Before Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater lets you choose a difficulty level, pick a control style or watch a single parachute open over the Soviet jungle, it stops and asks you something far more personal: which entry in this series do you love most? It feels like a fan poll. It is actually a loadout decision. Hidden behind that innocent question is a bundle of starting gear for Snake — a bonus camouflage uniform or face paint, waiting in his backpack from the moment the Virtuous Mission begins, and some of those bonuses are considerably more useful than others. So, with the remake’s launch week upon us, here is every answer explained, what each reward really does out in the field, and which pick we’d argue gives a first playthrough the most help — plus the honest case for ignoring strategy entirely and simply choosing the outfit you like looking at.
Forest, rock and river: the lush terrain Snake’s camouflage has to solve for most of Delta, which is why the forest-friendly patterns do so much heavy lifting. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
A Loyalty Test Before the Mission Even Starts
The question appears when you start a new game, and it offers eight possible answers: you’re playing the series for the first time, you like MGS1, MGS2, MGS3, MGS4, Peace Walker or MGS V — or you like everything in the series. There is no wrong door here, and nothing is missable in the long term. Your reward is handed over as soon as Snake recovers his backpack near the start of the Virtuous Mission, and from that point it lives in the Camouflage section of the Survival Viewer alongside everything else you collect, ready to be swapped in and out like any other pattern.
Two ground rules govern all eight rewards. First, a uniform’s special effect only works while Snake is actually wearing that uniform, so every bonus competes with the Camo Index — the percentage that tells you how well he blends into his current surroundings. Wearing a pattern with a wonderful perk but the wrong colours for the terrain is a genuine trade-off, not a freebie. Face paints play by kinder rules, because a paint can be worn together with whichever uniform suits the ground you’re crawling across. Second, finishing the game once unlocks every one of these question rewards for your later runs. Your opening answer therefore shapes a single playthrough, not your account forever — a fact worth remembering before you agonise over it.
Every Answer, and Exactly What It Pays
Playing the series for the first time — the Mummy uniform. The newcomer’s pick wraps Snake up like an excavated pharaoh and quietly removes one of the survival systems new players struggle with most: it prevents the injuries that would otherwise need treating with a bandage in the Cure menu. You are not invincible in it, and the rest of the field medicine still applies, but one whole category of wound simply stops happening. As training wheels go, it’s thoughtfully designed — protection aimed precisely at the people who declared themselves beginners.
I like MGS1 — the DPM and AUSCAM uniforms. The only answer that pays out two uniforms, and both are excellent. DPM doubles the rate at which Snake’s life gauge recovers naturally, which matters because Delta keeps the original’s survival logic: a fed, rested Snake heals, while a starving one doesn’t, so faster natural recovery means less time spent managing the Cure screen and fewer healing items burned. It also happens to be strong camouflage in the forest areas that dominate the map. AUSCAM, its partner, cuts incoming damage down to two-thirds of normal — a flat, always-relevant survivability boost that helps in boss fights, in botched infiltrations, and in the total-damage column if you’re chasing a high codename at the end.
Real British DPM — Disruptive Pattern Material — the family of patterns Delta’s MGS1 reward is named after. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I like MGS2 — the Desert Tiger uniform, plus a joke. Desert Tiger’s gift is logistical: while Snake wears it, fitted weapon suppressors never wear out. Suppressors in this game are consumables with a limited number of shots in them, and the tranquiliser pistol you’ll lean on for non-lethal play chews through them steadily. Removing that whole supply worry changes how freely you can shoot. This answer also revives the series’ favourite prank, discussed below: the opening plays out with Snake wearing a certain familiar-looking mask for the jump.
Jungle fighting in Vietnam, the war that made tiger stripe famous — Delta’s Desert Tiger is that pattern family’s desert descendant. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I like MGS3 — the Flecktarn uniform. The loyalist’s answer for the game being remade, and a connoisseur’s choice. Flecktarn stops battery drain entirely, so every powered gadget in Snake’s kit — thermal goggles, night-vision, the motion and sonar sensors — can run indefinitely instead of rationing their charge. Anyone who has hunted a certain century-old sniper through three screens of forest with the thermals on will understand why veterans rate this so highly. Its speckled greens also earn a strong Camo Index in woodland and foliage, which is most of the terrain that matters.
A swatch of genuine German Flecktarn, the speckled woodland pattern behind the MGS3 answer’s battery-saving uniform. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I like MGS4 — the Green and Brown face paints. Another double payout, this time in paints rather than uniforms — which, per the ground rules above, makes them unusually flexible. Green keeps the Grip gauge from ever emptying, so Snake can hang from rails, branches and ledges for as long as you need him there. Brown does the same favour for the O2 gauge underwater, removing the drowning clock from swimming sections and submerged shortcuts. Neither effect is dramatic minute-to-minute, but because paints stack with any uniform, these two perks never ask you to sacrifice camouflage to use them.
I like Peace Walker — the Banana uniform. A uniform printed with bananas, whose documented talent is that it makes any food taste great. In a game where Snake lives off the land — snakes, frogs, fruit, mushrooms of dubious intent — that is partly a gag about his famously undiscriminating palate, and partly a small mercy for your stamina economy, since a soldier who enjoys his rations is a soldier whose energy holds up. Nobody will win a Foxhound rank because of it. Everybody who picks it will smile the first time he tucks into something awful and loves it.
