At long last, Konami is ready to come back into the AAA gaming scene. Silent Hill’s revival is well and truly underway with multiple games in the works right now, and if leaks are to be believed, the Japanese company is gearing up to bring some of its other beloved dormant franchises back into the limelight as well. The name that instantly comes to mind is, of course, Metal Gear Solid, and according to reports, a ground-up remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is in development at Virtuos and ready to be announced in the coming months. Whether or not that actually ends up happening remains to be seen, but if it does, we, like everyone else, are going to want to see certain things from the game. To that end, here, we’re going to talk about a few things that we want the MGS3 remake to keep intact from the original, and a few that we’re hoping it’ll change.
KEEP: CAMOUFLAGE MECHANICS
The Metal Gear Solid franchise has always been a standard bearer for the stealth genre, and back in the day, that was very much the case with Metal Gear Solid 3 as well. One of several ways it improved upon its predecessors in this arena was with its new camouflage mechanics, which required players to manually select specific camouflage suits and paints to allow them to blend into varying environments to varying degrees. It was a system that worked as well in execution as it sounded on paper, and it was a big part of that game’s central loop. Obviously, we’re assuming that if the Snake Eater remake is real, it’ll make improvements to emphasize this mechanic even further- but improvements is what we’re hoping for, not replacements. The camouflage mechanic definitely needs to stay in.
KEEP: THE SURVIVAL MECHANICS
Just like its camouflage mechanics, Metal Gear Solid 3’s survival mechanics were a crucial part of the game in more ways than one, and formed an important part of its identity. From a narrative perspective, it made a lot of sense that Naked Snake had to pay extra focus to things such as his injuries and hunger while he was all alone behind enemy lines, while from a gameplay perspective, the execution of those ideas was, in a word, incredible. This is one area where we’d say the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake should make little to no changes and just bring over the survival systems pretty much exactly as they were in the original game. MGS3 struck a great balance in how it implemented them, making them an important part of the experience while also ensuring that they didn’t feel too overbearing, and hopefully, the remake will follow in its footsteps.
KEEP: THE STORY INTACT
This one’s kind of obvious. For all of its excellent boss fights and its incredible stealth gameplay, what makes Metal Gear Solid 3 stand out to this day more than anything else is its stellar story, which sinks its claws into you right off the bat and somehow keeps getting progressively more captivating until the very end. That story needs to be brought over without too many changes. Remakes sometimes have a tendency to make narrative changes where they’re not necessarily needed, and going down that route would be disastrous for a Snake Eater remake. Obviously, there is some room for improvement here as well – for instance, we’d love for the relationship and history between Naked Snake and The Boss to be established much better than it was in the original game – but any narrative changes the MGS3 remake makes (if it’s real) should be additive only.
KEEP: THE ORIGINAL VOICE CAST
Again, this is an obvious one, but given the Metal Gear franchise’s recent history, it’s one that bears mentioning nonetheless. Metal Gear Solid 5 ruffled more than a few feathers when it replaced David Hayter with Kiefer Sutherland as the voice of Big Boss, and since then, the vast majority of series fans have agreed that should the franchise ever come back, Hayter should come back with it. His performance as Naked Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3 is one for the ages, and we’d hate for him to not get the chance to potentially even improve upon it in a remake. We feel the best course of action for the remake would be to bring back the original game’s voice cast, especially when it comes to the like of the aforementioned David Hayter, not to mention Lori Alan, who did an incredible job with her portrayal of The Boss.
KEEP: THE CODEC CALLS
Again, an obvious one, and one that would apply to pretty much any new Metal Gear game, remake or not. Metal Gear’s codec calls have always been an integral part of the franchise, and so it was in MGS3 as well. Naked Snake’s long, meandering conversations with his support crew that often veered into topics that felt unrelated to the story were not only incredible flavour text, they also had a very unique charm to them that added immensely to the game’s identity. Codec calls might not have too much of an impact on how the game actually plays for the most part, but it’s fair to say that Snake Eater would be a very different game without them. As such, the remake needs to make sure that it brings those over as faithfully as it can.
CHANGE: THE LEVEL DESIGN
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with Metal Gear Solid 3’s level design- not even in the slightest. If the remake ends up following the same structure as the original game, we’d have next to no issues with that. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room for improvement- especially in the modern context. Metal Gear Solid 5 was an excellent showcase of how well the series’ stealth mechanics can be translated into an open world format, and we’d love for Metal Gear Solid 3 to do something similar. Even if it doesn’t end up being completely open world, we’d still like to see areas that are much larger and offer a much wider playing space. Of course, at the same time, the incredibly designed indoor environments of MGS3 shouldn’t be done away with either, so a balance between the two is essentially what we’re hoping for.
CHANGE: THE CQC MECHANICS
Close quarters combat, or CQC, has become an integral part of Metal Gear gameplay over the years, but Snake Eater was, of course, the first game to introduce it- and frankly, looking back at it, it didn’t do a particularly good job of it. Even at the time, it’s fair to say that the CQC was one of the clunkiest aspects of Snake Eater’s gameplay. The series has, in the years since then, improved upon the idea in subsequent entries, but we’d say there’s still plenty of room for improvement there. If you’re looking for good melee combat in a stealth-focused game, just look at how The Last of Us Part 1 implemented it- we wouldn’t mind seeing something similar in an MGS3 remake.
CHANGE: VOLGIN BOSS FIGHT
This might be a bit too specific, especially compared to some of the other things we’ve spoken about in this feature, but if you ask Metal Gear Solid fans what they feel is the series’ most frustrating boss fight, chances are the majority of them will tell you that Volgin is right up there. This was a complicated fight, owing to Volgin’s love for shields and electricity, and while that wouldn’t be too much of an issue by itself, the time limit that the fight imposed made things considerably annoying- not to mention the fact that the fight was also a bit too reliant on the game’s clunky CQC mechanics. MGS3 had plenty of solid boss fights, but this is one that we’d hope to see be completely reimagined in a remake.
CHANGE: THE SHOOTING MECHANICS
For its time, Metal Gear Solid 3 had decent shooting mechanics, especially considering the fact that this wasn’t a game that relied too much on shooting (for the most part). When it did, however, it’s fair to say that the game’s mechanics took some getting used to. While Snake Eater is still one of the best playing games around when it comes to stealth, when it comes to things like aiming and shooting, it never quite feels as precise or responsive as it should. Presumably (or hopefully, at least), this is an area where the MGS3 remake will look to make considerable improvements.
CHANGE: THE CAMERA
Again, this one is a bit obvious, and if an MGS3 remake is indeed being made, one would imagine this change is pretty much locked in anyway. The original game adopted a third person perspective, which was definitely an improvement over the isometric camera angles of its predecessors, but even so, it would feel a little out of place in a modern game, especially when that game is as cinematic and story-driven as MGS3 is. Our assumption is that if a remake is being made, it’ll have a camera similar to the one that Metal Gear Solid 5 adopted.
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