Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Is Replacing Metal Gear Online With A New Multiplayer Mode, Called Fox Hunt

Konami has announced their latest big change to Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and this time, they already prepared a response for how fans will react.

As reported by IGN, Konami UK has shared a new trailer revealing Fox Hunt, the new online mode coming with the game. Konami shared this description for Fox Hunt, addressing the immediate question out the gate:

When we say Metal Gear multiplayer, many fans will probably think of Metal Gear Online, but Fox Hunt will be its own new type of mode.

We very much appreciate all the long-time fans of MGO who have always wanted to see it make a comeback, but the landscape of multiplayer games has changed a lot since MGO. It took a lot of careful consideration to think about what a new online mode should look like.

Based on the iconic stealth and survival elements of the Metal Gear series, we are taking camouflage and hide and go seek to the next level. We challenged ourselves to make something unique that is more than just a shootout.

We’ve used that back and forth tension of staying hidden or searching out the enemy to create an online experience unique to Metal Gear.

What’s interesting here is to also watch Konami’s trailer, because it does immediately demonstrate Fox Hunt’s premise and why it makes sense to change Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater’s multiplayer. We see characters in-game deploying unusual disguises of many kinds.

For example, we see what appears to be a soldier on all fours wearing a small backpack. Suddenly, the backpack mass shifts and deploys a grass disguise that covers the entire soldier. We see the same grass disguise deployed by a soldier in a prone ADS stance, and one standing up while leaning on a wall.

Would this disguise work on real human players? A popular conceit in the Metal Gear franchise as a whole is the game operates in a particular logic that may not always work in real life, as real people and real soldiers will think in unexpected, unpredictable ways. This conceit was necessary to enable gameplay, but perhaps in 2025 Konami needed to rethink the whole idea for the sake of online multiplayer.

Konami was definitely not thinking about this from the point of view of preserving Kojima’s original ideas of how online multiplayer could work, Reiko character DLC and all. They were looking at Fortnite, Escape from Tarkov, Valheim, etc., and thinking about how their online could thrive in the face of those games.

We don’t know if Fox Hunt will fly or flop, but what it sounds like is Konami genuinely wants to win fans over to how Metal Gear plays. Everyone will definitely be looking forward to learning more about Fox Hunt soon.

You can watch the Fox Hunt Extended Look trailer below.