18 years after Metal Gear Solid 4 first launched, a modder has shown off its first modded map, MGS3's Groznyj Grad

It already felt weird and wonderful to say that PC Gamer has reviewed Metal Gear Solid 4, a game for the personal computer. Now it gets even weirder: MGS4 mods are incoming, with TriggerHappy on YouTube already showing off a custom map in Kojima's 2008 stealth-action classic.

Back in 2021, modder Jayveer showed off a map ported from Metal Gear Arcade into Metal Gear Online 2, the multiplayer accompaniment to MGS4, but to my knowledge, TriggerHappy's is the first demonstration of a custom singleplayer map in MGS4.

It's 55 beautiful seconds of Old Snake crouch walking around Groznyj Grad, the iconic fortress level of Metal Gear Solid 3. Only now it's infested with Gecko walkers mooing their incongruous moos and showing off their distractingly shapely legs. Stupid, sexy Geckos. TriggerHappy laconically describes the gameplay as "initial testing for adding AI to a custom map."

The enemy AI certainly seems to work: Those Geckos are not happy to see Snake, and it's not because they believe a man of his age shouldn't be putting so much stress on his back and knees. It's unclear how TriggerHappy got this custom map working, or how far away we are from widely available map making tools, but this is an exciting first step in the realm of custom content for MGS4.

I've mostly connected Master Collection modding with the essential performance and visual fixes that the community needed to cook up after Volume One's disastrous initial launch. Thankfully, not only has the Volume One situation vastly improved with official patches, but Konami shipped Volume Two (containing MGS4 and Peace Walker) in a much more acceptable condition.

Looking at the MGS4 Nexus, the projects on offer are fairly simple: Custom textures, miscellaneous tweaks, and an FPS unlocker all stood out to me. You can get DLSS5 working in there too, if you're into that sort of thing. Metal Gear is not a series I've ever strongly associated with modding, but I'm excited to see where we might go from here.

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