Metal Gear Solid Delta Devs “Only Planned to Update the Graphics” But Made Bigger Changes

In an interview released Thursday, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater developers revealed that their initial plans were just graphical updates but made bigger changes instead.

It has been 20 years since Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater launched for the PlayStation 2, and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater coming out this year aims to give the classic title a new look for modern consoles. The developers behind the scenes initially planned on only updating the two-decades-old graphics. However, a new interview by Famitsu (translated by Google) was released today, and creative producers Yuji Korekado and Noriaki Okamura said the dev team went in a different direction.

During the interview, Okamura started by saying he answered a call to produce the series again, and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater was started as a project to get new fans into the series as part of the onboarding process to the franchise. He says this was a challenge due to the fact the team “had to create something that people who are familiar with recent games would readily accept”.

Korekado then says the plan was to upgrade only Delta ‘s graphics, saying, “As long as we made the background and character models beautiful, we would leave the rest as they were. In fact, at first, we made a prototype with the animations and other things as they were.” This made the team feel like it wasn’t enough, so they proceeded to update “almost all of the animations and updated them everywhere” to allow Metal Gear Solid Delta the opportunity to take advantage of new-gen hardware.

The biggest change to Delta’s gameplay, according to Korekado, is the new perspectives of the character (likely inspired by Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain ). He says “The main feature is the ability to choose between ‘NEW STYLE,’ which is a third-person perspective, and ‘LEGACY STYLE,’ which uses a top-down bird’s-eye view and has controls closer to those of the original version” with original plans to allow the player to swap between the two seamlessly, but allowing the change made the original title’s difficulty easier due to the wider area of view with the new style as opposed to the classic MGS top-down view.

Korekado says “So we decided to split the play style into two. The ‘Legacy Style’ is close to the difficulty level of the original version, and we are adjusting the ‘New Style’ from scratch” suggesting Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater could give returning fans a new perspective on the classic.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is scheduled to launch at a TBD date in 2024.