Oct 6

Oct 6 Metal Gear Delta Will Live Or Die By Its Crouch Button

While stealth sequences have become a ubiquitous part of modern gaming, modern action stealth games often prefer to cast you as explosive instruments, rather than precision ones. Batman, Corvo, and BJ Blascowitz are characters thrown into unfamiliar spaces that are expected to use stealth as a tool to survive, but that survival is predicated on a brutal cat-and-mouse chase: you’ll often know exactly where the enemy is and need to use stealth to do as much damage to them as you possibly can before they see you, and do even more.

The original Metal Gear Solid 3: nake Eater, however, prefers to cast your role as a scalpel. The pace of the game is slow, deliberate, and, most importantly, surgical. Many of the game systems are built to make you stop and think, rather than make your interactions more seamless: there’s a stamina meter that forces you to hunt and eat your own food, every wound you take must be treated and dressed in a menu afterwards, and while Snake has access to camouflage, enemy soldiers are also wearing fatigues that blend into the environment just as well as yours. Because of this, intel becomes your most valuable weapon. You have to slowly learn about the environment and its challenges before you can take action, whether that’s through your codec, your line of sight, or through interrogating enemies. For me, preserving this pace is vital to any remake of the game, and the most crucial element of this pace can be found in the game's controls, which force you to be deliberate in every action you take.

Ahhhh, Mother Nature, she would never hurt us. HOLY SHIT IS THAT A SNAKE?

Snake in MGS3 essentially has three options for movement: tilting the control stick pushes Snake into a noisy, and highly visible, run. Pressing the D-Pad while Snake is standing makes him do a quiet, but agonizingly slow walk, which you can use to sneak up silently behind and interrogate enemies. Holding down the bottom face button puts Snake into a crawl, which allows you to blend into tall grass and move in first person. Crucially, while you can crouch, you CANNOT crouch walk, and crouching instead is a tool to get a slightly more comprehensive view of an area while sacrificing your own visibility.

Not having a form of crouch walking robs you of a tool that has become mandatory in nearly every modern stealth game, and a reflexive action we try to take as players when sneaking up on babbies. Whilst many games allow you to lay prone and fully stand, in those games, crouch walking often represents a ‘Goldilocks zone’. It allows you to move at roughly the same speed as walking, while also being almost as visible and quiet as lying prone. Because of this, play in a game like Dishonored or The Last of Us often drifts to using crouch walking as a ‘default’ method of travel when enemies are around because it’s simply the most optimal for stealth. The genius of MGS3’s system is that it forces you to make a choice between non-ideal options that come with massive vulnerabilities. A player trying to remain stealthy begins to see every enemy soldier as a HUGE hurdle to navigate or move around, especially if you’re attempting to do something more complex like interrogate/capture them.

When you’re crawling/slow walking towards an enemy, you actually move around as slowly as they do, which turns each approach into a nail-bitingly tense moment. You’ll only catch up with enemy soldiers if they’ve stopped moving completely and therefore could be getting ready to turn around. This, paired with a lack of a radar or a detective vision equivalent, means that rather than a player having a straightforward goal of crouch-walking up to an enemy, they’re forced to adopt a procedural approach of checking the codec for advice on the area, observing any enemies within it, watching their movement patterns, and thinking of a specific strategy to ambush them. This, in turn, is exactly the approach Naked Snake is meant to be taking in the game's narrative, with every codec call not only giving you information on the game's environment and systems but also letting both you and Snake connect to the game's characters. As Snake's friendship with the radio team grows, so does yours, partly because talking to them feels like a strategic necessity, rather than bonus content.

Naked Snake is dropped into the Russian jungle to be a ghost, relying purely on his wits and radio and precise control of his body, rather than technology. The consideration he must act with mirrors exactly the way in which more sluggish controls force you to play. Your mastery of the control scheme climaxes fantastically in the boss fight with The End, who, as a Sniper, is fully capable of punishing you for every and any misstep in your movement. There’s an incredible tension to the fact that, when you suspect you’re in his sights, you have to either crawl in first person or risk making a break for it and running. There’s no easy option to defuse the tension, you have to take a risk.

What I worry about most with Metal Gear Delta is that, with the desire to modernize, these little intricacies will be lost in translation. So much of what gives MGS3 its uniquely deliberate pace are things that have been sanded down and ‘streamlined’ in later Metal Gear games. The codec/radio became less and less of a presence, camouflage became simplified, the games became open world rather than cordoned off into static sections, and movement became easier and sleeker. I also love the later Metal Gear Solid games, but I don’t want MGS3 to be the later Metal Gear Solid games. I want it to feel analogue, to feel like a struggle, to feel deliberate. I want people playing the game for the first time to see what makes it unique among stealth games, rather than MGSV wearing an MGS3 skin.

The reason the crouch button particularly feels like a canary in the coal mine for unwanted changes is that they already added crouch walking into the 3DS version of MGS3, and while it’s an understandable change to make for a handheld experience to make the game more relaxed and forgiving, having such an ‘ideal’ movement option is one of those things that gets under your skin and hurts the vibe of a game. I don’t think an MGS3 remake necessarily can’t change anything, but so much of its personality is tied up in ‘dated’ systems, and any change to those systems, particularly letting Snake waddle around in a crouch walk, could completely ruin the feel of one of the greatest games ever.