METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER

At the height of the Cold War, America's greatest agent, a woman known only as The Boss, defects to the Soviet Union. At the same time, an extremist named Colonel Volgin fires an American-made portable nuclear missile at the Soviet design bureau OKB-754, sparking an international incident. In order for America to clear its name and avoid World War III, The Boss' last apprentice, a man named John, also known as "Jack" and codenamed "Naked Snake", is dispatched by the special forces unit FOX to assassinate the woman who taught him everything"

With the goal of rescuing Gray Fox and uncovering the meaning of the cryptic message, rookie operative Solid Snake is sent into Outer Heaven alone.

The game was officially announced at E3 2004. However, prior to its official announcement, a voice cast sheet was leaked.

The game was originally supposed to be developed for the PlayStation 3, but due to the long wait for PS3, the game was instead to be developed for the PlayStation 2. From the outset, Hideo Kojima wished to drastically change the setting from previous games in the series. He stated that the jungle setting was what both his development team and the Metal Gear fans wanted. However, he acknowledged that the elements of a jungle environment, such as the weather, landscape, and wildlife were features that would present problems during the game's development. Whereas in previous installments the player started out close to, or even within, the enemy base, Kojima wished Metal Gear Solid 3 to be more realistic, with Snake starting out miles from the enemy and having to work his way to the enemy encampment.

Kojima commented that the outside environment was very difficult to create. He explained that the reason previous games were primarily set indoors was because the current consoles at the time were not powerful enough to portray a true jungle environment. In contrast with urban environments, the outdoors do not have a flat surface, resulting in Snake having to cross uneven terrain such as rocks, dirt mounds, and tree stumps. As a result, the collision engine used in previous installments could not be used, and a new one had to be built. Setting up the motion capture technology to fit with the terrain was also a challenge during development.

With all the features and graphics that were implemented, the game was given a lower frame rate at 30 frames per second, compared to Metal Gear Solid 2's 60 frames per second.

Many fans wanted Metal Gear Solid 3 to use a interactive camera rather than a fixed camera, but this was ultimately not implemented in the game. Kojima viewed Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3 as a trilogy, and wished to keep the camera the same as the previous two in order to keep the feel of the three games the same. He did, however, acknowledge that the trend for video games at the time was to use the interactive camera. This camera was later implemented in an updated version of Metal Gear Solid 3 titled Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence and was also implemented in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Kojima designed Metal Gear Solid 3's boss battles to be different not only from those in previous Metal Gear games, but also from any other game. He said that the boss battle with The End best represented free, open gameplay in the game, as the battle with The End is fought in a large, open environment in the outdoors rather than within a building. The player also has the ability to both avoid this boss battle altogether by killing The End earlier in the game; or save and quit during the fight, wait a week, and reload the game to find The End having died of old age. Kojima commented that features like this did not appear in other games.

In one of his blogs, Kojima stated that in early development, the game's storyline featured a space development theme. However, as the game's development progressed, that theme lost its significance, so the developers ultimately removed it from the game. In addition, the game was to have taken place during August 24, 1963, which was Kojima's date of birth, but was instead set a year later in order to factor John F. Kennedy's assassination into the plot. Kojima and other staff members also intended to visit the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. to gain more ideas for the Cold War setting of the game, but their plans were put on indefinite hold and eventually cancelled due to the Beltway Sniper Attacks.

During the story, it was originally intended that Snake and various Russian-aligned characters would have spoke in fluent Russian. While Akio Ōtsuka was open to the idea, the rest of the cast was not. As a result, Kojima decided to present foreign languages generally how Hollywood films does it (ie, have the characters speak English, or Japanese in this case, while implying that they're actually speaking in another language).

Along with several re-releases, the original version of Metal Gear Solid 3 has received the greatest number of updates compared to other games in the series. Overall, there are four versions: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, Metal Gear Solid 3 HD (a component of Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection) and Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D.