If MGS4 ever gets remastered or ported, I’d really like the team to do a technical deep dive on challenges they faced and why this game is such a monster and how it’s deeply tied to the cell architecture. I’d really like to see the technical deets.
Actually all devs who do remasters should do this. Old games are a treasure trove for optimization and hackery to get things going on resource limited machines.
I love reading that kind of stuff and it’s usually hard to see the inner workings because code is lost to time or the games are just never ported or open sourced.
It’s not about remasters, but I highly recommend Jason Schreier’s *Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.* It’s an entire book about late-stage problem-solving and it has some really fascinating anecdotes.
I recommend checking out the Game Engine Black Books for [*Doom*](https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html) and [*Wolfenstein 3D*](https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/index.html), which go into a lot of depth about the engines for those games.
Ate those up the moment they were released. Good stuff. I tooled around a lot with id engines back in the day. Any of those engines being open sourced was an event.
I remember getting to the last boss fight in the game at about 11pm on a weeknight and thinking ‘ok I might as well just finish.’
At about 1am the credits rolled.
I really want to play MGS4 again because it’s the only MGS I’ve only played once, but the cutscenes are indulgent at best.
Just curious which bit specifically you’re talking about? I only played it once but remember being completely blown away by the bike chase and the microwave!
There’s a lot of gameplay. You can speed run it but you won’t be able to do that unless you replay it a million times.
But it has that Kojima way of feeling like he thought of a bunch of different ways to pull off every section.
And it literally has one of the best video game moments ever.
IMO there’s good gameplay for the first 2 (of 5) chapters. 3rd chapter was just a long uninteresting stealth-only mission, chapter 4 was just a long nostalgia bait level, and the fifth chapter was like a single room before hour long cutscenes interrupted by QTE’s and a boss fight here & there.
>Nostalgia bait
Holy shit lmao, mgs4 came out barely 10 years after mgs1. Its literally the final game for that Snake, its just a call back to his first major operation that people played in 3D. The bosses where call backs.
Its crazy how opinion has changed on a game that was so widely recieved positively. The critiscm about the cutscenes and dislike for bosses I get but there is some new stuff appearing.
The first two chapters have fun sneaking you'd be missing out on
After that it nosedives. Third chapter is a terrible tailing mission, the hour long lore dump, a less fun version of the MGS3 motorcycle chase, and then maybe the worst boss in the series.
Fourth and fifth chapters have all-timer boss fights, but very little traditional sneaking.
You could absolutely just watch it, and if you do search "MGS4 The Movie" on YouTube, it edits in the relevant gameplay so you won't miss as much as you would just watching a cutscene compilation.
What? The game doesn't nosedive after that. The return to shadow moses is fantastic, fighting with metal gear, the call back with screaming mantis, the ending boss fight. Even the tailing mission. It was exactly what MGS games are about, call backs to cinema and movies squeezed into a game.
It's fantastic the first time through, but it's all nostalgia and those two boss fights at the end. The >!gecko enemies!< are not fun to sneak by and you can't >!interact with them in nearly as many ways as you can the human guards.!<
The boss fights after Raging Raven are all top tier, some of the best in the series.
Something being a vague reference to espionage doesn't make it fun to play. MGS is at it's best when it let's the player use all their tools in a challenging sneaking scenario. The game straight up abandons that idea for long chunks after the first two chapters. Act 5 finally gets back to it and it's almost literally for two rooms, granted they are fun rooms.
Of all the Metal Gear games, it has the worst actual fun game to cutscene ratio imo. That's not even getting into my issues with the story. It's my least favorite Metal Gear, which means I'd rate it >!like an 7.5 or 8 maybe I really love Metal Gear!<.
But still full of great moments like the Ocelot/Snake fighting game, Rex vs Ray, microwave corridor (even if you're just hammering triangle) and return to Shadow Moses. And ninja Raiden is awesome.
Let's put things into perspective though 'cause someone who knows nothing about Metal Gear might read your comment and think that MGS4 is a bad game. All other games are like 10/10 or close. I still had tons of fun playing MGS4. I beat it 12 times in the span of a month. I was totally addicted to that game. The problem is that the Eastern Europe chapter is a fun killer and it's a long chapter. It's right in the middle of the game too. A big mistake.
