Despite it’s updated looks, Metal Gear Solid Delta isn’t as big of a remake as it seems at first glance. All of the areas are still divided by loading screens, all the dialogue audio is the same, and for the most part, all the cutscenes are a one-to-one recreation of the original. However, there are more than a few quality of life changes and more hidden updates to the game you might not realize at first. Below you’ll find the biggest changes and differences compared to previous versions of Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater.
Snake Eater offered a wealth of options in how you approached certain encounters, but that came at the price of grafting systems onto a control scheme that started with the first Metal Gear Solid. Delta has been massively changed in this regard, with controls hewing much closer to modern sensibilities when you choose the New Style option.
Examples include aiming and firing over the shoulder with the triggers, moving weapons and equipment to the D-pad, crouching to the circle button and climbing to the X button. Instead of rolling by hitting the crouch button while running, it’s been completely moved to Triangle. But you can still hold Triangle to immediately go prone out of a roll.
CQC has also been moved to the right trigger, but past that the concepts are pretty much the same, except there’s no more pressure-sensitive buttons like with the original release. For instance, instead of holding down Circle super hard to slit someone’s throat, you can just press X while they’re in a hold.
You can opt to use a hybrid version of the Legacy Controls if you’d like, but that will switch you to the Legacy Camera as well, which we’ll discuss later. Aim and fire controls will still be on the trigger, and you can move back and forth while prone while aiming, but you can’t move while in first person, just slightly shift left and right.
Weapons will behave differently in Legacy Style as well. As an example, the Mk22 Tranquilizer in the original Snake Eater has very little bullet drop, allowing you to snipe headshots from far away. It behaves the same way in Legacy Style in Delta, while there is heavy and noticeable bullet drop in the New Style, presumably since the updated controls and third-person aiming would make it far too easy otherwise.
While the updated 3DS version included crouch walking, the original Snake Eater and even the updated Subsistence only allowed you to sneakily walk upright. Moving while crouched meant you went prone and started crawling. In Delta, you can now press Circle to crouch and move while hunched over instead of going prone, and to fully lay down, you need to hold Crouch. Stalking has also been moved to holding L1 while moving instead of using the D-pad, since the D-pad is now used for switching weapons and equipment.
You can also now move in first-person, albeit slowly, and movement while aiming while you’re prone has been updated. Even though your gun will drop while crawling in first-person, you can keep aiming in one direction while moving in any direction, making lateral movement and backwards crawling while aiming possible. It’s all much more intuitive, rather than having to spin like a top.
To round out the rest of the movement changes, you no longer have to keep holding the left stick into a piece of cover to flatten yourself to it. Snake will now “stick” to any cover you press up against, even if you let go of the stick.
While most of Delta is built on the bones of Snake Eater, there are some new animations, particularly with the CQC takedowns. While the slam in Snake Eater used to be just one animation over and over, you now get unique ones depending on how and from what direction you approach an enemy. There are even unique ones if they pull a knife on you.
While you can still open up the Survival Viewer to swap out your camo, you can now do so in a pop-up menu without needing to pause by holding up on the D-pad, selecting with the right stick, and pressing X. There’s a small transition while Snake swaps into his new duds, but this is a much more intuitive way to swap into what you need without breaking up the experience.
It only keeps your most recent combinations in this menu, so if you need a novel Face camo with a particular uniform rather than the usual suspects, you’ll still need to enter the Survival Viewer.
The 1960s may be too early for a fancy codec, but Naked Snake still has a radio. Just as in the original Snake Eater, the radio will open the full screen dialogue box, but you can now also pop it up while still in gameplay, making for a bit more streamlined experience. Another great quality of life update is that you can skip individual voice lines, and even fast forward to different parts of the conversation without the audio cutting out entirely. In the original, skipping anything would mean no more VO for the rest of the call.
Also, if you interrogate enemies to learn secret frequencies to open doors, they’ll show up in the radio dial here, so you can easily use them.
Delta also adds a photo mode to the Snake Eater Experience. You can enter photo mode through the pause menu, and change things like depth of field, frames, filters, and even toggle the characters on and off. Your options will be limited while in a cutscene, though.
Just like the original, there’s one kerotan frog in all 64 areas of the map that you can shoot to unlock special camo. Delta has added a camouflaged rubber duck to every area as well, which unlocks a different kind of camo.
You can check your progress for both of these in the pause menu as well as whether or not you’ve found the one for that particular area.
Delta’s map is as barebones as the original’s but now you’re given a compass in your equipment menu that even highlights the direction you should be going, making it into a quasi-minimap.
This doesn’t use a battery, so keep it equipped at all times if you’d like to keep your bearings more easily.
Not only will you get on-screen pop-up tips for actions you’re performing in the field, you’ll occasionally get reminders of where you need to be going, what you need to be doing, and even contextual button prompts like climb, pick up enemy, or the full laundry list of CQC actions you can perform while holding an enemy.
You even get enemy indicators that let you know which direction an enemy saw you from. Some might say it clutters the screen a bit in what used to be a relatively minimalist UI, but there’s no doubt it’s helpful. You can also turn most of these off piece by piece in the options menu.
Also, a quick hint– since you need to be within CQC range to hold someone up from behind, wait until you see the CQC on-screen prompt to aim your gun. That’s a surefire way to know you’re in the right range.
In later releases of the original game, like Subsistence, a controllable 3D camera was added that you could switch back and forth from by clicking in the right stick. In Delta, changing the camera means changing back to the legacy control scheme and reloading the last checkpoint, so you can’t do it on the fly. Thankfully, without spoiling, some setpiece areas later in the game that were clearly intended to have the original camera still do, even when playing in the New Style.
In the updated Subsistence release of the original Snake Eater, there was a mode called Secret Theater on the second disc that let you watch a collection of joke movies and even a trailer for the then-upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4. In Delta, the Demo Theater (which contains all the cutscenes from the game) and the Secret Theater both unlock after clearing the story for the first time. But the Secret Theater videos need to be unlocked one-by-one by obtaining film reels from specific enemies, and a few from Subsistence have been removed.
You can see which enemies have these reels on their person, and the only way to obtain them is to hold the enemy up, circle around to their front, and point the gun at a sensitive area on their body so they shake them loose.
If you harm them or bump them in any way, even if you knock them out non-lethally, the reel will pop up into the air and break. Once you complete the game and unlock the secret theater, the list of films will tell you where every reel is, so don’t worry about needing to get them on your first playthrough.
No matter which version of Snake Eater you played in the past, it was always annoying to reload a save, often requiring you to exit all the way to the main menu. Now if you accidentally kill someone in a non-lethal run or you just get spotted, you can load the most recent autosave very quickly, which will put you at the start of the area you last entered.
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