Konami has revealed the resolutions and framerates for Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Volume 1 for each platform.
Actually, the only outlier is the Nintendo Switch, but I’m sure you had already guessed on that. As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Konami revealed that:
- Nintendo Switch at handheld mode will output at 720p, 30 FPS.
- Nintendo Switch at docked mode will output at 1080p, 30 FPS.
- All other platforms will output at 1080p, 60 FPS.
To put that in perspective, the Bluepoint games, HD Edition ports of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater that originally released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ran at 720p, 60 FPS.
So, the Nintendo Switch’s aging Tegra X1 doesn’t quite have it in itself to run at 720p 60FPS undocked, but that’s still a technical achievement. To put this in perspective, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt also runs at 720p, 30 FPS, but you won’t hear too many gamers complain that the game is compromised in terms of performance. Similarly, many gamers stand by the impossible port of Doom Eternal to the Nintendo Switch.
The bigger story here really is how barebones this collection has turned out to be for other platforms, that can certainly use a magician’s bag of tricks to upresolution these games well above what was possible on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Much like Red Dead Redemption on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, these are barebones ports, with performance raised up just a little bit from their original form.
What will disappoint gamers on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, is that higher performance, higher quality versions of these games are possible. And it’s likely that modders will at least do their magic on the Steam version of this anthology to do just that. But Konami’s choice not to do that much more for these ports makes it harder to accept this anthology.
But then maybe that attitude isn’t entirely the right one to take. Not working on 4K graphics means these games are better preserved, if not in their completely original form, closer to that form than they would be otherwise.
If some gamers feel that these are lazy ports, so be it. Not every rerelease has to be Metroid Prime Remastered. For the sake of game preservation, when it would be financially feasible, these ‘lazy ports’ will do the job of keeping games playable and relevant between console generations.
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Volume 1 will be released on October 24, 2023, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows on Steam.