Konami Veterans Say They Had To Resurrect Metal Gear Because...

Says MGS4 would be "pretty difficult" to port… but that's not a "no", right?

The departure of Hideo Kojima from Konami saw the publisher react, initially at least, like a spurned lover. There was an ill-advised attempt to remove the creator's name from certain packaging, followed-up by the even more ill-advised spinoff Metal Gear Survive, before things went quiet and, for years and years, Konami did nothing with the company's flagship series.

Time heals all wounds though, and in recent years Konami has been doing a good job of gradually bringing Metal Gear back: first with the Master Collection Volume 1, which brought the first two Metal Gear MSX titles and three Metal Gear Solid games (plus spinoffs) to modern platforms. It didn't launch in the best way, but after a year of patching I'd recommend it wholeheartedly.

Then this year brought Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, a ground-up but faithful remake of the beloved MGS3 that impressed almost everyone. It may not be the glorious future this series deserves, but it showed that Konami could still kick it at the top table, and produce a Metal Gear game that looks and feels like it belongs in 2025.

Konami's staying tight-lipped about what's next, though we do know that The Master Collection Volume 2 is in development. And now Metal Gear veterans Yuji Korekado, director of Delta, and Konami stalwart and series producer Noriaki Okamura have given a new interview to Japanese outlet Real Sound (translated by GamesRadar+) about why Konami decided to bring Metal Gear back now. Well: everyone's getting older, for a start.

"Because the series has been around for a long time, we have a wide variety of fans," says Korekado. "And we are conscious of being respectful to the previous games in the series. With this remake, we thought about how it would be best to bring the game to modern players, while respecting the thoughts and concepts of the original creator.

"However, if you reproduce the original work exactly as it is, some aspects can be difficult to play, so we adapted them… It's extremely difficult to balance honoring the original work with trying new things, so I'm always worrying about what we produce."

Delta executed this tightrope walk by giving players the choice between original styles with stuff like the controls, and a new control system that's more in-line with what contemporary players might expect. I should also point out that the Metal Gear games always had control schemes that split opinion

Source: PC Gamer