'Metal Gear Solid 2' mod adds third-person camera to Hideo Kojima's masterpiece

Twenty years ago this month, Konami released Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, an expanded re-release of MGS2: Sons of Liberty. If you've been looking for an excuse to revisit one of the most important games of the 21st century, now is the perfect time. Over the weekend, modder oct0xor released The Substance of Subsistence, a mod that adds a third-person camera to Hideo Kojima's masterpiece.

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If it's been a while since you've played MGS2, you might have forgotten that the game uses a legacy aerial camera from Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid. It wasn't until 2006 with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, the expanded re-release of Snake Eater, that Hideo Kojima and Konami set up a third-person camera. This piece of history is also the origin of the mod's name, with The Substance of Subsistence referring to the extended editions of each game.

Adding a new perspective to MGS2 was no easy task. "The code to have a normal third person camera was never present in the game, and to implement it I had to reverse engineer and rewrite a lot of stuff in the game engine", oct0xor told PC Gamer. You can read more about the work that went into an oct0xor developer diary shared a few months ago.

You can find instructions on how to install Substance of Subsistence on Github. The tricky part is finding a PC copy of the game. Konami has pulled Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 from GOG and other digital storefronts due to a licensing issue" temporary" in 2021. In July, the company said it was still working to resolve the dispute, but did not provide a timeline for when the games would be available for purchase again.

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