Smooth like Big Boss’ skin-tight suit
It’s hard to know what a PC port of a Metal Gear Solid game will look like in 2014. Revengeance had a decent port, but that was done by Platinum. The last Metal Gear game to hit our Home Computers was over a decade ago, so they aren’t anything to go off of, either. Well, coming out of retirement, Kojima and company have stepped up to the plate and hit a home run!
In fact, like Jordan, this was my first Metal Gear Solid experience. It was thoroughly enjoyable, largely because of how smooth it was. It’s easy to recommend this title to pretty much anyone, since it’s proven to capture the hearts of newbies like Jordan and myself, while being a great enough overall experience to satisfy long-term fans.
Tested on: Intel i7-4770k 3.50 GHz, 8GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU
It’s almost hard to believe how great this PC port is. Ground Zeroes runs at a smooth 60 frames per second about 95% of the time. I did experience a few moments where the framerate was brought down to around 30, although there was no clear indication as to why. Maybe there was extra shrubbery on screen and I didn’t notice, but these moments were brief and very infrequent.
Even the cutscenes, which run in-engine, are at a constant 60 frames per second. All of this is even without going into the options once to alter anything! The pre-set options the game set for my setup worked incredibly well for optimization. There is an option to lock the framerate at 30 FPS if needed.
It is impossible to interact with the main menu using the mouse, but that’s a minor inconvenience at best. Regardless of whether the player is in the menus or in-game, Ground Zeroes will recognize a controller input and immediately switch all button prompts to controller buttons (tested with an Xbox 360 controller). The loading screen icons are all controller buttons, however, regardless of whether or not a controller is attached. The load times are short, but will only advance after the player hits a button; you can read all the tips you want!
Keyboard controls are completely remappable, but controller-users must choose from specific schemes. Playing the game with a mouse and keyboard is very comfortable. Since the camera speed and mouse sensitivity are adjustable, it’s almost guaranteed that each player will find the settings that are right for them. The only controls that are a bit funky are the interrogation controls, but they are completely remappable so it is easily fixable!
Other quality-of-life additions are also included, like the ability to skip the intro splash screens (!!!) and the fact that a Borderless Windowed option is included. Alt-tabbing during the Borderless Windowed option doesn’t really work, however. It brings up the Taskbar, but clicking on windows doesn’t bring anything in focus.
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a PC port in excellent form. Kojima and Konami have really knocked it out of the park in terms of PC optimization. This is a port that I can point to in the future to say “next/current gen ports don’t have to be complete garbage” when the inevitable PC port of who-knows-what comes out and is….complete garbage.
