Dataminers and modders find interesting stuff in old game code all the time, but it’s not often that they find something that could greatly improve the game’s entire experience. Metal Gear Solid 2’s anniversary is a great time to be a fan.
Metal Gear Solid 2 modder Afevis Solmunko announced that he’d found a 3rd-person camera mode no one had noticed was hidden in the game for the 15 years since the release of the MGS2 HD Collection. And he wasn’t even looking for anything. He just stumbled upon it, like a true 25th anniversary miracle.
In case this sounds weird because you remember MGS2 having a third-person camera all along, yeah, but this is a third-person unlocked camera, one that players can freely control around the character. Instead of only working in fixed angles like the camera from the original MGS 2 and MGS 3 releases, it behaves like the camera introduced by Splinter Cell, which inspired the superior MGS 3 re-release, Subsistence, and all the MGS games that came after.
As Solmunko explains, this camera setting doesn’t work in interior areas with tighter corridors, as it would’ve caused the camera to clip through the walls. The fact that it intentionally stops working in those areas specifically, together with development logs recently brought up by fans, gives us proof that this camera was indeed something the developers were tinkering with for the HD release, though it ended up going nowhere, unfortunately.
The good news is Solmunko will tinker with this camera mode further and include it in the MGSHDFix mod, which will allow players to enjoy Metal Gear Solid 2 in its most modernized format yet. As it nears the 25th anniversary of its release, MGS2 has returned to the limelight for a bunch of reasons, one of them being the leak of many of its original assets. Here’s wondering what more we’ll be seeing until Nov. 13.
