The biggest thing I noticed in MGS2 was the hundreds of references they made to pop culture and real-life things. Almost all their work was based on real-life experiences and tv. Rose and Raiden are based on Jack and Rose to the titanic. Photos of New York City were taken for game architects to copy and emulate the city. Even vamp is based on a Spanish dancer. They simulated real human behavior to recreate that in the game. But also a lot of their methods in creating the game called for a personal perspective. The sound architect had to imagine the sound from scenarios he never got to see. The whole game in a way is created that way from scratch and why so many different pop culture references are made because its a combination of everyone's ideas and experiences -- literally they had notebooks for that. Just think about April 30th.
MSG4 while I sure took about the same about of creative energy, I would argue that the documentary barely covered that. It was mainly about making notes for mental processes and corrections. The game was extremely hard to make because of the new PS3 software, so I can imagine that's why. They were so attentive to details and spent what felt like a large portion of time checking for bugs and making revisions. They wanted to ensure the game ran smoothly and players would spend time to appreciate new features like Octomom. The team did this by having regular group discussions, again the collaboration of ideas, and writing down their critiques over and over again. The coolest thing I thought MSG4 introduced was the rehashing of an old bit character from MSG1 for a split second into MSG4.
I already tend to write all my critiques down for my work so my mental processes wouldn't change as much. However, the group collaboration seemed to work so effectively for them I might try to do that for a project of my own.
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