Konami published Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, an extended edition of MGS2: Sons of Liberty, 20 years ago this month. If you’ve been seeking for a reason to play one of the most essential games of the twenty-first century, now is the moment. The Substance of Subsistence, a hack that adds a third-person camera to Hideo Kojima’s masterwork, was published over the weekend by modder oct0xor.
If you haven’t played MGS2 in a while, you may have forgotten about the above camera, which was a carryover from Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima and Konami didn’t incorporate a real third-person camera until 2006’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, an enhanced rerelease of Snake Eater. The Substance of Subsistence refers to the enhanced versions of each game, which is also where the mod’s name derives from.
It was not a simple effort to add a fresh viewpoint to MGS2. “The code to have a standard third-person camera was never there in the game, and I had to reverse engineer and rebuild many things in the game engine to enable it,” oct0xor told PC Gamer. More information about the work may be found in a development diary posted by oct0xor a few months ago.
GitHub has instructions for installing the Substance of Subsistence. The difficult part is locating a PC copy of the game. Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 were removed from GOG and other digital marketplaces in 2021 due to a “temporary” licence problem. In July, the firm said that it was still attempting to resolve the disagreement but did not specify when the games would be available for purchase again.
