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Does the arrival of Metal Gear Solid 5 finally close out the cross-gen era of console gaming? While the pre-launch focus on the game has centred almost exclusively on PlayStation 4, Hideo Kojima's swan-song launches this week on four console platforms, including the stalwart PS3 and Xbox 360 - a development and publishing choice made years ago, based on genuine fears that gamers would not upgrade to the latest generation of hardware. Cross-gen production was commonplace as we transitioned across to PS4 and Xbox One, and for good reason - game-makers needed to hedge their bets financially when tens of millions of dollars were sunk into individual titles.With that economic outlook in mind, MGS5's Fox Engine was designed around the need to support multiple levels of hardware spanning generations, a state of affairs that caused Kojima to explain in advance that the game may look a little behind efforts from competing studios, but the end result is actually in line with our expectations: both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hand in a highly polished, beautiful presentation, while perhaps unsurprisingly, their last-gen counterparts fall a little short. On the one hand, some might say that the fact that these versions exist at all in a feature-complete, playable state is a miracle - but on the other, it's clear that Xbox 360 and PS3 are being dragged kicking and screaming to their limits.
That might seem at odds with the image comparisons released by Konami a couple of weeks back, where Xbox 360 and PS3 appeared to hand in a very close approximation of their next-gen brethren. However, with both versions of the game in hand, what we are looking at is an amplification of the cross-gen divide seen in Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes.
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