Metal Gear Solid 2 mod that adds third-person camera out now

Metal Gear Solid 2, the 2001 action game from creative visionary Hideo Kojima, has finally had a proper third-person camera mod released, not long after the project was announced to be borrowing from the updated release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. Yes, this means you can play a sort of hybrid between MGS2 and 3 right now, as the mod has been made public.

Developed by Boris Larin, a game modder and security researcher, the MGS2 third-person mod is finally out after it was revealed recently. Borrowing the idea from the updated version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, the Substance of Subsistence project trades out the top-down stealth-driven camera for a more action-orientated and player controlled approach, letting you experience the Big Shell in a whole new light.

Alongside this announcement, Larin also reiterated how Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 have been pulled from online stores for their use of historical footage (and are still unavailable) while offering to help fix the issue.

“Konami, if it is not possible to renew the licences, and you need any technical assistance, I will be happy to help remove/replace the problematic content. I will even do it for free so more people can enjoy the game (with my mod).”

Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance of Subsistence has taken around two months to complete, with the seemingly small change to the camera needing to account for lots more code down the line.

“I wanted to have a camera that works exactly like in MGS3, but that game was never released for PC, so I also had to reverse engineer the code for the PS2 and PS Vita versions, which is more difficult,” Larin recently told PCGamesN.

“Also, on rare occasions, developers release their games with debug symbols that contain function names and other information. This helps a lot in reverse engineering, and I spent time looking for this information in different releases of MGS games. Unfortunately, the debug symbols were never included. However, MGS fans motivated me to continue my work, and I worked on it on weekends and when I had free time during the summer.”

You will need a legitimate copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 on PC to play this mod, so if you haven’t purchased one in the past you’ll sadly be out of luck until Konami hopefully relists the game’s in online stores. You can find the mod on GitHub.

If you’re a fan of the Metal Gear games, you may want to try out some of the other best stealth games, as well as the best classic PC games that are still worth playing even today.