High contrast FTW.

new one looks better...

more detail on the mullet too !

Wow, I really dislike the new ones, everyone looks too plasticy, the background details are more clear but the people...blech.

Wow, good stuff here. The realism in the textures and lighting is much better now. Kojima really is a perfectionist.

Like the first one better. Kinda has that dream/flashback look to it. The newer one looks to real (as in in-game reality). But thats just my opinion, I could be wrong or right.

I see they cut down a bit on the "bloom lighting" effects. Fewer flower petals, too, though I thought they gave it a cool contrasting effect.

Guess not even BLu-Ray could hold that many rendering passes for that many cutscenes....

Kind of hard to say which version I like the best since each one is so different from the other. I like older style for some of them and the new style for the rest although I think I would like the older style for the game.

The gallery isn't showing up for me, but that one pic looks quite nice.

Yeah. No. Snake looks much younger, Campbell looks the same as always. And Otacon. :(

Everyone looks more ugly now!
Yay for realism.

I like the new textures and lighting better. The older ones were too saturated and had less detail, especially in shot "mgs4changes9.jpg".

@TheCleaningGuy:nvm, working now.
I kinda like old Otacon better, but the new shots look better overall.

The new images make Snake look like Robert Stack. He looked way better in the older ones.

However, most everything else seems to be at least somewhat improved.

I liked the soft effect created by the bloom, and I also preferred Meryl's hair before, but otherwise things look improved.

Nice to see that they ditched the vaseline-smeared-lens filter. Barbara Walters has that shit copyrighted.

@Yuki: Hm, actually, the more I look at the old shots, the more I kind of prefer a lot of them. Not all, but a number of them.

@Yuki: I was thinking the same thing.

@Luke Plunkett:

Hoping that was sarcasm because the storage format has nothing to do with how many filters you can use.

The new ones look technically better but I liked the style of the old clips. The hazy filter gave a dreamy, surreal atmosphere to the (mostly) realistic style.

The older stuff looks far more cinematic and visually arresting. As someone else noted in this comments section, "high contrast FTW", indeed.

yellow bloom otacon = a ok, new otacon = uncanny valley :(

I vote for the first one, I'm guessing that's what they wanted, but couldn't manage due to the CPU and RAM of the PS3.

I think this is what Kojima was talking about a couple of weeks ago in that one interview that quoted him as being "disappointed" in MGS4 (not true). He did say in that interview that the Cell Processor was completely tapped, and that they had to downgrade from the original movies they made.

And here's the part where I extend both middle fingers to Sony for their effed-up policy on gimping the PS3. WTF, man? You design a revolutionary new processor for it. Your first commercial use of the Cell Processor was the PS3. 8 cores in that baby. But you locked down one of the cores for the PS3 OS (which STILL doesn't bring up the XMB during gameplay), and permanently disable one of the others for some bullshit reason. Then you give the developers the remaining six cores, and further gimp the box with a mere 256 MB of system RAM and 256 MB of RAM for graphics... and expect them to not feel slightly cheated.

The original demo was probably made on a PS3 Devkit. The devkit's early models didn't even have Cell processors - they had MASSIVE CPUs which emulated Cell Processors, and could easily out-perform the chips that PS3s have. Without a real PS3 to test their stuff on, it's entirely possible that team Kojima just set the bar too high.

Anyway, I don't mean to get too negative, the current version looks great, especially the gameplay - but those early trailers were friggin' beautiful, and I will miss them. I look forward to one day playing gamese of that caliber on the PS4... or the Xbox 720... or the Dreamcast II.

I know what it is that weirds me out about the newer images. The characters look like models from Dead Rising. Not that that's a bad thing! But if you follow me, they look too clean, too crisp...too different from the rest of the MGS4 screens. I guess it's just a matter of familiarity being shaken up.

hmmm i still cant decide which one i like better... but ocaton def looks better in the older version.

The stuff on the left looks far more cinema-esque. The images on the right look cleaner. Like a pretentious director decided to just get rid of the bloom and tint.

I don't know how anybody could miss the giant phallic missile coming out of the chopper. Anyway, the new screen shots are probably why Kojima was disappointed with the game, didn't live up to his original expectations. Ah well, game still looks great.

@ChunkOFunk:

that is a mid-flight refueling probe.

@Highlander Wolf: Props to you, man. I feel the same way on both fronts: Sony's purported downgrade of the PS3, and the diminished graphical results of MGS 4. Nevertheless, the game still looks great.

@Highlander Wolf:
On second thought, it still has a lot going for it.

Sure, I miss the cool stuff the old movies did with focus and blurring. Everything in the new movie and screenshots are more distinct, looks more like computer graphics and less like cinema.

BUT! I'm still blown away by the smoke effects. The way te dirt kets kicked up by bullets hitting the ground is very cool. That new video, watching the snowstorm in it was breathtaking. And the sound is the best I've ever heard in a video game. It even sounds like you can hear Snake breathing sometimes.

So, win some, lose some. I'm sure I'll love whatever the final result is.

Much much better. I don't know what the naysayers are talking about. These look great to me.

looks alot more detailed to me. tighting everything up for the big show next month. wow. seems just crazy that the mythical metal gear solid 4 is finally going to come out.