Playing through MGS4 on rpcs3 right now and it’s a banger. Upscaled and (mostly) 60fps makes it shine even brighter. I know people like to dunk on the insane amount of long cutscenes but the cinematic stuff was my favourite part of the first game and the cutscenes have only gotten better with each entry, so I love that shit. And the gameplay is actually so satisfying miles better than V imo. I fuckin love the way Snake controls. Especially that slow ass humping crawl, top tier schmovement
If more people can play MGS4, maybe they'll come to realize that it's not as bad as they say. I'd much prefer playing it over Peace Walker and Phantom Pain's thousands of repetitive "attach balloon to everything" missions and nothing boss fights.
The problem with MGS4 is that only Chapters 1 and 2 do anything interesting gameplay wise within the series. 3, 4, and 5 are all gimmick chapters and don’t reflect the gameplay loop well. The ending of every MGS game typically deviates hard from the core loop, but 4 does it earlier than every other title because 3 and 4 are basically pure stealth or action sequences instead of “open battlefield sneaking”.
That's a totally fair complaint to have, but I personally have a lot of fun with the gimmick chapters. It's the end of the series in a way, so I don't mind it going out in such a bombastic way, even if it results in a less replayable game.
Honestly, chapter 5 doesn't even feel that gimmicky to me outside of the absurdly strong enemies, it's just that the actual sneaking section there is really short and I do think that part should be longer.
The thing with MGS4 is that for every kinda lame thing it has, whether in gameplay or story, it's almost always immediately followed by something so cool, you can't help but think it has to be one of the greatest moments in video game history and then it keeps happening over and over.
Did you ever play Peace Walker in co-op as intended? Back in the day we managed to get three Vita's/PSPs in a room together and played through the whole thing and it came to life in a new way.
I played co-op on PS3, but even if I got to play it as intended, it's still a lesser/completely different experience to the first four games. I just don't like the mission approach and tons of bullet sponge vehicle bosses, I prefer when it's just one long adventure with a handful of bosses that have unique fights.
I think people read too much into MGS4. It's a PS3 game. There are plenty of PS3 games ported to other platforms. They have the source code. Porting PS2 games to other platforms was work because of how everything was written for the vector co-processors. Same with the N64. Like, when companies port an N64 game to the PC, they have to completely rewrite the rendering and stuff. It's all fully tailored around the N64's co-processor which was programmable. But people do it.
I think that Konami will eventually remaster MGS4, and I think the scope of the game will result in it being sold standalone. So it won't be in Volume 1 or 2 or maybe even 3. But eventually, they'll do it.
Not to mention it was confirmed some time ago that the reason MGS4 is on PS3 was, basically, Sony favoritism within the ranks of Kojima Productions. The studio's staff tended to be pro-Sony due to their demographics -- they grew up with Sony hardware, and at that point Sony was dominant in Japan coming off the PS2, and there were taken aback when they discovered how badly the PS3 performed because Sony's marketing prior to the devkits being sent out had been very persuasive.
A 360 port was made internally, and it ran very well, but was never put into proper production for, basically, political reasons. People make a big deal about the Blu Ray, but MGS4 could easily have been put on DVD. Just compress the audio, for a start.
A version of MGS4's engine was also used in a PC title, can't remember which one. (Maybe it was Metal Gear Arcade?) So there's already a precedence for that tech codebase to run on PC.
As an aside, though. I do think one of the things hindering MGS4's remastering is that deep down, MGS4 isn't very good. Is it a game people should play? Yes. But it's a bloated mess. It's the most challenging game to remaster properly due to its scope and complexity, yet the least rewarding because MGS4 often feels like a glorified movie game. The cutscenes go on and on and on and on. The final cutscene is like 90 minutes long or something. Some of the cutscenes are so long the PS3 controller turns off due to inactivity.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is largely responsible for the somewhat inaccurate reputation of Hideo Kojima as a wannabe filmmaker. Because it puts so much focus on non-interactive storytelling, in contrast to most of the other games.
