Is There Any Truth in MGS4 Coming to the Xbox 360?

January 5th, 2008

metal gear solid 4 xbox 360 port

If you’ve been keeping your eye on the video game rumour mill over the past several months then its highly likely that you have heard about the constant stream of rumours about Konami planning a port of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for the Xbox 360. This rumour has been floating around for a few months now, so I thought that it was about time I’d address it.

Is it Technically Possible?

I guess this would be the first question that we should ask ourselves. Unfortunately for us this question is difficult to answer. Not technically but rather we have no idea of the scope of MGS4. All that we have seen of the game so far is the first chapter and possibly some snippets of later in the game. As usual Konami have this one completely under wraps and the only real clue that we have is a quote from Ryan Payton saying that MGS4 is even longer than MGS3: Snake Eater.

So It looks like I’ll have to do some guess work here. Personally I can’t see MGS4 being any larger than 20GB in raw size. Which would mean that it would have to fit on two Xbox 360 DVDs. And really thats fine, games on the 360 are already 2 discs. I do think that in order to fit on the two discs or to just run on the 360 some settings will have to be toned down. It would probably mean lowering the resolution of some textures or something like that. Then again it is hard to say how much MGS4 will make use of the cell processor. But overall, from what we know now. MGS4 for the most part should run decently on the Xbox 360. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if (in typical Kojima style) MGS4 blows away our expectations and pushes the PS3 to the limits. Meaing that it could never be down ported to the Xbox 360. Argh this is so hard. ><

Would Kojima Productions want to port it over to the PS3?

For almost every rumour that gets released Kojima-san himself states otherwise. So its pretty clear that the team is not interested in releasing an Xbox 360 port.

metal gear solid 4 xbox 360 port

Although I think that all of this doesn’t matter because the fact is Konami need to sell too many copies of this game just to turn over a profit. And all of this pressure is going to be put on the North American sales because MGS is no longer a game for the Japanese (it simply doesn’t sell as well) and the PAL territory sales will make little difference overall. Now if you look at the previous sales of MGS games, namely MGS2 (because it was the most hyped) of about 7 million games in its lifetime. It becomes pretty clear that MGS4 will not achieve the magic 1 million sales on release especially with the small North American PS3 user base. So knowing this I think that Konami as a business might have stepped in and have assigned the team to work on a port after the PS3 version is completed, just to recoup production costs. Basically it all comes down to if Konami want to make a profit out of this game and chances are they will.

Once again on the flipside MGS3: Snake Eater had high production costs and still remained solely on the Playstation 2.

So What Would This Mean to Sony?

I think we all know the answer here, it means bad news. MGS4 is their ace in the hole for the hardcore user base, so no exclusive MGS4 can only be bad for Sony. And it would probably be the game in which defines the movement of developers dropping off with Sony.

Conclusion

I always use to think that an Xbox 360 port would never happen but ever since I started investigating it seems as though I just get more and more confused. So at the moment I’m not really sure what is going to happen. All I know is that come July I will be playing the best game on the Playstation 3. What about you guys, do you think that this port will take place? Will MGS4 just be a timed exclusive? Hit me up on the comments box or vote in the site poll to be heard.

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Ryan Payton Drops a Few Hints About MGS4

October 24th, 2007

Gametrailers and Joystiq both recently interviewed Ryan Payton(an Assistant Producer on MGS4). Although this is a few days old, it won’t stop me from writing about these meaty tidbits that he gave away. I’m just way too excited about this game, its hard to refuse. Lets take a look at the Joystiq interview:

Where the Game is at in Production

Payton states that the latest development build is a step up from the E for All demo. Differences include altered menus and the inclusion of more gameplay elements. At this stage, they are tweaking the AI for the games difficulty, stages and working on scripted enemy events. He believes that the demo is 80% of what the final game will be like.

Payton later continues that because the AI is still not done Konami don’t want to release a demo of the game(via PSN) as they think that people will exploit this. They think that even the demo at E for All isn’t up to Beta stage yet, so they want it to be perfect first, before releasing anything.

old snake mgs4

Ending

He knows what happens for the ending, says that there are no gimmicks. The use of “it’s the final chapter of Solid Snake” and “the final chapter in his life” kinda allures to an ending where Snake dies.

The ending is meant to pay homage to the legend, its meant to be something that people won’t believe and will talk about for some time.

Other Gameplay Modes

Payton states that there will be other gameplay modes beyond the main stealth/action gameplay design. These modes are meant to borrow from other genres and each bit lasts about half an hour. Although the interviewer suggests that this could be some sort of racing component(which sounds very reasonable) Payton declines to comment on these features. He thinks people will be pleasantly surprised by these additions.

Western Game Version

Payton states that Hideo has put him in charge of the western version of the game. So he gets to control difficulty settings etc. So he reckons that the western version will be more difficult than the Japanese version. He wants to focus more around the over the shoulder cam(Resident Evil 4) instead of auto aiming. This judgement is based from the different play styles between cultures.

Opening and Closing Movies

This part was quite interesting, theres little point in my paraphrasing it for you:

“I think that the opening movie and the ending of the game are going to be the two talks of the town. The opening movie is something that has never been attempted, and will never be attempted again. It’s something that could only come out of Hideo’s mind.”

Other Quick Tidbits

Some very interesting tidbits indeed. And in some ways a bit of a relief to know the extent to which the team are putting in for this game. My anticipation is still running at an all time high. I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on any more significant advancements.

Transcript

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