Released in late 2023, Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Volume 1 was a promising but ultimately frustrating, buggy, and visually lacklustre effort from Konami. However, the good news is that improvements have been made, with version 2.0 taking aim at several key issues on console and PC. It’s a relief to see, because it’s a project worth salvaging – being an all-in-one package containing seven core games in the series, with some beautifully presented extras. Today, I’m focusing on the Metal Gear Solid trilogy – the more demanding full 3D entries that first released on PlayStation 1 and 2 – since that’s really where the bulk of the problems arose in this collection. So just what has changed, and is the Master Collection now the definitive way to play?
Let’s jump straight to the most pressing issue: Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3’s image quality. The Master Collection uses the same codebase as the HD Collection, as released by Bluepoint for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2011. While an excellent port for its time, the gripe is that the Master Collection continued to run these games at the same native 720p resolution, even on PS5, Series X and S. The result was rough scaled to 4K displays, with heavy aliasing on show. Worse still, the PC version also ran at 720p with no graphics menu to tweak either of these games’ visual settings.
Update 2.0 addresses this issue to a certain extent. MGS2 and 3 each now offer settings in their front end launchers, letting us push the internal resolution up to 1080p. This is followed by a separate upscaling option, where AMD’s FSR is understood to be at work scaling that base image to a 1080p, 1440p or 4K target. And finally, there’s a movie setting for both MGS2 and 3, letting us access a ‘High Resolution’ mode. This mode affects every pre-rendered cutscene in both games, where AI upscaling is applied to the original encode for a crisper, cleaner result.
With all three settings boosted – the native 1080p rendering, 4K upscaling and high resolution movies – Konami calls this the ‘adjusted’ mode, while all the original settings are still here if you wish to use them. All told, it’s a messy solution, but the adjusted mode does have a positive impact. On PS5 and Series X, the new adjusted preset minimises stair-stepping – the pixel crawl – across any hard geometric lines. Visual noise is far from eradicated, though: you’ll still easily catch aliasing on bright, overhanging lamps or door outlines – but at least the jump from 720p to 1080p creates a finer gradient to those steps. Just as importantly, patch 2.0’s superior 4K upscale results in greater clarity across a scene. The distant signs and the metal railings of MGS2’s oil rig are more cleanly defined, and likewise, it resolves Metal Gear Solid 3’s dense forest areas with a sharper image. Again, visual noise is still evident, especially using the free camera to look directly ahead in MGS3, but it is an improvement overall.