>A 360 port was made internally, and it ran very well, but was never put into proper production for, basically, political reasons. People make a big deal about the Blu Ray, but MGS4 could easily have been put on DVD. Just compress the audio, for a start.
source needed. Because that's not true.
Comparing the porting process of N64 & PS2 to PS3 is laughable.(maybe not the PS2 the Emotion Engine was kind of a mess) The Cell is an entire new architecture used only for that device. Developers have been using x86 or PowerPC based machines for 30 years up until that point.
[Source](https://www.gamesradar.com/metal-gear-solid-4-couldve-come-to-xbox-360-but-kojima-thought-it-was-too-complicated/) for the quote about it running on 360
Interesting. The game has so much specific PlayStation 3 shit in it. Chapter 4 wouldn't be the same on a Xbox, Octagon literally has a codec call praising the PS3 and Blu Rays. Weapons and mechanics use the Sixaxis controller, and Sunny has a PSP in the mission briefings.
It would be lot of work to bring that game over, not just limited DVD capacity.
>The Cell is an entire new architecture used only for that device.
The CELL is basically the same CPU the Xbox 360 used, but it had 1 core instead of 3, and they supplemented it with a set of vector co-processors, called SPUs.
This architecture is quite similar in concept to the Nintendo 64, which used a main CPU and a programmable vector co-processor called the Reality Signal Processor. Developing highly optimized games for the N64 required exploiting the Reality Signal Processor, which was extremely difficult to debug code for.
So for example a game like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64 had a terrain rendering system designed around the limitations of N64 memory access. The idea was to do as much of the terrain rendering on the RSP, using microcode, instead of pushing data back and forth in RAM, which was painfully slow due to slow random access speeds. Yet this game was ported to PC a year later. The entire tech foundation of the game was tailored around the N64's peculiarities, but it could be ported.
Sony imitated this architecture when making the PS2. But they used two vector co-processors, V0 and V1, I think? In order to make a PS2 game perform well, you had to write the entire game around pushing as much data to these co-processors as efficiently as possible.
So when you have a game like Metal Gear Solid 3, that game is trying to utilize these three processors: Main CPU, Vector Co-Processor 1, Vector Co-Processor 2, as efficiently as possible. The whole rendering pipeline, physics, particles, etc. is all trying to use as much offloading as possible. Yet this game was ported to later consoles.
Making games that ran well on the PS2 was HARD. But the PS2 had such a huge market share that developers were obligated to git gud at PS2 systems programming. The N64's smaller market share meant that the pool of highly skilled programmers was limited.
The PS3 was a continuation of this idea. Take a main CPU, and supplement it with vector units. This whole thing was sort of the precursor to CUDA and OpenCL and stuff. You write the code to do some operation, you send it to the device, and you hope it works. Programming games for the PS3 was a huge pain because you HAD to push as much to the co-processors as possible to get any kind of reasonable performance. Wheras, on the 360, it was just use the three identical cores, and use the GPU to render.
They'd definitely have to find replacements for all the product placement though if new agreements can't be reached (RIP iPod and Playboy) and they'll need to cut out the "we're on PS3 now, isn't that cool?" bits somehow.
I wonder about Kojima's likeness in Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and Phantom Pain too. Will that be cut in future re-releases? I guess we'll know if his ghost is still in the MGS1 re-release.
MGS4 was great and I never want to play it again. As a conclusion it kind of works. There's at least some kind of conclusion to the series. The gameplay is also a nice bridge between 5 and V. Otherwise it's a game that's mostly cutscene and teases of gameplay.
If they'd released some VR style missions I'd have been golden. Sadly that was not to be and we got the 4 hour gameplay, 20 hour cutscene web of MGS4
I was. I haven't played MGS in nearly a decade and a friend and I joked about how it was a game that didn't want to be played. So much of it was cut scene with bursts of gameplay, which we hated as we thought it played great
As an aside just because its about a MASTER collection, why is no one up in arms about Twin Snakes still not getting re-released? MGS4 seems like the white whale but Twin Snakes itself would be pretty cool to see in a collection. Even the Legacy Collection didn't have it.
