Pretty good.
I never thought I’d write these words, but you gotta hand it to Konami. In the year since the first Metal Gear Solid Master Collection debuted to a, ah, mixed response, the devs under producer Noriaki Okamura have been steadily beavering away at its many issues. We got actual 360-degree analogue control in MGS1 (eventually), fixes for launch issues that prevented players from downloading international versions of the games, and even a pause menu in MGS2. Imagine!
But the best was yet to come. Konami’s just released 2.0 patches for MGS 2 and 3, adding new internal resolution and upscaling options that make the games a lot less muddy on modern displays. In other words, the studio has done what has been the work of dedicated modders up to now.
Just pop into the options in each game’s launcher before you start playing and you can choose between “Original Mode” (how the games looked at launch last year) and “Adjusted Mode,” which will switch the game’s internal rendering resolution to 1080p and set the upscaling anywhere from 1080p to 4K. It affects cutscenes as well as moment-to-moment gameplay and you can also mix and match settings with a custom mode.
Friends, I’m not on PC Gamer’s hardware team, so don’t take my own testing as declarative or exhaustive, but it looks great to me. I’ve booted up both MGS2 and 3 on my own 4K television with all the new options enabled and they both look sharp as a tack, especially compared to the smeary, muddy experience you got on high-res screens before today.
I tried them on Steam Deck, too (where their original 720p-ness wasn’t an issue anyway), and they look great there as well. It’s taken almost a year, but my layman’s opinion is that these two games have finally got PC ports worthy of their legend, just what I wanted to see when I launched them for the first time last October. You can see it in action in the video above, and here’s a little comparison I made myself (with the added bonus that you can make Snake blink). It might not look like much on a smaller screen, but trust me, it’s a big difference on high-resolution monitors and TVs.
The graphical enhancements are the headline item, but they’re not the only thing in the patch. Both games have also got new gamepad settings that will let you rebind your controls, as well as a new layout for keyboard users (plus, if you want, you can just create your own custom layout there, too). In MGS2’s case, that comes with new mouse support, letting you ready, aim, and use your weapon in first-person view.
I don’t want to pour too much sugar on Konami. After all, the games really ought to have been in this state when they launched, rather than nearly a full year after, but as an MGS sicko I’m genuinely thrilled to have versions of these games that feel actually definitive. My long-delayed MGS3 replay can finally kick off now that I can bear to look at the game on my television.
Of course, opinions might vary when it comes to MGS1. Where MGS2 and 3 are native ports of the Bluepoint remasters, MGS1 is the original PS1 game running in a barebones emulator, and it hasn’t gotten a 2.0 patch like its sequels. That means you can still find a better experience of that game by setting up your own instance in Duckstation or another PS1 emulator (though it’s a bit more of a faff). Personally, MGS1 runs well enough that I’d be mostly content recommending it to anyone just looking to play the game, but I certainly wouldn’t object if Konami saw fit to put out a comparable whizzbang patch for the original 3D Metal Gear game.
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