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Metro Exodus Enhanced - out of the metro tunnels and back on Steam

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
I just found out that the Redux version of Metro introduced the super immersive element of flies landing on your gas mask visor.

Flies, in fucking eternal winter.
 

toro

Arcane
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Apr 14, 2009
Messages
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27356230_1989947931033662_7573160478890895726_o.jpg


Edit: It was posted on their facebook.
 
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Vexxt

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2018
Messages
67
Huge info dump today - as Game Informer featured Exodus in their March issue: https://imgur.com/a/o3MLU



Sounds amazing to me - much more like STALKER in many regards, but still retains some linear story-driven areas.
 
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Joined
Mar 18, 2009
Messages
7,304
I still haven't played through Last Light, probably not worth bothering to retry it. Last time I tried I picked one of them "Ranger" modes only to uninstall when I found out that these imbecile developers apparently think that no true ranger should be able to check how much fucking ammo he has.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
The ranger hardcore mode in 2033 redux removes all of your UI, including QTE prompts. Yeah, they were so lazy with that """remake""" that they couldn't be even bothered to do more than just disable the entire UI.
 

Vexxt

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2018
Messages
67
The ranger hardcore mode in 2033 redux removes all of your UI, including QTE prompts. Yeah, they were so lazy with that """remake""" that they couldn't be even bothered to do more than just disable the entire UI.

Yes, that was an odd decision and I agree. I used "Ranger" mode not "Ranger Hardcore" - damage output, lack of hip-fire crosshair, hit markers etc are all still gone, but you still get a basic hud showing ammo etc.
 

Zer0wing

Cipher
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
2,607
I like what I'm reading. I always felt the Metro series had so much more potential, only to be straitjacketed into a linear hallway shooter.
I always thought it's a good thing Metro 2033 & LL are linear shooters, because one, it's based on the story told in the book of the same name and two, there already was STALKER for more open-ended type of game.

Now that STALKER is gone, and Exodus continues after books and previous games, developers has more freedom with their source material and empty niche to fill in.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Jan 28, 2011
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97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.gameinformer.com/themes/...ame=10-bold-changes-exodus-is-making-to-metro

10 Bold Changes Exodus Is Making To Metro

Metro1610.jpg


Though familiar (mask-obscured) faces return from prior games, Exodus is bringing sweeping changes to Metro's claustrophobic brand of action-horror. We recently went to 4A Games' studio in Malta and took a sneak peek at the latest entry. We came away with a sense of great ambition and boldness on behalf of 4A's attempt to make the best Metro game. The team is completely redefining certain features long-time fans consider tenets of the series.

These are the 10 biggest changes we saw.

1. Say Goodbye To The Metro
Both Metro 2033 and Last Light took place in and under the Moscow metro. As trailers suggest, this is no longer the case. After an introductory sequence in Metro, Exodus finds Artyom, his wife Anna, and the rest of the crew cutting through the Russian wilderness in search of hope. This means bigger spaces, dangerous new factions, and a new world of trouble for our survivors.

2. Exodus Is Bigger...But It's Not Open World.
During our studio visit, 4A Games pressed upon us repeatedly the importance of realizing that Exodus is not an open-world game. Instead, Exodus is comprised of several huge sandbox levels that funnel in and out of the linear path of story missions, as well as side activities for you to find. Once you finish an area, you move on to the next one, without any way to return to it. Still, the flythroughs of the sandbox regions were impressive and diverse. The largest area in Last Light, according to 4A, was 200x100 meters and Exodus' sandboxes stretch to two square kilometers.

3. The Ammo Economy Is Gone
In the previous Metro titles, you used military-grade ammunition to purchase weapons, upgrades for said weapons, and various tools like medkits. This made combat encounters tense and tactical, forcing you to decide if sacrificing bullets to mow down the guards in your way was worth it, or if you should instead take a longer route and bypass your foes with stealth. Since you're not in the metro anymore, the ammo economy is no longer a concern. Instead, that economy has been replaced by a scavenging system that seems more in line with recent Fallout entries, turning junk and valuables you find in the open world into two resources: chemicals and materials. These can then be used to craft tools and other valuable items.

Prepare to seek out workstations littered around each map to craft precious ammo, though.

4. Combat Has Been Enhanced
With Metro increasing its size, it makes sense for the game to expand its combat and stealth gameplay as well. While the classic flexible gameplay of Metro remains steadfast, letting players choose between stealth and guns-blazing action, 4A has complicated things in pleasing ways. You now have the option between lethal and non-lethal takedowns for foes, giving you a happy pacifistic medium between violent killing and completely bypassing enemies. The takedown animations are also now varied, with each animation depending on what weapon you're using, the speed of your approach, and where you are adjacent to the enemy.