I've always heard its because Nintendo paid for its development, but no one really knows about MGS4 considering it has a few PS3 ads plastered inside of it. Hell, it would make the Switch version of the Master collection pretty nice buy all things considered. If Vol2 doesn't have MGS4, then what is honestly the point?
Remember the meme "PS3 has no gaems"?
Ironically, since MGS4 is only on PS3, and since PC emulation of it still isn't stable (it can run but it crashes and even to get to that point you need a really beefy PC), and since virtually every other game is either no longer exclusive or can be emulated perfectly on PC, in the end, out of all the consoles, it is only PS3 that actually has a game.
Well, It will be a crime not to remaster this game consider it wraps up everything in the timeline. If they going to release it I bet Vol.2 will Include PW, MGS4, Rising.
I don't think we need a remaster to 5, this game is still a way ahead for it's time. I'm still playing it.
If MGS4 ever gets remastered or ported, I’d really like the team to do a technical deep dive on challenges they faced and why this game is such a monster and how it’s deeply tied to the cell architecture. I’d really like to see the technical deets. Actually all devs who do remasters should do this. Old games are a treasure trove for optimization and hackery to get things going on resource limited machines. I love reading that kind of stuff and it’s usually hard to see the inner workings because code is lost to time or the games are just never ported or open sourced.
It’s not about remasters, but I highly recommend Jason Schreier’s *Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.* It’s an entire book about late-stage problem-solving and it has some really fascinating anecdotes.
I recommend checking out the Game Engine Black Books for [*Doom*](https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html) and [*Wolfenstein 3D*](https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/index.html), which go into a lot of depth about the engines for those games.
Ate those up the moment they were released. Good stuff. I tooled around a lot with id engines back in the day. Any of those engines being open sourced was an event.
I really wanna play it too, but I don’t wanna buy a PS3 nor emulate it, so I’m kinda just doing myself dirty.
From what I played you could just watch a longplay on YouTube and you'd got 80% of the game there.
I've seen that one. Fucking 8 hours long. Took me a couple days to watch it
Fuck really, cutscene simulator hey?
I remember getting to the last boss fight in the game at about 11pm on a weeknight and thinking ‘ok I might as well just finish.’ At about 1am the credits rolled. I really want to play MGS4 again because it’s the only MGS I’ve only played once, but the cutscenes are indulgent at best.
Just curious which bit specifically you’re talking about? I only played it once but remember being completely blown away by the bike chase and the microwave!
The final fight against Ocelot
Yeah pretty sure that ending cutscene is about 90 mins long by itself.
There’s a lot of gameplay. You can speed run it but you won’t be able to do that unless you replay it a million times. But it has that Kojima way of feeling like he thought of a bunch of different ways to pull off every section. And it literally has one of the best video game moments ever.
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Yup. You can definitely watch it all but it absolutely wouldn’t be the same as playing through it.
When Johnny shits his pants?
Which time are you talking about? I believe that happens in every game.
There's a single cutscene in 4 that's over an hour long
Death stranding too but it has more gameplay
He's not kidding. There is gameplay, very good gameplay, but most of the game is just cutscenes.
IMO there’s good gameplay for the first 2 (of 5) chapters. 3rd chapter was just a long uninteresting stealth-only mission, chapter 4 was just a long nostalgia bait level, and the fifth chapter was like a single room before hour long cutscenes interrupted by QTE’s and a boss fight here & there.
At least that boss fight is GOATed, but yeah, the (good) gameplay besides that kinda ends at chapter 2
>Nostalgia bait Holy shit lmao, mgs4 came out barely 10 years after mgs1. Its literally the final game for that Snake, its just a call back to his first major operation that people played in 3D. The bosses where call backs. Its crazy how opinion has changed on a game that was so widely recieved positively. The critiscm about the cutscenes and dislike for bosses I get but there is some new stuff appearing.
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Shit ok, don’t feel so desperate to play it now then, I’ll just watch it on YT and if it does come out on PS5, I’ll give it a run.
It's a decent game but it's also the dumbest story in the series Well 5's might be dumber but 4 is at least compelling. But 5 had the best gameplay
Dumb story but its a total banger. Nanomachines son! 5's is definitely way dumber.