A banana leaf up close. The Peace Walker answer’s uniform is considerably yellower, and makes everything Snake eats taste wonderful. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I like MGS V — the National Flags face paints. The purely cosmetic payout: a set of paints wearing the flags of the Soviet Union, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Japan and the USA. They offer essentially nothing to your Camo Index and nothing at all to your survival — they exist so that a man infiltrating the USSR in 1964 can do it with, say, the Stars and Stripes painted across his face, which is either terrible tradecraft or perfect confidence, depending on your reading. As a statement of affection for The Phantom Pain‘s globe-trotting, it’s charming; as starting gear, it’s the weakest hand on the table.
I like everything in the series — the Grenade uniform. The completionist’s answer carries the loudest perk in the list: while Snake wears it, grenades can be thrown endlessly, with no ammunition limit. That is unquestionably powerful in a straight fight, and unquestionably at odds with everything a stealth infiltration is supposed to be — every infinite grenade still explodes at full volume in front of witnesses. Treat it as a chaos option for players who intend to solve the Cold War personally, or as a second-run toy, rather than a first run’s best friend.
An Old Joke, Refitted With New Prizes
Veterans will recognise the question itself, because the original Snake Eater asked a smaller version of it back on the PlayStation 2 — and for years, plenty of players never knew it did anything at all. In that first release, declaring it your first time gave you the standard opening. Saying you liked MGS1 slowed the rate at which Snake’s stamina drained during the Virtuous Mission, a gentle head start. And saying you liked MGS2 triggered the series’ most affectionate wind-up: the HALO jump played out with Snake wearing a mask modelled on Raiden, the protagonist so many MGS2 players had felt ambushed by, complete with a misleading name readout that lasted until you recovered the backpack. It was the game asking, with a straight face, whether you’d like to be fooled again.
The expanded Subsistence edition then added a fourth answer — I like MGS3 — which opened the vault: the Demo Theatre cutscenes, the European Extreme difficulty, the Duel mode, and a bundle of bonus camouflage and face paints that had arrived after the original release. Look closely at that old bundle and you’ll spot AUSCAM, Desert Tiger, Flecktarn, the national flag paints and the Brown face paint among its contents. Delta’s design is best understood as that vault being divided back up, answer by answer, and extended across the whole saga: MGS4, Peace Walker and MGS V simply didn’t exist when the question was first asked, and answers like Mummy and Grenade give the remake’s version a couple of headline acts of its own. Even the MGS2 mask gag survives the transition, transplanted into Delta’s opening for everyone who picks it — though the mask itself can be found in the Camouflage menu regardless of your answer, so nobody misses the joke entirely.
A close-up of Australian DPCU — AUSCAM — whose Delta incarnation trims every hit Snake takes down to two-thirds damage. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
So Which Pick Helps a First Run Most?
Our verdict: answer MGS1. It is the only option that hands you two genuinely strong tools instead of one, and they cover the two pressures a first playthrough applies constantly. DPM’s doubled life recovery smooths out the survival learning curve — the early hours of Snake Eater are famously a tutorial in eating, resting and field surgery, and recovering health twice as fast forgives a lot of beginner mistakes, in camouflage that suits the jungle you’re learning in. When things go loud, AUSCAM’s one-third damage reduction is the closest thing on this list to a difficulty setting you can wear, and it keeps paying out from the first guard skirmish to the final duel. No other answer is useful in as many different situations, as early, with as little expertise required to benefit.
Flecktarn, from the MGS3 answer, runs it close — arguably the connoisseur’s winner. Unlimited battery rewrites how you use the sensor and goggle kit for the entire game, and its woodland camouflage is top-tier where it counts. If your instinct is to sweep every room with technology before entering it, take Flecktarn and don’t look back. Desert Tiger takes third place for the tranquiliser-heavy player: a suppressor that never dies quietly removes one of the game’s most persistent errands. And a special word for the true newcomer the first answer is aimed at — Mummy is a better pick than pride suggests, because the Cure menu’s bandage-class injuries are exactly the sort of friction that overwhelms people in their first Virtuous Mission.
The rest we’d file under flavour. The MGS4 paints are elegant precisely because they stack with any uniform, but grip and oxygen are situational gauges — delightful when a section calls for them, invisible when it doesn’t. Grenade’s endless explosives answer a question stealth players aren’t asking. Banana and the National Flags are jokes, and good ones — but jokes.
The Honest Answer Is the Cosmetic You Like
And yet. Strip the analysis back and one fact dominates all of it: none of these rewards is essential, the game’s own arsenal of collectible camouflage will cover every situation the story throws at you, and a single completed run hands you the entire set anyway. The bonuses are seasoning, not the meal. Which means the strategically literate answer and the emotionally honest answer end up in the same place more often than not — if you adore Peace Walker, wearing the Banana uniform through the Virtuous Mission will make you happier than a two-thirds damage model ever will, and happiness, across a fifteen-to-twenty-hour infiltration, is a real resource too. Pick MGS1 if you want the strongest start. Pick Flecktarn if you want the cleverest one. But if your heart already knows its answer, trust it: Snake has survived worse decisions than yours, usually while wearing something ridiculous.