Metal Gear Solid 2 gets new MGS3-like third-person mode after 20 years
Metal Gear Solid 2, the stealth game masterpiece from Death Stranding and PT director Hideo Kojima, has a new third-person mode based on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, over 20 years since its original launch.
Created by security researcher and modder Boris Larin, The Substance of Subsistence – or SOS – Project, brings the free-moving, over-the-shoulder third-person camera from the expanded version of MGS3 into Metal Gear Solid 2, offering a whole-new game experience as well as fresh perspectives on Kojima Productions’ iconic environments. You may remember that the original Metal Gear Solid 2 featured a partly mobile, but fixed camera, restricting your view to often distant or bird’s-eye perspective high angles. Larin wants to change that. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, they explain their initial inspirations and what has kept them going through various developmental obstacles.
“I was replaying MGS games over the Christmas and New Year holidays,” they explain, “and while I was playing MGS2, I kept thinking ‘what if this game had the same third-person camera as in MGS3?’ I thought, ‘if MGS2 had the same camera, it would be so amazing.’ After I came up with this idea, I closed the game and started looking at its code.
“I wanted to have a camera that works exactly like in MGS3, but that game was never released for PC, so I also had to reverse engineer the code for the PS2 and PS Vita versions, which is more difficult. Also, on rare occasions, developers release their games with debug symbols that contain function names and other information. This helps a lot in reverse engineering, and I spent time looking for this information in different releases of MGS games. Unfortunately, the debug symbols were never included.
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