more than adapted the old codes because sometimes, remake are easier to do that porting the old games to new platforms...
So I think that Konami will choose the "Game Key" Solution for the Switch 2 and probably a compromised of Streaming version or Stream Part of codes or textures for the first one or even, maybe a whole Stream solution for both Switch and maybe other systems too...
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