Metal Gear Forums - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Master Collection Vol. 2 getting a steelbook release

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:15:05 +0200

Damn it, I wasn't planning on buying this but guess I'll have to now.

MGS4 Countdown: Install Screen

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:13:07 +0200

Nitroid has made a countdown leading up to MGS4's rerelease as part of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 in the style of Guns of the Patriots' install screen after some fears that the iconic screen won't feature in the collection due to improvements of modern hardware making it superfluous.

Click here to check it out.

A fun little site imo, we need more stuff like this.

What are you looking forward to revisiting in Vol. 2?

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:42:16 +0100

As the title says. I know a lot of us haven't played MGS4 in a long time so which part of the game are you most eager to experience again on current gen tech?

I'm personally most excited for Act 2. Laughing Octopus has always been my favourite boss in the game and the South America section leading up to her isn't as fresh in my mind as the locations in the other Acts so it will feel more like a fresh experience compared to those.

I'm also eager to play around with the gun customisation. I remember it being such an exciting part of the game when I was younger and felt super "next-gen" lmao.

Returning to MGS4 in 2025: A Retrospective

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:47:40 +0200

I'm afraid it's been... SEVENTEEN YEARS??? I wasn't even 17 when I joined MGSF just before this released.

I had been going through the series again last year before the announcement for the Master Collection was made, but in typical fashion I have taken a strange and long route in doing so. This is actually the first time I've done a full replay of the series since it seemed like the end for Metal Gear Solid. I had never played Metal Gear or Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake up until this point, so I said I'd finally rectify that, then I moved onto MGS1-3.

But I thought, "how can I possibly do this in the most difficult manner possible?". So I decided to play them all on the PS Vita (ever hear of it? Of course you have. Vita means life but this lovely little system was left to die like Otacon at Shadow Moses). Remind me never to do that again. Fighting the RAY army in MGS2 on Hard on a Vita is something that human hands were never designed to do.

I get to MGS4 and dig out THE CELL my PS3. When I started writing this I was only up to Act 3 but I decided to write my thoughts down for myself while they were fresh in my head, and then it ballooned into a giant essay. So I'm going to post it act by act as I try to write even more to ensure nobody will ever read it tidy it up. Much like each of these posts, there will be no discernable rhythm to my updates.

Besides, everyone knows Acts 1 and 2 are the only good ones, right? Well, maybe. If this replay has taught me anything, it is that my memory of the game is not as strong as I thought.

First up, the beginning. It's quite saddening to see David Hayter doing his little "interview" on one of the channels during the intro given what occurred and the truth coming out about Kojima trying desperately to get rid of him since MGS3. Sure, he could have felt like he didn't owe him anything and he was just a voice actor doing a job, and it seems like Hayter felt the same to an extent. But this man was Solid Snake and Big Boss, and had been for years and clearly loved doing it.

Anyway, Snake is cool as FUCK smoking in the loading screen, it was all because of this that I decided to take up casual smoking on nights out, thanks Kojima. Remember when we had to endure a 10+ minute install for every single chapter change? Luckily an option to install all chapters at once to the HDD was patched in but it was a while after release. We've come a long way.

Act 1 - "Brother! It's been too long!"

I always felt like this act in the Middle-East was the very best of MGS4 in terms of gameplay. You have a mixture of outdoor environments and buildings (or the remnants of damaged buildings) to utilise, and when you catch up with the Mk II, you can influence the battle between the PMC and the militia, or just use it as cover basically. But... quite honestly I found it pretty boring this time around. I tried pissing both sides off and it never really felt like it worked like it should have, and of course you can't side with the PMC soldiers, so it's really help out the militia or just let them falter. Probably doesn't help that bang in the middle of this section is that horrific hotel encounter with the FROGS, which is dreadful on Big Boss Hard or The Boss Extreme. The amount of times you make progress towards the exit only to find the screen flashing to the continue screen because of Johnny's sorry ass getting blasted to pieces is painful.

I feel like the best section is towards the end when you get to Liquid Ocelot's camp as the openness makes every move far more risky, but unfortunately it's just a really short section. It feels almost like a very intimate (and more populated) Groznyj Grad, but only a tiny portion of it.

A word here on the cutscenes: how long does a human need to hear Drebin and Snake talk about weaponry and ID tags? If I first played this as someone that had a life or a job I'd say I would have packed it in at that point. I mean we haven't even gotten to the stupid monkey yet. A game having 9 hours of cutscenes is never forgotten once you've experienced it all multiple times, but I really did not remember how long so many of them felt. Even on playthroughs where you're skipping every cutscene, there are still multiple sections during gameplay which force you to watch vehicles or soldiers moving. Going directly from MGS2 and 3 to this feels unbelievably jarring as it can feel quite hard to have any continual flow with gameplay segments being constantly interrupted.

The Case Study of Metal Gear Solid 4

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:48:28 +0200

Autodesk has created an in-depth article discussing the production of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots.
It generally looks like a making of but focused only on the visual references of Snake's final mission.

Autodesk is the company that created SoftImage and XSI, the programs used in MGS4 (and in several other hi-end games) for the following functionalities:

Character and mechanical design
Character production
Character bone structure
Specific character animation (battle stance, punch position, roll, crouch, etc.) (not motion acting animation)
Facial Animation (including: Expressions, phonemes, eye and eyebrow animation, wrinkles)
Lip synchronization
Facial Rig Construction
Texturing
Background Modeling
Lighting Direction
Limited Special Effects (motion blur, field depth effect, etc.) (not explosions)
+ more unknown...

