This week has been a pretty great one for Metal Gear Solid fans. The Xbox Games Showcase showed off the first gameplay trailer for MGS Delta, which actually looked promising, and Konami has finally given us a bit more information about the remake.
The upcoming game's introduction page details a couple of interesting tidbits, like how Konami rendered the characters and setting with Unreal Engine 5, and that players can now opt for a "more modern control style," which will hopefully make getting around more intuitive. However, one new feature has grabbed the attention of players: any injuries inflicted on Snake will leave scars behind.
"The battle damage system has been upgraded, with the wear and tear of Snake's clothes, as well as bruises and bullet wounds on his body, reflected in real-time," the introduction says. "Any injuries to his actual body will leave their mark permanently, telling a story of each player's unique journey through the game." While this sounds like a pretty minor detail, some players have pointed out that Snake could end up completely unrecognisable if you're not very good at the game.
Most of the replies to one player's tweet about the new feature are pictures of various characters in states of medical recovery. There's Gutz from Bezerk, the Batman villain Two-Face, and that one bandaged fish from SpongeBob who has bones made of glass and paper skin. It'll honestly be quite revealing to see how badly your Snake gets beaten up throughout the game, and it may even give rise to a no-injury speedrun variant where players will have to restart if Snake gets a visible scratch. But for others, scratches aren't a top priority. Instead, the fragility of Snake's clothes comes first: "First thing I'm doing is absolutely demolishing his shirt," one player replies.
This new feature probably won't be too punishing, as I doubt you'd be able to call off sick and wait for an ankle sprain to heal, but it's still a fun quirk to have and very in keeping with previous MGS games. In the original MGS 3, you could win a fight against the sniper, The End, by waiting a week outside of the game until he died of old age, so permanent injuries are far from the strangest addition Konami has made in this series.
