Metal Gear Solid series veterans – Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater director Yuji Korekado, and series producer Noriaki Okamura – felt pressure to create the third entry's remake for new fans while its original staff gets older.
In an interview with Real Sound translated by GamesRadar+, Korekado discusses the difficulties of creating a game for "modern players" while also pleasing long-time fans and staying true to series creator's Hideo Kojima's vision, given that he no longer works at Konami.
"Because the series has been around for a long time, we have a wide variety of fans," Korekado says. "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 [for today's gamers], so we adapted them."
If you've played Delta you'll know that one of the biggest updates is an over-the-shoulder camera option alongside the original fixed camera angles. The decision to allow players the choice between the original and new features was very intentional. "It's extremely difficult to balance honoring the original work with trying new things, so I'm always worrying about what we produce," he adds.
Konami has remained quiet about the circumstances surrounding Kojima's departure from the company almost a decade ago. It's even unclear which developers left with the legendary director, though you'll see more than a few familiar names in the credits for Kojima Productions' Death Stranding series, such as the art director on many Metal Gear games, Yoji Shinkawa.
"With losing the original staff, it was challenging figuring out how to continue the series," Okamura says. "We would start and stop talking about developing something new all the time. However, given our age, and how the number of developers with knowledge of the Metal Gear series was decreasing, we decided that if we didn't resurrect the series now, it would become difficult to do so. Because it's such an incredible series, I decided that now was the time."
Delta was a collaboration between series veterans and new developers, with the hopes that the young blood could capture the games' essence, and bring that into new entries. However, I'm not overly heartened, given that, when Korekado is asked what surprised him about the new staff, he says, "I was surprised that they told me, 'I don't know how to do close quarters combat.' In the original, The Boss teaches you how to use it over the transceiver, but modern players don't always listen to the transceiver messages all the way through" – even if he chuckles while saying it.
