Metal Gear Solid Delta’s Modern Camera Made the Game So Easy Konami Bumped Up the Difficulty

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (officially Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater) is a remake of the original Metal Gear Solid 3 that adds a full third-person mode to the game, but being able to run and gun made it so easy Konami manually bumped up the difficulty.

In an interview with Famitsu translated by Automaton, creative producer Yuji Korekado discussed the two gameplay modes available in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Legacy Style and New Style. The former is an exact recreation of the 2004 game, essentially a top-down camera with a fixed perspective, while the latter features modern gameplay in a third-person mode.

Another difference between the two modes is that New Style gives players the ability to move while aiming and shooting. This was technically possible in the original game (and thus will be in Legacy Mode) but hitting a target was practically impossible.

The difficulty of Metal Gear Solid 3 was therefore balanced to work with standing still before shooting enemies, essentially giving them a little bit more time to deal damage. When that time was taken away in the modern third-person New Style, Konami found taking them out made the game too easy.

“New Style provides a wider, linear field of view, and you can shoot your gun while moving Snake, which made the difficulty level lower than we had expected,” Korekado said. “However, if we were to adjust things to match the New Style, that would make the Legacy Style too difficult. That’s why we decided to split the two play styles.”

The different modes will therefore feel like the same difficulty, but that’s only because Konami has adjusted them to be different behind the scenes.

Metal Gear Solid Delta is still set for a 2024 launch despite the end of the year drawing closer and closer, with a release due on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC.

Beyond the New Style and its third-person perspective, the game is otherwise shaping up to be an exact recreation of the original. “Metal Gear Solid Delta seems more like a very shiny HD remaster than the elegant remake it could have been,” IGN said in our preview. “It’s an admittedly beautiful nostalgia trip, but almost faithful to a fault.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.