Beyond this expansion, the game also keeps tabs on your actions. Mowing down members of one faction can result in them meeting you with open hostility should you run into them down the road. However, treating them with relative gentleness could make for friendlier run-ins.

5. Your Hub World Is On The Move
With the Metro gone, so are the various stations that would act as your hub worlds, letting you restock ammo and talk to inhabitants for bits of story building. This time they've been replaced with a train called The Aurora. While we weren't told too much about the specifics of the locomotive, creative director Andriy Prokhorov did say, "the Aurora will be constantly changing along the journey with more cars, different types of cars, and people that join you."

Metro3610.jpg


6. You Use Vehicles
4A Games told us there would be vehicles for the player to commandeer during their journey, through the studio was tight-lipped when it came to saying what kind of vehicles. Outside of The Aurora, we saw Artyom row a boat across a lake, but that was the only player-controlled vehicle we witnessed during the gameplay demonstration.

7. The Game Takes Place Over A Year
2033 and Last Light took place over the course of a few days. Exodus's journey instead occurs over the course of a year, with each sandbox encompassing a season. The "fall level" takes place in a gorgeous mountain setting filled with mutant bears while summer takes place in a deserty environment with burning oil platforms on the coast that gives off a bit of a Mad Max vibe.

8. Weapon Upgrades Are Different Now
Whereas previous games had you buying upgrades or discovering weapons in the field with unremovable attachments, Exodus makes things a little more relaxed and stressful at the same time. If you come across a weapon in the world that has a scope or clip extender you want but you don't want the weapon it's attached to, good news, you can remove it and use it with a compatible gun in your inventory. A lot of attachments are available for your guns: scopes, barrels, stocks, magazines, and attachments.

However, weapon upkeep is now something to be concerned about. If you don't visit your workstation enough to perform maintenance on your gun, it can become unclean. They never stop working completely, but when guns get dirty, they eject literal dirt from the barrel and suffer a stats hit to damage and accuracy.

9. There Are Side Excursions
While lacking the typical quest-giver interaction that defines "sidequests," 4A says it's creating a wealth of activities for each area for players to find as they explore. Players can learn about these quests by reading notes found in the world, talking to characters, or overhearing conversations. Going off the beaten path could lead to a firefight with bandits in a farm, or a house filled with supplies, as well as some corpses that appear to have betrayed one another shortly before they drew their last breaths.

10. The Factions Are More Self-Contained
Whereas the factions in 2033 and Last Light formed a tightly interconnected (and often hostile) community, Exodus has factions that live in isolation from one another that you encounter. During our gameplay demo, we ran into a group of religious fanatics that worshiped a massive fish living in a nearby lake. Artyom's actions toward each faction, namely whether he responds with violence or pacifism in their initial meeting, will define his relationship to each.
 

Carrion

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I always thought it's a good thing Metro 2033 & LL are linear shooters, because one, it's based on the story told in the book of the same name and two, there already was STALKER for more open-ended type of game.
You could easily have made a good Metro game with a linear story and level progression, they just chose not to do it. Every damn shooter has an open world nowadays, and a more traditional shooter with tighter level design could've been great. Metro's problem was that the games desperately tried to mimic modern cinematic corridor shooters at every turn, even when it completely clashed with what they were otherwise going for. There are supposed to be survival elements and focus on resource management, but you can't do anything meaningful with it when the player is stuck on rails with forced checkpoint saving and no way to backtrack. In your setting the favored currency is bullets, but it's hard to take that seriously when the game features a CoD-like turret section where you use a machinegun to fire away the GDP of a small nation. You've got QTEs, regenerating health and an overabundance of super-dramatic first-person cutscenes that interrupt the flow of the action at every damn turn. There were good ideas here and there, and the atmosphere was almost STALKERish in a few places, but as a whole the games were pretty much garbage.
 

Vexxt

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2018
Messages
67
Uh, there was no regenerating health.

Considering both 2033 and especially LL were made in the least ideal environment possible, what they were able to do with both games was great.

I mean, calling them "garbage" is a bit harsh, don't you think?

  • First off, the engine is home grown and graphically impressive.
  • The studio was tiny and made mostly of fragmented bits of GSC
  • They lost their publisher in the middle of LL development, and had to figure out a way to complete the game with no financing or support.
  • And if that weren't enough, they also had to figure out a way to complete the game in the midst of cultural upheaval and mass revolt.

I mean shit man, give credit where credit is due. There is a lot of "garbage" out there, but I wouldn't include the Metro series in that classification.
 

