Whisper it quietly, but Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater looks like the most exciting Konami project in years. The trailer shown at this year’s Xbox Games Showcase contains just over two minutes of tightly edited in-engine footage, but it answers a lot of questions about the direction of the project – with more details provided in an interview between Solid Snake voice actor David Hayter and producer Noriaki Okamura. At its heart, Delta looks to offer extensive reworks to visuals, controls and camera, using Unreal Engine 5, alongside slavishly faithful recreation of the level design and cutscene direction of the PS2 original.
Of course, we’ve seen Metal Gear Solid 3 polished up in Bluepoint’s excellent HD Collection back on PS3 and Xbox 360 – a build that’s also been re-used in the recent Master Collection to mixed reviews. But this remake, Metal Gear Solid Delta, is a more ambitious beast. It’s shaping up to be a genuine effort to give series fans the best way to play the game. The big question is this: how does the footage we have so far compare to the original via the HD Collection? What’s changed, and what stays intact?
While Metal Gear Solid Delta’s release date is still unannounced, we do know it’s set for release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam – and with that being the case, there’s no telling what platform we’re precisely seeing in the trailer. It could be a mixture of formats, though the smart money is on an early PC build. Practically every shot I’ve pixel counted shows a crisp native 4K image, a true 3840×2160 with dynamic resolution scaling deployed only rarely. Next there’s the frame-rate situation. Oddly enough, the trailer is only presented on YouTube as a 30fps encode, but hopefully that is a limitation of the capture – we’d expect to see a full 60fps in the final product, as we got with the HD Collection before it.