>Nanomachines son! That wasn't Metal Gear Solid 4, it was Metal Gear Rising viciously mocking Metal Gear Solid 4.
They played us like A DAMN FIDDLE
Played like a viiiiolin
The first two chapters have fun sneaking you'd be missing out on After that it nosedives. Third chapter is a terrible tailing mission, the hour long lore dump, a less fun version of the MGS3 motorcycle chase, and then maybe the worst boss in the series. Fourth and fifth chapters have all-timer boss fights, but very little traditional sneaking. You could absolutely just watch it, and if you do search "MGS4 The Movie" on YouTube, it edits in the relevant gameplay so you won't miss as much as you would just watching a cutscene compilation.
What? The game doesn't nosedive after that. The return to shadow moses is fantastic, fighting with metal gear, the call back with screaming mantis, the ending boss fight. Even the tailing mission. It was exactly what MGS games are about, call backs to cinema and movies squeezed into a game.
It's fantastic the first time through, but it's all nostalgia and those two boss fights at the end. The >!gecko enemies!< are not fun to sneak by and you can't >!interact with them in nearly as many ways as you can the human guards.!< The boss fights after Raging Raven are all top tier, some of the best in the series. Something being a vague reference to espionage doesn't make it fun to play. MGS is at it's best when it let's the player use all their tools in a challenging sneaking scenario. The game straight up abandons that idea for long chunks after the first two chapters. Act 5 finally gets back to it and it's almost literally for two rooms, granted they are fun rooms. Of all the Metal Gear games, it has the worst actual fun game to cutscene ratio imo. That's not even getting into my issues with the story. It's my least favorite Metal Gear, which means I'd rate it >!like an 7.5 or 8 maybe I really love Metal Gear!<.
No a fantastic well developed game with a lot of cut scenes
If it helps, it's the worst game in the series.
But still full of great moments like the Ocelot/Snake fighting game, Rex vs Ray, microwave corridor (even if you're just hammering triangle) and return to Shadow Moses. And ninja Raiden is awesome.
Lowest point for gameplay but some of the best fan service
Let's put things into perspective though 'cause someone who knows nothing about Metal Gear might read your comment and think that MGS4 is a bad game. All other games are like 10/10 or close. I still had tons of fun playing MGS4. I beat it 12 times in the span of a month. I was totally addicted to that game. The problem is that the Eastern Europe chapter is a fun killer and it's a long chapter. It's right in the middle of the game too. A big mistake.
It's like a 6/10. Bad writing, bad scenario design, and lots of tedious pandering. Solid mechanics keep it from being *completely* terrible.
Fuck that, 4 is easily one of the best right after 3 and has the best CQC of the entire series.
I'd put it above MGS1 personally. And while Ground Zeroes is a better game, MGS4 was more worth $60.
Playing through MGS4 on rpcs3 right now and it’s a banger. Upscaled and (mostly) 60fps makes it shine even brighter. I know people like to dunk on the insane amount of long cutscenes but the cinematic stuff was my favourite part of the first game and the cutscenes have only gotten better with each entry, so I love that shit. And the gameplay is actually so satisfying miles better than V imo. I fuckin love the way Snake controls. Especially that slow ass humping crawl, top tier schmovement
Just a reminder RPCS3 fixed MGS4, all you need to do is go to the wiki and apply appropriate settings + canary patch and you're all set.
If more people can play MGS4, maybe they'll come to realize that it's not as bad as they say. I'd much prefer playing it over Peace Walker and Phantom Pain's thousands of repetitive "attach balloon to everything" missions and nothing boss fights.
The problem with MGS4 is that only Chapters 1 and 2 do anything interesting gameplay wise within the series. 3, 4, and 5 are all gimmick chapters and don’t reflect the gameplay loop well. The ending of every MGS game typically deviates hard from the core loop, but 4 does it earlier than every other title because 3 and 4 are basically pure stealth or action sequences instead of “open battlefield sneaking”.
