If there is a franchise that is crying out for a remastering for the current generation of consoles, that is undoubtedly Metal Gear Solid. The original MGS have not been touched up since the excellent Metal Gear Solid HD compilation of 2011, and there are no signs pointing to a relaunch for PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, despite the fact that MGS cutscenes apparently rendered with Fox were discovered a while ago. Engine in a Japanese pachinko machine. However, we have good news: the 2011 remastering is now backward compatible on Xbox One, and this is the best way to play these classic games on modern hardware.
However, it is better that you moderate your expectations. Like most Xbox 360 titles that work on Xbox One, the rendering resolution is still 720p with 2x MSAA as in the original from Bluepoint Games and, save for the inclusion of an additional 16x anisotropic filtering at the software level of system on Xbox One X, the general presentation of all the games in the compilation is identical to the one they had on Xbox 360. Luckily, the backward compatibility does bring improvements in another aspect.
We talked, of course, about performance, where Bluepoint was trying to move both Metal Gear Solid 2 and its ambitious sequel to a stable 60FPS. The task for the developers was significantly easier with MGS2, as the team led by Hideo Kojima already set 60Hz as a goal in the original game. The result in the transition to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 was a nearly stable frame-rate for most of the action. The opening sequence with Snake on the ship is without a doubt the most demanding of the entire game, with lots of geometry and rain effects. The previous generation consoles were already moving it well, so it’s no surprise that the Xbox One and Xbox One X do as well.
But the situation with the cinematics of MGS2 is very different. Whether in the hangar or in the Raiden sections on the oil rig, any sequence showing a larger area reduces its performance on the original Xbox 360 hardware. This is practically fixed with backward compatibility, but there are still moments in which the problems remain, even on Xbox One X. In a scene that dropped sharply to 35FPS on Xbox 360 the new Xbox go up to 48FPS. It’s unusual not to see an improvement in the Xbox One X hardware here, as it doesn’t seem like a GPU-demanding scene, and even if we were limited by the CPU X it is 31% better than its predecessor. Anyway, while you play 60FPS is maintained more solidly than in any other console, and you also get the advantage of having 16x anisotropic filtering.
:: Everything we know about Cyberpunk 2077: trailers, date, gameplay details and more
It is in Metal Gear Solid 3, technologically more advanced, where Bluepoint Games began to run into the limits of what they could achieve in their remastering on previous generation consoles, and where current consoles make a greater difference. On the PS2 original, Kojima’s team tried to revolutionize in-game detail at the expense of frame-rate, going from MGS2’s 60FPS to 30FPS. In fact, the implementation of this decision was quite visionary; Although the kinematics operated in vertical sync (and performance that often plummeted), playable parts ran at 30FPS with adaptive sync, occasionally exhibiting some tearing. Adaptive timing, especially at 30FPS, was unusual in the PS2 era, although it was used often in the next generation. In any case, MGS 3 was, by and large, the result of brilliant technical development, with a team trying to push PS2 to the limit in its last years of life. For its remastering, Bluepoint set itself the goal of obtaining the same 60FPS of MGS2, something without a doubt quite ambitious.
And they almost succeeded. Similar to the original PlayStation 2, the cutscenes often fail to hit that number, but the gameplay is pretty solid. Ironically, considering the roots of the series, the remastering for Xbox 360 ran noticeably smoother than the version for PlayStation 3, although both were a huge improvement over the same game running on original hardware.
The advantage is especially evident in the playable parts, although the fluidity of MGS3 depended a lot on the version you were playing. The standard game with its default perspective offers basically 30FPS with some small drops below said objective, accompanied by the flickering of on-screen tearing. The later released Subsistence version, with a free camera option, saw performance drop to between 20FPS and 30FPS with a lot of tearing. When it came to optimizing the code on PS2, the gameplay was much smoother with the fixed perspective.
For its remastering Bluepoint not only faced the extra challenge of the free camera, but even improved it with respect to the implementation on PS2. The truth is that it continues to produce some performance drops on PS3 and Xbox 360, but when playing on Xbox One hardware the frame-rate improves ostensibly, despite not taking advantage of the extra power of the Xbox One X hardware GPU. .
And this brings us directly to the situation surrounding Xbox One X-enhanced Xbox 360 games: why has the stream of releases stopped so abruptly? It’s been six months since Microsoft released the second wave of titles, and we haven’t seen any more since then, even though more backward-compatible titles are released on a regular basis. When a game as important as Metal Gear Solid HD Collection comes to Xbox One, one wonders why there are no improvements on Xbox One X.
In the case of these remastering, we would be facing an Ultra HD presentation with 3840×2160 resolution, with MSAA to produce perfect image quality. And based on the quality of Bluepoint’s 720p remastering – not to mention moving the PS2 originals to native 4K via PCSX2 emulation – we can see that the art holds up and that we could be looking at something truly special. Previous Xbox 360 games enhanced on Xbox One X also showed that increased resolution is often accompanied by improved performance. The idea of playing these classic titles in 4K is more than attractive, but it is still out of reach.
As we head into the fourth quarter, when the biggest games are released and when manufacturers intend to sell more consoles, our hope is that the Xbox 360 enhanced games program on Xbox One X will be reactivated. In any case, the truth is that Xbox One is right now the best way to play the titles of the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, much as a patch to take advantage of the Xbox One X hardware would be the icing on the cake for users with Ultra HD televisions.
