Metal Gear Solid 4 PC System Requirements and Recommended Specs

It’s finally happening folks. After 18 years of being landlocked to the PS3, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is coming to PC. (As part of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2 alongside Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker.)

This is a huge deal for fans of the pre-eminent stealth-action franchise, as MGS4 is known as one of the best of the series, but due to the continual difficulty in PS3 emulation, it’s been hard for PC players to give it a try. Happily, the Metal Gear Solid 4 system requirements are pretty relaxed, so it looks like those days are over.

• OS: Windows 11 (64-bit)
• CPU: Intel Core i5-9600K
• RAM: 16 GB
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650
• Storage: 25 GB
• DirectX Version: 12

• OS: Windows 11 (64-bit)
• CPU: Intel Core i5-10500
• RAM: 16 GB
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
• Storage: 25 GB
• DirectX Version: 12

For what it’s worth, these are the exact same system requirements as Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. But it doesn’t matter right now as, at time of writing, you are unable to purchase the two games that make up the Master Collection Volume 2 separately.

For better or worse, this is going to be a pretty easy game for your system to run. The recommended GPU, the GTX 980 was released in 2014, which is good news as a huge percentage of the PC gaming community will be able to play this iconic game.

However, the keen-eyed amongst you might have noticed that the storage requirement, 25 GB, is the exact same as the maximum capacity of a single layer Blu Ray disc which was the format used on the PS3. This means that Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PC is likely to be more of a straight-up port than a comprehensive remaster.

In one sense, this is disappointing, as the graphical leaps and bounds we’ve made since 2008 could have contributed to a crazy upgrade. However, the purists among us might appreciate a game totally unchanged by modern design standards.

However, Metal Gear Solid 3, recently got a ground-up remake with Metal Gear Solid Δ, and MGS4 is almost as iconic as that game so perhaps this Metal Gear Solid 4 PC port is just a stopgap until that happens.

The tagline of the Metal Gear Solid franchise is “Tactical Espionage Action”. This is not inaccurate, though the “tactical” part can be ignored if you lack the patience. This game is all about sneaking. You are literally equipped with a suit that changed color dynamically to match your surroundings.

With this suit, a dizzying array of weapons, and some pretty interesting gadgets, you must navigate through a tactfully unnamed middle eastern country. You must also make use of close quarters combat in cases where you need to be silent.

It’s a bit of a lost cause to attempt to summarise a Kojima plotline, but the vague synopsis is:

It’s an alternate history where the cold wart continued way later, and has now been supplanted by constant, world-wide civil wars. The global economy is now based on PMCs, meaning that the wars won’t ever truly end. Unless you can take out the man secretly orchestrating it all behind the scenes.

Give it a go, and you’ll experience some of the most spectacular action set pieces in gaming, some otherworldly characters, and also the longest damned cutscenes you’ve ever seen. Oh an also nanomachines, son.