Carrion

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Lost in Necropolis
Uh, there was no regenerating health.
Surely there was. I think it was only disabled in some of the Ranger modes, and there might be differences between the original and Redux versions (only ever played the originals).

I could easily look past the flaws if the game was just clunky or buggy, but all the compromises in game design ruined them for me. Especially Metro 2033 feels like they had a really cool concept in mind at first, but at some point in development they suddenly decided the game should play like CoD instead. I really wanted to like it, as the game did have good things going for it, but in the end it just did nothing for me because that brand of modern shooters is something I simply can't stand.

The new game does sound like an improvement, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
3. The Ammo Economy Is Gone
In the previous Metro titles, you used military-grade ammunition to purchase weapons, upgrades for said weapons, and various tools like medkits. This made combat encounters tense and tactical, forcing you to decide if sacrificing bullets to mow down the guards in your way was worth it, or if you should instead take a longer route and bypass your foes with stealth.
Ha ha. No.
This was never a thing, not even on the hardest difficulty of Ranger Hardcore in the original 2033.
 

Vexxt

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2018
Messages
67
Uh, there was no regenerating health.
Surely there was. I think it was only disabled in some of the Ranger modes, and there might be differences between the original and Redux versions (only ever played the originals).

I could easily look past the flaws if the game was just clunky or buggy, but all the compromises in game design ruined them for me. Especially Metro 2033 feels like they had a really cool concept in mind at first, but at some point in development they suddenly decided the game should play like CoD instead. I really wanted to like it, as the game did have good things going for it, but in the end it just did nothing for me because that brand of modern shooters is something I simply can't stand.

The new game does sound like an improvement, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Fair enough - I guess what I am getting at is this time they have the freedom, funds and resources to do as they wish, so I think we are in for a treat.

I've never played anything but Ranger, so you could be right about the health. I always remember the only way to heal being to use the medkit shot.

The most recent video about the game shows one of the "sandbox" environments in decent detail, and its more or less a love letter to STALKER IMO. Take a look: (around 3:45) http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2018/02/09/how-open-world-is-metro-exodus.aspx

I am hopeful!
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
Uh, there was no regenerating health.

Considering both 2033 and especially LL were made in the least ideal environment possible, what they were able to do with both games was great.

I mean, calling them "garbage" is a bit harsh, don't you think?

  • First off, the engine is home grown and graphically impressive.
  • The studio was tiny and made mostly of fragmented bits of GSC
  • They lost their publisher in the middle of LL development, and had to figure out a way to complete the game with no financing or support.
  • And if that weren't enough, they also had to figure out a way to complete the game in the midst of cultural upheaval and mass revolt.

I mean shit man, give credit where credit is due. There is a lot of "garbage" out there, but I wouldn't include the Metro series in that classification.
The engine was stolen from GSC. It's literally a modified Xray engine that Stalker games use, to the point where it still had the unfinished global illumination option in it in 2033, and the same file structure.
 

ciox

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1,277
Another thing that puts me off this series (besides the popamole aspects) is the FANTASY like monsters.

They were not so bad in the first game but in the second they are just straight up random shit from random artists' portfolios.
Seems to be a part of the games getting drawn towards the zaniness of the 3d Fallout games, with more gimmicky narrative content like this being added also "During our gameplay demo, we ran into a group of religious fanatics that worshiped a massive fish"

Still I really like the added inventory management like removable/movable mods and (soft) degradation, mechanically it feels like they are making it more like STALKER in every way.
 

Vexxt

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2018
Messages
67
The engine was stolen from GSC. It's literally a modified Xray engine that Stalker games use, to the point where it still had the unfinished global illumination option in it in 2033, and the same file structure.

I've heard this before - and I think there was even a lawsuit between GSC and 4a -

My understanding was their proof of concept was indeed in x-ray, but that was it.

Either way, Call of Pripyat and 2033 were released within 1 year of each other, and 2033 looks SO much better, there must have been some wizardry at play even if they used components of xray.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
2033 looks better because it's all in small closed maps, one of the issues with making large maps in CoP was that there was a budget limit for the amount of detail a map could have in it (since most objects are a static part of the map and not spawned in meshes, maybe they worked that in too).
The biggest improvement were the character animations which probably wasn't a hard thing to change without touching much of the engine.

Don't how much they changed in Last Light or the Redux versions, but the r_gi variables are still in the cfg.

Apparently the guys in 4a studio left before even SoC was released? So they had a lot of time to work on the engine. Still a lot of balls to claim it's not the same one when they couldn't even be assed to remove non-functional features.
 
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Vexxt

Educated
Joined
Feb 6, 2018
Messages
67
I think you are right - I think they jumped and formed 4A before SoC even shipped.
 

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