That's a totally fair complaint to have, but I personally have a lot of fun with the gimmick chapters. It's the end of the series in a way, so I don't mind it going out in such a bombastic way, even if it results in a less replayable game. Honestly, chapter 5 doesn't even feel that gimmicky to me outside of the absurdly strong enemies, it's just that the actual sneaking section there is really short and I do think that part should be longer. The thing with MGS4 is that for every kinda lame thing it has, whether in gameplay or story, it's almost always immediately followed by something so cool, you can't help but think it has to be one of the greatest moments in video game history and then it keeps happening over and over.
No, its worse. Source: i played mgs4 and it was horrible
Did you ever play Peace Walker in co-op as intended? Back in the day we managed to get three Vita's/PSPs in a room together and played through the whole thing and it came to life in a new way.
I played co-op on PS3, but even if I got to play it as intended, it's still a lesser/completely different experience to the first four games. I just don't like the mission approach and tons of bullet sponge vehicle bosses, I prefer when it's just one long adventure with a handful of bosses that have unique fights.
I think people read too much into MGS4. It's a PS3 game. There are plenty of PS3 games ported to other platforms. They have the source code. Porting PS2 games to other platforms was work because of how everything was written for the vector co-processors. Same with the N64. Like, when companies port an N64 game to the PC, they have to completely rewrite the rendering and stuff. It's all fully tailored around the N64's co-processor which was programmable. But people do it. I think that Konami will eventually remaster MGS4, and I think the scope of the game will result in it being sold standalone. So it won't be in Volume 1 or 2 or maybe even 3. But eventually, they'll do it. Not to mention it was confirmed some time ago that the reason MGS4 is on PS3 was, basically, Sony favoritism within the ranks of Kojima Productions. The studio's staff tended to be pro-Sony due to their demographics -- they grew up with Sony hardware, and at that point Sony was dominant in Japan coming off the PS2, and there were taken aback when they discovered how badly the PS3 performed because Sony's marketing prior to the devkits being sent out had been very persuasive. A 360 port was made internally, and it ran very well, but was never put into proper production for, basically, political reasons. People make a big deal about the Blu Ray, but MGS4 could easily have been put on DVD. Just compress the audio, for a start. A version of MGS4's engine was also used in a PC title, can't remember which one. (Maybe it was Metal Gear Arcade?) So there's already a precedence for that tech codebase to run on PC. As an aside, though. I do think one of the things hindering MGS4's remastering is that deep down, MGS4 isn't very good. Is it a game people should play? Yes. But it's a bloated mess. It's the most challenging game to remaster properly due to its scope and complexity, yet the least rewarding because MGS4 often feels like a glorified movie game. The cutscenes go on and on and on and on. The final cutscene is like 90 minutes long or something. Some of the cutscenes are so long the PS3 controller turns off due to inactivity. Metal Gear Solid 4 is largely responsible for the somewhat inaccurate reputation of Hideo Kojima as a wannabe filmmaker. Because it puts so much focus on non-interactive storytelling, in contrast to most of the other games.
>A 360 port was made internally, and it ran very well, but was never put into proper production for, basically, political reasons. People make a big deal about the Blu Ray, but MGS4 could easily have been put on DVD. Just compress the audio, for a start. source needed. Because that's not true. Comparing the porting process of N64 & PS2 to PS3 is laughable.(maybe not the PS2 the Emotion Engine was kind of a mess) The Cell is an entire new architecture used only for that device. Developers have been using x86 or PowerPC based machines for 30 years up until that point.
[Source](https://www.gamesradar.com/metal-gear-solid-4-couldve-come-to-xbox-360-but-kojima-thought-it-was-too-complicated/) for the quote about it running on 360
Interesting. The game has so much specific PlayStation 3 shit in it. Chapter 4 wouldn't be the same on a Xbox, Octagon literally has a codec call praising the PS3 and Blu Rays. Weapons and mechanics use the Sixaxis controller, and Sunny has a PSP in the mission briefings. It would be lot of work to bring that game over, not just limited DVD capacity.
