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Transparent as ever, Hideo Kojima's misgivings with Metal Gear Solid 4 proved largely technical in nature, with the scale of its levels and animation blending apparently falling short of his ambitions. Almost six years on, and we have an open-world slice of Metal Gear Solid 5 that seeks to address this - ambitiously hitting not one, but four platforms at once. Helpfully, the 60fps advantage on PS4 and Xbox One has been revealed far in advance by the studio, while Kojima himself declares the PS4 version as being closest to the photo-realistic bar his team is aiming for, thanks to its full 1080p presentation. But is resolution the only benefit in buying Ground Zeroes on Sony's latest platform - and what of the older console releases? One of the perks of the PS4 version, as revealed earlier via a tweet, is atmospheric simulation - a real-time approach to rendering skies in the Ground Zeroes mission. This allows clouds to move dynamically and impact the sun's lighting, where by contrast the Xbox One release joins PS3 and 360 with purely static skyboxes. It's a difference that only becomes apparent during side-ops missions, where the military base is accessible in broad daylight. Though curiously, the skybox is reinstated during certain set-pieces on PS4 - making this a subtle advantage if you know when and where to look.
The resolution details stand as the most dramatic difference though, with Konami happily making public the specifics of each version ahead of release. From our pixel counts, we can confirm that the PS4 does indeed push out a 1920x1080 framebuffer as promised, while on Xbox One we have just a 1280x720 window with which to work. For a game that embarks on a crusade for open-world stealth action, the lower resolution on Microsoft's platform does affect visibility when lining up long-range shots - just as it does across Battlefield 4's sandbox areas.
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