I certainly like the sharper crisper graphics.

The only loss to me is that some of the characters are a little too "warts and all" - Otacon and Raiden.

On the plus side, it prevents the annoying 'bloom-porn' that a lot of games today indulge in.

Hooray! SOMEONE finally got rid of excessive bloom for once! /cry

I agree, I like the newer ones better. All the filters made it look like a really good PS2 game. Now you can see detail on the buildings and the faces. Otocon look better in the old one though. Something about the textures on his face. Eveything else looks good though.

I'm sure they will be tweaking this game till the last minute. And they'll be plenty of filters to be had as well , probably.

Look at the background in the Raiden head shot. It looks significantly worse.

The reality is likely that the early trailers were not rendered in a real game engine or were rendered in a real engine at 1 FPS (or some other non-playable framerate) and then pulled together in a video editor.

If they overshot on model and texture detail early, once it came time to actually ship the game at a playable framerate they had to cut back to what you see today.

I personally like the pictures from the new footage. I love how they gave everything more of a textured/ viceral feel rather then the smother look of the original footage. Just look at the wriknles on the faces. They blow me away and give the character just that much more depth.

Also preference aside I don't think Konami had to "dumb" it down as @Highlander Wolf: suggests. Look at the helicopter picture. Before it lacked any of the detail you see in the new pictures and all of its parts were pertty much hidden in its own shadow.

@Luke Plunkett: I'm not sure that disk capacity has anything to do with rendering passes of the in-game engine. Isn't that more an issue for the Cell Processor?

That's the biggest change, though. Less bloom, less washed out, a bit more vibrant. I'm not sure if I know which I like better, but the characters and models certainly look better in the newest versions.

Of course, they've changed up the models and such so much, I'm sure they're still tweaking things.

Depends on your preference I guess. Both look good for different reasons, although I can understand why they might want to switch to a sharper contrast over their more "dream"-like version. It looks sharper and there's less "Am I looking at a severed head, or an opossum?"

Looks fine to me either way.

nothing new - the closer to actual launch the worse most games look...

@Guile0: Actually, I somehow doubt that. The earliest trailers actually had framerate problems, which have been fixed since then.

Kojima has stated that they started planning the game before getting PS3 tech specs, and it's likely that at the time earlier trailers were created, they hadn't factored in the limitations of current-gen hardware. I seem to recall the same thing occuring with the original MGS for the PS1.

[kotaku.com]
doesn't work.

/anti-PS3 comment

@TheCleaningGuy: I disagree on the Otacon shot, because there's much more foreground/background contrast in the older version of that shot. That contrast pleases me (at least me) more.

I like the blurred pictures more.

I kind of prefer the first set. They had a more filmic look to them, but I guess these are more in line with what we will be seeing in the final product.

This is why you can't make a sex video game, UNCANNY VALLEY!

I think blurry was fine.

@Roflcopter_Down: Wants you to follow HIM!:
Works for me.

The new one looks better for sure on some, but I find that the previous ones have a lot more style, and even look better than most of the new ones.

Yeah i kinda prefer the older pics. The softer/yellowish effect makes everything look more life like - plus it looks more stylised like a film.

@Highlander Wolf: What, Willis, AAAARE you talking about? The graphics aren't any less sophisticated or anything of the sort. In fact, from where I am standing they appear to be significantly improved more detailed.

I don't like many of the changes they've made to the characters' faces and I don't care for the fact that the shimmering floating leaves were removed - those were just cool - but I am almost certain that these changes weren't made due to technical limitations but rather due to changing artistic direction.

That "improved" above was supposed to have a strike through it.

All changes look even better.

Damn, I'm so psyched...it's getting disgusting.

Bring it on already. :)

You know, being that I'm a hourly reader of this page and studying game design, you'd had to think that we all here would be aware (perhaps not) that assets change throughout a development cycle...

Tweaks should be a part of any game's development cycle. If they aren't, someone thinks they're always right and that's usually not a good thing.

The game visually improved if you ask me. Much sharper. No, scratch that. A helluva lot sharper. Love it.

June 11/12th Midnight Launch, I'm waiting!

@Highlander Wolf: good comment, you might be onto something man.

@TheIrishNinja:
Maybe you should submit that, you know, to Multi-Tap?

@Highlander Wolf: "I vote for the first one, I'm guessing that's what they wanted, but couldn't manage due to the CPU and RAM of the PS3."

From the looks of it the new shots are the ones requiring more RAM as textures are on a completely different level of detail. Most likely the previous videos were heavily retouched at composition, with an actual person doing the blurs, levels adjusting and whatnot. That kind of a quality is hard, if not impossible to match in realtime graphics as there is no professional human eye evaluating the picture, algorithms can go only so far. For example in every game that uses "HDRI", you'll run into situations where parts of the picture are ridiculously overbright, mostly all of the time, it just doesn't look good because the algorithm can't evaluate the result same as person does.

He actually said he's part of the problem lololol

A next game without BOOM?

MADNESS!

I never had a problem with the old version i think they looked fine. But i don't mind the newer look either, they are alot more detailed and crisp. Man i can't wait for June to roll around. Either way the game looks great, spending my time playing GTA but this is the game i been waiting for.