Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater arrived for PS5, Xbox, and PC back in August, but this wasn’t the complete experience. While it contained a lovingly recrafted version of the classic campaign, Konami decided to delay its Fox Hunt multiplayer mode until a later date.
Now, after months of waiting, Fox Hunt has finally arrived as a free update that allows up to 12 players to battle it out on a selection of maps inspired by the main narrative. You’ll don several different disguises while engaging in hide-and-seek gameplay, in which you need to kill, extract, and steal valuable amphibian assets from your enemies.
Instead of implementing traditional multiplayer modes, it feels like Konami has strived to give Fox Hunt that signature Metal Gear Solid flavour, and the results speak for themselves. So it is even more of a shame that it was sent out to die with seemingly no promotion.
The modern gaming landscape is one obsessed with fleeting trends. A random indie can pop up on Steam and attract hundreds of thousands of players in a single week, only to become a distant memory in record time as we all move on to the next big thing. The same logic applies to triple-A blockbusters in which we play them, talk about them online for a bit, and move on.
Very few exceptions exist, such as a handful of live service juggernauts and video games that can form fandoms that go beyond the initial experience. Gems like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that break boundaries in the medium and show us exactly what developers are capable of when not constrained by capitalist publishers. Fail to strike while the iron is hot, and you’re going to suffer the consequences because people just won’t care.
Fox Hunt launched last week with no crossplay support and minimal marketing, meaning that hardcore fans who wanted to find a match struggled to do so and couldn’t fully experience a part of the game they’d been excited for.
Things have stabilised since, but I struggle to see a world in which Fox Hunt is seen as anything more than a niche part of a game which already feels catered to a specific brand of Metal Gear Solid fan. A shame, because there is an awful lot of potential here. Being able to utilise myriad different environmental disguises and many of the weapons and items found in the campaign against other players sounds so much fun.
Unfortunately, it appears the gameplay is somewhat unrefined as well. Players on Reddit are acknowledging that Konami seemed to send Fox Hunt out to die not just because of its unceremonious release, but also that much of it feels woefully unbalanced at the time of writing.
It runs poorly, the netcode is bad, maps are too small for the number of teams required for certain modes, time to kill is absurd, and the randomised rewards make progression feel like a needless slog. What worries me most is that the audience won’t be big enough for Konami to care when it comes to future quality-of-life updates.
There is a high chance that Fox Hunt is left to die as a small community of players hold on for dear life, aware of the greatness it could have conjured if things were different.
An ideal world would have seen this become the next iteration of Metal Gear Online — an unorthodox take on multiplayer with distinct mechanics, modes, and progression that stood out among myriad copycats. Konami might have missed the boat on this one, and that breaks my heart.
