METRO 10TH ANNIVERSARY STUDIO UPDATE
Hello everyone,
As you may have seen, a few months back we decided to join the Embracer family and to work more closely with the incredibly talented team at Saber Interactive. This decision has provided a huge opportunity for us at 4A Games to have access to greater resources and a larger talent pool to bring you more of the experiences you’ve grown to know and love from 4A Games.
We know we’ve been a little quiet since, and you’ve all been left with some pretty big questions. We’ve needed some time to get settled, but we feel now is a great time to look forward as well as back, and talk directly to the incredible community that has grown with us and supported Metro and 4A Games over the past ten years, and share some of our plans for the future as we embark on this new chapter.
Aside from the acquisition, and the dramatic global events unfolding around us, 2020 represents a momentous year for 4A Games and the Metro series.
We’ve been celebrating the 10th Anniversary of our very first release – Metro 2033 – and a decade of making Metro games that has seen our small, fiercely independent studio expand our horizons culminating in the finale to Metro Exodus earlier this year with the ‘Sam’s Story’ DLC.
It’s been an incredible journey for us all, as the stories of 4A Games, Dmitry Glukhovsky, and Artyom have intertwined. We’ve tried to capture this journey with our ‘Metro Timeline’ – an interactive retrospective that charts every major event in the studio and series’ history. You can view our trailer here https://youtu.be/4DB9JA1OgiQ, and visit the Timeline on the official Metro website at timeline.metrothegame.com
But we also want to talk about the future as well as celebrate the past; we’re going to share our ongoing development roadmap for Metro Exodus, including our Xbox Series X | S and PS5 plans; we’re going to talk about our ambitions for the future of the studio and the Metro series; and we’re going to tackle the subject of Metro multiplayer head on.
FIRST, LET’S TALK ABOUT METRO EXODUS!
We’re currently hard at work on bringing Metro Exodus to Xbox Series X | S and PlayStation 5 next year. While we can’t share all the details just yet, you should expect major enhancements including faster frame rate, increased resolution, reduced loading times, and stunning Ray Tracing features made possible by the new hardware. The new consoles are amazing, and will allow us to deliver visual enhancements and performance only possible on state of the art PC hardware and RTX enabled cards – until now.
We’re happy to confirm that these enhanced versions will also be made available as a free upgrade to all existing owners. That means if you already own Metro Exodus on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, whether digitally or on disc, you will be able to upgrade to this enhanced version on the next generation on consoles for free.
And if you’ve yet to pick up the game on Gen 8, you can do so safe in the knowledge you will get the enhanced version for free should you upgrade your console in the future.
Aside from these enhanced versions for Gen 9, we recently brought Metro Exodus to more players through Amazon’s ‘Luna’ streaming service; and we’re also working on dedicated Linux and Mac versions of the game. We’ll share more information about these closer to release.
LOOKING BEYOND METRO EXODUS, WHAT’S NEXT FOR 4A GAMES AND THE METRO SERIES?
Who we are
Before we look forward, it’s important to look back at how the studio has grown and evolved over the past 15 years.
We were founded in Ukraine in 2005 when a small core group broke away from GSC Gameworld during the final stages of development on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The ‘four A’s’ – Andrew ‘Prof’ Prokhorov, Alex (Oles) Shyshkovtsov, Aleksandr Maksymchuk, and Andrew Tkachenko – wanted to create a new studio based on the philosophy of a close, supportive family for all members.
Our creative director, Prof was inspired by reading the first online draft of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s ‘Metro 2033’ long before the book was even published, and this set the path that would tie 4A Games to the Metro series for the next 15 years.
When Metro 2033 released in March 2010, 4A games numbered just 60 people, all based in Kyiv. 10 years and three games later, we are a team of 150+ spread between two locations; a new HQ in Malta (opened in 2014) and a brand new state-of-the-art office space in Kyiv (opened in 2020).
Over the past decade we’ve always tried to push our ambitions higher, culminating in Metro Exodus – a blend of the strictly linear, story driven gameplay of Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light and large open levels ripe for exploration, inspired by our experiences on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. all those years ago.
Now, we are part of the Embracer Group of companies, as an independently run subsidiary of Saber Interactive, and this move will allow us to take the studio, and the Metro series to a new level.
So let’s talk about what we mean by that.
Our plans
Metro
It’s no secret that we have already started work on the next Metro game. Using everything we’ve learned from the last 15 years, we’ve set our sights even higher – the next title is being built for Gen 9 consoles and PC, with a complete overhaul of our engine and renderer to take advantage of the new power, storage, and hardware supported ray tracing afforded by the new consoles.
We’re not ready to share anything more, but we wanted to reassure our fans about a few important topics.
First – we’re committed to delivering a great story driven single player experience; this is what the Metro series is founded on. As a studio, we want to constantly push ourselves to create bigger and better games, but we also listen to what the fans are saying, and we know what’s important to you. We take our responsibility to the franchise seriously, and we think you’ll be excited about our plans for the next chapter.
Multiplayer
At the same time, our partnership with Saber will allow us to explore something that has always been an ambition for 4A Games, but something we have never been able to commit to until now: a multiplayer experience in the Metro universe.
As a small studio we have never been able to do justice to these ambitions, and our ideas have never made it beyond the prototype phase. But with Saber’s experience in online gaming, we are now actively exploring multiplayer concepts that will offer a new way to experience the world of Metro.
We know some of our fans have concerns whenever they hear multiplayer mentioned, so we wanted to tackle this topic head on and talk about some of goals and principles behind this early exploration.
Let’s start by saying, we hear your concerns. We’re not looking at multiplayer as a box-ticking exercise, or to jump on some trend or bandwagon. As creators, we want to explore a multiplayer experience that makes complete sense in the Metro universe.
We’re also committed to ensuring that whatever we do, it’s not to the detriment of our single-player ambitions. We’ll need a dedicated team focused solely on the online component, and this is what our new partnership with Saber can bring; years of expertise, technology, and know-how to help us realise our ambitions.
Additionally, a reminder that it’s still early days – none of the thoughts above mean that the next Metro game will be multiplayer only; or that the next game will have single and multi-player in the same package. We are still figuring things out, but know that we are absolutely committed to more single-player, story driven experiences in the Metro universe that our fans have come to know and love.
NEW IP
Finally – while we expect to be working on Metro for many years to come, we want to stretch ourselves by exploring new projects and new IP. In 2017 we released Arktika.1, a sci-fi FPS for the Oculus Rift, and our first steps towards a goal of being a multi-project studio. We now want to grow this ambition to another new AAA experience that can sit alongside the Metro series. We’re hiring across both our Malta and Kyiv studios to help us bring these dreams to reality, so if you think you have what it takes and want to join our team, head to our careers page and apply at 4a-games.com.mt/careers !
Let’s talk more!
We want to leave you with one more important bit. We know we’ve been pretty quiet over the past decade during development of our projects, keeping our heads down, focused on our work. But we want to change that. We’ve always loved our community; lurking on forums and social media, taking in feedback and applying it directly to our updates and new content, and trying to respond as often as we were able, but we know that’s not enough. While we’re still working through the details of our plans for this, we have a goal to be more responsive and communicative as we embark on these next projects, so please stay tuned to our social channels for updates.
Thank you for all your support over the past decade. We hope this update has you as excited for the next ten years as we are!
- 4A Games Team