Metro Last Light is not a first-person shooter to be enjoyed by casual gamers after another spoon-fed style experience - rather than being an arcade style shooter, it’s more of a ‘simulation experience’.
(Metro: Last Light, PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
But that Eastern European work philosophy goes into the level of detail as well?
We have a guy on the team who’s a former nuclear engineer. There's guys from the old world of Russia in the studio, the guys who made Stalker, and they’re trying to make the most atmospheric and most realistic game experiences possible. The amount of detail that goes into the game is absolutely astonishing. The fact that every single bullet is an actual object in the world with physics to it, and if we shoot a round out it actually shoots a projectile out, and then it’s not in the casing any more. And then if you eject the casings they each clink off each other. Normally in game design we don’t do that, we's just paint the texture on instead. It’s low resource, it’s low memory, it’s very easy, it’s quick and efficient, but this team puts all this extra detail into their design. Each lightbulb has two forks for the filament that have actual geometry to them, the filament itself has geometry, the glass casing has geo, everything is actually real in that world.
The control panels in the game, again normally we’d just lay a picture on it and put some texture down. The control panels in Metro Last Light have buttons elevated off the panel you can look at, they have removable switches - the game has all that extra detail. You’re not smacked in the face by detail, detail, detail, it all just adds into this experience where all of a sudden you have a bit of a revelation, and you’re like wow, this is really interesting, there’s something more to this. I think that comes from those guys, whether it be their culture or what have you, but that Eastern European influence definitely bleeds into the game, which is great. I think the entire package could have only been delivered by these guys.
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We have a guy on the team who’s a former nuclear engineer. There's guys from the old world of Russia in the studio, the guys who made Stalker, and they’re trying to make the most atmospheric and most realistic game experiences possible. The amount of detail that goes into the game is absolutely astonishing. The fact that every single bullet is an actual object in the world with physics to it, and if we shoot a round out it actually shoots a projectile out, and then it’s not in the casing any more. And then if you eject the casings they each clink off each other. Normally in game design we don’t do that, we's just paint the texture on instead. It’s low resource, it’s low memory, it’s very easy, it’s quick and efficient, but this team puts all this extra detail into their design. Each lightbulb has two forks for the filament that have actual geometry to them, the filament itself has geometry, the glass casing has geo, everything is actually real in that world.
The control panels in the game, again normally we’d just lay a picture on it and put some texture down. The control panels in Metro Last Light have buttons elevated off the panel you can look at, they have removable switches - the game has all that extra detail. You’re not smacked in the face by detail, detail, detail, it all just adds into this experience where all of a sudden you have a bit of a revelation, and you’re like wow, this is really interesting, there’s something more to this. I think that comes from those guys, whether it be their culture or what have you, but that Eastern European influence definitely bleeds into the game, which is great. I think the entire package could have only been delivered by these guys.
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