The Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 was a cool idea that didn’t live up to its promise when it arrived in August 2023. Missing features, adding frustrating bugs, and lacking upgrades across certain platforms made it feel like a lackluster port of all-time classics. Konami is trying to make good on that commitment a year later, however, with a 2.0 update that improves a lot, at least on PC.
The patch will be out on PC first, arriving alongside a trading card and badge for the Metal Gear collection on Steam. The release for other platforms will follow at a later date. A big addition for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty on PC is the ability to finally customize the resolution in the settings menu. There are also new optional upscaling techniques that should improve the sharpness of the game at various points. The in-game movies can also be swapped to a clearer image or keep the original look.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is getting similar new settings options, including adjustable controller schemes and alternate keyboard layouts. The further upscaling techniques that can be applied seem to make a decent different, letting players take for advantage of their hardware to boost the visual crispness. The proof will be in the results players actually get once the updated version of the collection is installed. Hopefully it hasn’t broken anything else in the process.
“We’re also worried about how Vol. 1 had a pretty rough launch,” Konami’s Noriaki Okamura recently said in a Metal Gear Production Hotline livestream. “We’re going to do everything we can to not repeat that [with Volume 2].”
Konami is also working on a Master Collection Vol. 2. Even though we don’t know what’s in it yet, it would likely include Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the second-to-last Metal Gear game that director Hideo Kojima worked on, which has been trapped on the PlayStation 3 with no backwards compatibility options for nearly two decades. The Japanese publisher also has a remake of Snake Eater called Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta that looks pretty and very faithful to the original, but still doesn’t have a release date.
Either way, it’s nice to see that in addition to honoring the legacy of its back catalog, Konami is also willing to go back and fix its mistakes after launch. After all, Master Collection Vol. 1 will likely be the main way people have to access these games for many years to come.
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