A closer look at Master Collection’s Cyrillic stencil textures

Claims on Reddit that the final Master Collection Vol. 1 update’s text textures show AI upscaling artifacts deserve a closer look. Our resident modder Afevis dug through the assets and identified a different explanation for the examples we shared: a double-printed Cyrillic stencil reused across textures containing text.

The same approach appears in the HD Collection and Metal Gear Solid Delta. Much of this environmental lettering was never intended to be clean, readable text. With sharper textures, the repeated and overlapping marks are easier to see than they were in the blurrier versions.

For these examples, the asset comparison is the key context: odd-looking lettering by itself does not establish that it was newly generated by AI. Afevis’s findings point to the stencil material already present in the games.

Source: Our original post on X, reporting Afevis’s findings