In what may be a land speed record for insufficient ports to the PC, modder Serge has released a small tool for the "Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection" port. Despite Konami's confusing claims over the past few months, players today learned that the emulated HD remasters of "Metal Gear Solid 2" and "Metal Gear Solid 3" are both rendered at 720p on PC, resulting in a particularly blurry image on high-resolution 1440p and 4K monitors We learned that the mod, released about 10 hours after the game was unlocked on Steam, fixes this. 64.5 kilobytes.

I tested it by setting MGSResolutionPatch to render the first few minutes of Metal Gear Solid 3 at 3840x2160 (4K). The difference in image quality is obvious.

This change in resolution may have broken some of the game's visual effects designed specifically for the PlayStation 2 hardware. However, the first few minutes of the game look perfect.

And, as the astute players of this game have pointed out (e.g., on Resetera), some of these effects have already been changed in the process of porting the 2011 HD Collection to the PlayStation 3 on which this release is based It remains a puzzling choice to insist on this resolution for a 3D game in 2023. Especially since Konami has made some modifications to the game in order to fix some of the glitches present in the HD Collection. Offering players a choice of resolutions would have gone an incredibly long way in quelling the anger over this remaster.

MGSResolutionPath is apparently causing some UI problems in "Metal Gear Solid 2" (or rather, changing resolutions in general is causing problems) - and other visuals caused by rendering in 4K. I suspect that the modders will quickly resolve this issue in the next few days before scrutinizing the two games for oddities.

To change the resolution of MGS2/3, simply follow the simple instructions on the Github page linked above: download the D3D11 file and the resolution patch, both of which need to be placed in the game installation folder. You can then open the MGSResolutionPatch.ini and set the resolution (default is 4K).