I'm still in a dream.
Among the trailers at Sony’s State of Play showcase was a new look at Metal Gear Delta: Snake Eater. Of the many remake projects in the contemporary game industry, this is a bit of an odd one: it’s largely a straight-up visual recreation of Metal Gear Solid 3, with some modernized touches, which means it’s going to feel an awful lot like the original PS2 game.
Now, yeah, that PS2 game is one of the best ever made, but still. All of the questions I have around Delta are how the feel of the game is going to hold up, because visually Konami has done a spectacular job on the characters and environments. The latest trailer mostly focuses on giving us a brief glimpse of Snake’s various fights against the Cobra Unit, MGS Delta’s bosses, and a few of the game’s big set pieces.
Revolver Ocelot’s still doing his goofy gun tricks, the Pain (the bee guy) is still chewing the scenery as he sends little swarms after you, and The End (old sniper dude) fight looks like it’ll be taking full advantage of the gorgeous environment and camouflage work. Particularly notable were some of Ocelot’s animations, which almost look like they’ve been slightly stylised but lifted straight from the PS2 game.
Oh: and it looks like the fistfight with Volgin might be a little more of a fight this time, with Snake executing some beautifully clean CQC on him. I may be reading too much into a brief clip there though.
Once the boss showreel is out of the way, however, and we’ve seen a few of the chase sequences, this new trailer goes into some of Delta’s more unusual features. The first is the return of Snake vs. Monkey, which Konami had previously confirmed, an excellent Sony-exclusive bonus mode that sees Snake hunting down the little critters from Ape Escape.
This particular flavour of the mode will only be on PlayStation, but Konami is making a version with Bomberman for Xbox, which is presumably the version we’ll be getting on PC.
Then the big news. Right at the end of the trailer we see a jungle landscape. An item appears. A previously camouflaged player quickly grabs the item, dives to the ground, and their camouflage shifts to match the terrain. A split-second later another player appears, looks around suspiciously for a moment, then walks on by without seeing them.
It’s only a few seconds long, but this is unmistakably a tease for the return of Metal Gear Online, the absolutely superb multiplayer mode that was introduced in MGS3: Subsistence (a PS2 director’s cut of the original game). Following the clip we see the text “and more” which as far as I’m concerned seals the deal: I was definitely interested in Delta anyway, but honestly didn’t expect the return of MGO.
You may well wonder why this is worth getting excited about. MGO pits two teams of soldiers against each other across various modes (deathmatch, capture the flag, etcetera), with the top-scoring player on each team becoming one of the game’s main characters in the next round (with unique equipment and abilities).
That may sound pretty standard but the magic of MGO is in the depth of Metal Gear’s existing systems, and how cleverly they’re implemented in a multiplayer environment. It’s also full of brilliant little Kojima touches, like dead players becoming invisible ghosts that can go around, tap on walls, and whisper “woooo” in the ears of the living.
MGO didn’t survive long in the wild: Konami turned off the various worldwide servers across 2006-7, though to this day there are fan-run communities that keep the game (and later iterations of MGO) available.
Konami has yet to officially confirm the return of MGO, but I’m convinced (and delighted). We’ll know for sure soon enough: Metal Gear Delta is due to release on August 28,2025, and for such a visual showcase has some pretty reasonable system requirements.
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