mgs3 and photorealisming the painterly game

The recent Metal Gear Solid 3 remake uses a lot of Quixel Megascans (a mostly-free library of ultra-high-fidelity photogrammetry), which I don’t think matters at all in itself, but it’s funny that the bit of wood Snake bites down on when he splints his elbow is 100% identical to a plank you roll over all the time in InFlux Redux, and it’s interesting how a game full of such bespoke assets gets a remake that isn’t.

In a photorealistic-ish style, maybe it doesn’t really matter anymore whose “photos” (or scans) you use for commonplace objects. But it doesn’t feel great that everything onscreen was once a bespoke work of art in itself, and now mostly is not, in what is notionally a faithful remake.

You might look at a tree in the original and be like, that’s a great tree. Somewhere there’s someone who worked thoughtfully on that tree, and it’s good that you appreciate their work. But in the remake, that’s just a tree, more-or-less a real tree that exists somewhere. Someone scanned it some years back. Bit different.

I used Quixel Megascans myself, on a remake of my own game, to replace old assets, some of which (the ones made by me) weren’t great when they were new. But my game was trying to be photoreal – it was just 2012, and that meant “photos wrapped around basic shapes”. It’s “faithful” to replace my shit planks with good planks.

MGS3 the original is not photoreal, it’s painterly. I’d say this also about Half-Life 1, or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It would be weird to recreate these in a photorealistic style, weirder than it would be for Max Payne, which had one, but in 2001. But a realistic style is always what is reached for on these remakes.

This connects to something I’ve talked about before: the way the costs associated with the visual end of game development have shifted around in counterintuitive ways. It used to be that photorealistic graphics were the most expensive goal you could strive for. They aren’t anymore – we have very efficient ways to do this now. And the more real the assets look, the more they’re interchangable – the exact same kinda-rotten fallen-over tree trunk is in InFlux Redux, MGS Delta, COD Warzone, and dozens of others. Which is fine in itself, as a labour-saving device, but you have to be careful about which labour you’re saving.

What is pretty expensive is thoughtful art direction and bespoke assets. You have to iterate more on a painted material than a photoreal one. You have to have artistic conviction, not just an eye for reality. It would take astronomically more time and money to remake MGS3 in something approaching its original style than this did. Plus it opens you to more issues of interpretation – if we pretend it was supposed to look real, well shit, we can do that. Interpreting someone else’s art style meaningfully is fraught as hell. A lot of folks think it’s impossible or pointless, and I don’t think that’s true, but it does need you to respond to the original work with a level of insight and care that no budget can guarantee. You need the right people. Probably can’t get ’em. Probably shouldn’t try it without ’em.

I do like remakes and remasters, and I do like fancy graphics, and I do think there’s value in reinterpreting old work, but this latest MGS3 lands in an uncomfortable middle-ground for me. It’s not a Remaster, which would present the original work in higher fidelity, and it’s not a Remake, which would be a new take on the source material. It’s sort of the least-creative, safest thing they could have done, and as someone playing MGS3 for the first time through it, I feel like it has me missing most of the point.