The article contains some complex references to animation and product design as well as use, techniques and creativity on 3D design programs. Some additional knowledge may be needed in order to fully comprehend what the article states at some points.

June 12, 2008 saw the simultaneous worldwide release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4) for the PlayStation 3. Gamers all over the world were waiting eagerly for this ultimate stealth mission game. No doubt they have already been captivated by its powerful gameplay.

MGS4 was a huge project that took Hideo Kojima, the virtuoso director, about three and a half years to complete. The Metal Gear series has been around for 21 years, with many people regarding it as a masterpiece in terms of its scenarios, gameplay and realism. Making a particular impact is its world-class graphics that go beyond the boundaries of a conventional game. These graphics give the action such realism and immediacy that players feel like they have been transported to a real battlefield.

Click images to enlarge

The Metal Gear Solid series was created by Kojima Productions, a development unit at Konami Digital Entertainment. Kojima Productions has also given us popular series such as Zone of the Enders and Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand. The team has three directors: Hideo Kojima, Yoji Shinkawa and Shuyo Murata. There is a program manager, design manager, script manager and sound manager, as well as many other artists and programmers.

In the development of MGS4, about 100 staff members were involved in the 3D content production. Extra personnel were added during busy periods, and by the final phase of development over 180 people were working on the project. By the end there were as many 40 programmers working on MGS4, including the work required for online compatibility. From the fact that such a large number of people were involved and it took three and a half years to finish, we can see that MGS4 truly was a mega-project.

The main tool used in this game with its world-class video graphics was SOFTIMAGE|XSI. We interviewed the Kojima Productions team after they had finished development and as the release date for MGS4 was approaching. In this interview, we were lucky to be able to speak with staff from all the major development units, including characters, background, machines, 2D, event demos, motions and programming. We learned a lot of interesting information, so this article has been split into two parts.

Chapter List:
C01. From a Single Storyboard...
C02. Art Direction in Metal Gear Solid
C03. Character Production Workflow
C04. Gator: An Essential Function
C05. Amazing Facial Animation
C06. High-Quality Normal Maps Generated with Ultimapper
C07. XSI's Cluster Constraint Function: Turning Ideas into Reality
C08. XSI Animation
C09. Modeling Size
C10. Texture Setting for General Machines
C11. Modeling Using Calibration
C12. Background Modeling Process
C13. Role of Programmers
C14. Finally

C01. From a Single Storyboard...
MGS4 video was first previewed to the public in a trailer shown at the 2005 Tokyo Game Show. The main character, Snake, was shown looking around a wall in a ruined building. From this single storyboard, the whole project started. After four months, the team finished a spectacular trailer that was over 10 minutes long and made a huge impression around the world.

This high quality video that made such a strong impact fully utilized the real-time processing power of the PS3. To transfer this to the actual game without losing quality, it took a lot of effort for the team to import the data and create a proper balance. In the initial stages of the project, they were still getting used to the performance of the PS3, and there were no precedents to any of the work that they were doing. The data size required for the content was much bigger than anything that had come before.

C02. Art Direction in Metal Gear Solid
Like the previous titles in the series, Yoji Shinkawa was in charge of art direction for all the character and machine designs in MGS4. In this game, the most important consideration was whether the design would pull the player into the game. It didn't matter whether it was expressed through an exaggerated effect or through a conventional illustration.

Mr. Shinkawa starts his design process by using a brush to make a drawing. The resulting design is a black and white image drawn in Mr. Shinkawa's distinctive brush style. Then, one of a number of different methods is selected to embody the black and white image. The original picture may be touched up, it may be transferred to a 3D figure, or if the design is complicated, it may be modeled out of clay.

In this way, the team developed a more concrete design from the original image, which they then used as a reference when modeling with XSI. For machines modeled from clay and some of the characters, they used 3D data obtained from calibration (image-based modeling). The team imported the data into XSI for editing.

It is also possible to use 3D scanning to create 3D data. But because the scanned data requires a lot of modeling correction work, the team decided not to use this 3D scanning method. They said that using the calibration method results in less correction work and that it was relatively easy to import accurate image data into XSI. The calibration workflow is described in more detail using images in the second half of this article.

In the design process, Mr. Shinkawa also selected all the color designs. He said that even when he was drawing the original pictures in black ink, he could see in his head the types of colors that he would use for the characters. He made his final selection after all the characters were ready, choosing colors that would achieve a good overall balance. He reproduced textures such as material colors, metallic expressions and complex patterns using the real-time shader. The textures that Mr. Shinkawa wanted were created one after another by programmers using the real-time shader. Sometimes he would show a prototype that he created in advance with a mental ray shader to share his ideas on texture with the programmers.

Yoji Shinkawa's design workflow for creating a 3D image from an original drawing.

Many characters from previous titles in the series reappear in MGS4, which makes the fans very happy. But there were some characters that were being depicted in 3D for the first time, such as Naomi, who appeared in MGS1. The team worked hard to create attractive 3D characters that would not disappoint the hardcore fans of the series.

Mr. Shinkawa said, "When we first started to develop the Metal Gear Solid series, we just wanted to make a war game that we ourselves would really want to play. The fact that the series grew into one that is played by so many people is thanks to our loyal users. We are confident that MGS4 will live up to the expectations of these fans. But we are never satisfied with the way things are. We always want to work harder to push our creative abilities to the limit and create even better games in the future."