>he couldn't have survived. Huge tankers that displace thousands of tons kill sailors by dragging them down as they sink.
He's Solid Snake! He's built different! I believe he did, and he was Pliskin.
The tanker really sank, and Big Shell was really built around it. The events and participants there were planned by the Patriots to recreate Shadow Moses, not so much as a training exercise for Raiden but to test the S3 plan, and how an individual can be manipulated with misinformation. This is done to Raiden and the player (even before the game was released, like how all the previews hyped up the return of Solid Snake, then it turns out he's a side character you only play as for a couple of hours). I think there's ambiguity around the word “simulation”, it's a simulation in the sense that it's staged, like how police might train in a simulated terror attack - not a computer simulation.
>>The characters he meets are simulations of the real ones we meet in MGS4?
My bad I was referring to the Colonel and Rose... they are AI chatbot versions of the versions we meet in MGS1 and 4. But Solidus, Vamp, Emma etc. are real and playing their part in the simulation. Remember Solidus raised Raiden as a child soldier and later orchestrated the events of MGS1 (getting Ocelot to convince Liquid to highjack REX). Raiden and Vamp are the same as the ones in MGS4, and Solidus's real body was recovered to rebuild Big Boss.
These Rose and Colonel chatbots predicted what we see today with AI chatbot versions of famous figures from through the ages. If the S3 plan (as Ocelot understood it) was to refine the perfect soldier like Solid Snake, you can see how each soldier having a personalised AI version of the Colonel and a save game lady that Snake had could be incredibly useful on the battlefield.
Do you think in the near future, real soldiers will be using AI to help them in battle the way the Colonel AI does for Raiden?
>MGS4 kinda does away with that. It gives you answers.
I agree, I think the misinformation was deliberate and interesting in MGS2, and then I remember how exciting it was the first time I played MGS4 getting those cold hard truths! And I think those rehashed situations and characters were a deliberate part of the master narrative of the series.