With Metro Exodus, 4A Games not only seeks to harness the power of current platforms to create a game with impressive graphics but one that is also much more ambitious than its predecessors. As proof of this, we now know that its world will be bigger than those of Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light combined.
As part of its coverage of Metro Exodus, Game Informer published an interview with Andriy Prokhorov, creative director of the project and Job Bloch, the executive producer. In it, they make it clear that the world of Exodus will be bigger and more ambitious than anything else they have done before. One of the main changes is that it will have several areas that will offer some freedom.
“In each of these big areas, there’s hours of gameplay, above ground, below ground,” Bloch said. “In general the game itself is larger than anything we’ve ever made before. Larger than the past two games—together. You can enter one of these environments and you can go off and do whatever you want. There’s definitely a story that you follow, and if you follow that story, and you only follow that story, you will miss out on other content in those environments.”
What Bloch means is that Metro Exodus will remain true to the roots and being a linear game. That said, its big scenarios will hide several secrets and you’ll have the freedom to explore them for hours to discover all their secrets. In this way, everything seems to indicate that the jump from Metro: Last Light to Metro Exodus will feel similar to Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception to Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
As you imagine, finding a balance between linearity and freedom was not easy and Prokhorov recognizes it. As he mentions, what the creatives of 4A Games feared is that granting too much freedom would lose the essence of Metro or that giving too little would make it feel very linear.
“I think we succeeded, and we like how we made both of them—Metro and Stalker—friendly [with] each other. But it’s still Metro,” he said. “Players ask us a lot, give us more freedom, give us more freedom—take it!” says the creative director.
Metro Exodus will arrive on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC sometime in 2018.