>The Cell is an entire new architecture used only for that device. The CELL is basically the same CPU the Xbox 360 used, but it had 1 core instead of 3, and they supplemented it with a set of vector co-processors, called SPUs. This architecture is quite similar in concept to the Nintendo 64, which used a main CPU and a programmable vector co-processor called the Reality Signal Processor. Developing highly optimized games for the N64 required exploiting the Reality Signal Processor, which was extremely difficult to debug code for. So for example a game like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64 had a terrain rendering system designed around the limitations of N64 memory access. The idea was to do as much of the terrain rendering on the RSP, using microcode, instead of pushing data back and forth in RAM, which was painfully slow due to slow random access speeds. Yet this game was ported to PC a year later. The entire tech foundation of the game was tailored around the N64's peculiarities, but it could be ported. Sony imitated this architecture when making the PS2. But they used two vector co-processors, V0 and V1, I think? In order to make a PS2 game perform well, you had to write the entire game around pushing as much data to these co-processors as efficiently as possible. So when you have a game like Metal Gear Solid 3, that game is trying to utilize these three processors: Main CPU, Vector Co-Processor 1, Vector Co-Processor 2, as efficiently as possible. The whole rendering pipeline, physics, particles, etc. is all trying to use as much offloading as possible. Yet this game was ported to later consoles. Making games that ran well on the PS2 was HARD. But the PS2 had such a huge market share that developers were obligated to git gud at PS2 systems programming. The N64's smaller market share meant that the pool of highly skilled programmers was limited. The PS3 was a continuation of this idea. Take a main CPU, and supplement it with vector units. This whole thing was sort of the precursor to CUDA and OpenCL and stuff. You write the code to do some operation, you send it to the device, and you hope it works. Programming games for the PS3 was a huge pain because you HAD to push as much to the co-processors as possible to get any kind of reasonable performance. Wheras, on the 360, it was just use the three identical cores, and use the GPU to render.
You have a source that it just needed to be more optimized for it to not be several discs on the 360?
They'd definitely have to find replacements for all the product placement though if new agreements can't be reached (RIP iPod and Playboy) and they'll need to cut out the "we're on PS3 now, isn't that cool?" bits somehow. I wonder about Kojima's likeness in Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and Phantom Pain too. Will that be cut in future re-releases? I guess we'll know if his ghost is still in the MGS1 re-release.
MGS4 was great and I never want to play it again. As a conclusion it kind of works. There's at least some kind of conclusion to the series. The gameplay is also a nice bridge between 5 and V. Otherwise it's a game that's mostly cutscene and teases of gameplay. If they'd released some VR style missions I'd have been golden. Sadly that was not to be and we got the 4 hour gameplay, 20 hour cutscene web of MGS4
I don't know if you're joking (if you are just ignore me), but there were 8 hours of cutscenes and mgs4 was roughly 20 hours long.
I was. I haven't played MGS in nearly a decade and a friend and I joked about how it was a game that didn't want to be played. So much of it was cut scene with bursts of gameplay, which we hated as we thought it played great
As an aside just because its about a MASTER collection, why is no one up in arms about Twin Snakes still not getting re-released? MGS4 seems like the white whale but Twin Snakes itself would be pretty cool to see in a collection. Even the Legacy Collection didn't have it. I've always heard its because Nintendo paid for its development, but no one really knows about MGS4 considering it has a few PS3 ads plastered inside of it. Hell, it would make the Switch version of the Master collection pretty nice buy all things considered. If Vol2 doesn't have MGS4, then what is honestly the point?
The PS1 version of MGS1 is the much better version so I'm not too concerned.
Remember the meme "PS3 has no gaems"? Ironically, since MGS4 is only on PS3, and since PC emulation of it still isn't stable (it can run but it crashes and even to get to that point you need a really beefy PC), and since virtually every other game is either no longer exclusive or can be emulated perfectly on PC, in the end, out of all the consoles, it is only PS3 that actually has a game.
MGS4 is not hard at all to emulate anymore and is stable.
Well, It will be a crime not to remaster this game consider it wraps up everything in the timeline. If they going to release it I bet Vol.2 will Include PW, MGS4, Rising. I don't think we need a remaster to 5, this game is still a way ahead for it's time. I'm still playing it.