4A Games explained the benefits of the PlayStation 5/Xbox Series version.

The 2019 game, Metro Exodus is now available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, with a free upgrade on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. (Physically, a Complete edition for 40 USD/EUR contains the base game and the two DLC, Sam’s Story and The Two Colonels.) It includes fully ray traced lighting and 60 FPS on all next-gen consoles. It runs at 4K on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 and targets 1080p on Series S. They have reduced loading times, a field of view slider, spatial audio and controller latency improvements on Xbox, and haptic feedback support for the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller.

„In layman’s terms, ray tracing is a physically accurate simulation of the behaviour of light. Before ray tracing, games used to have all sorts of tricks, some of them real-time, some of them pre-calculated or what we call ‘baked’, to make the scene look as though it were believably lit. Creating baked assets and a lot of these tricks were not only extremely time-intensive on the artists, but also any technique that cannot be done in real-time greatly hampers other areas of development such as gameplay and design.

By using millions of rays, we can build up an incredibly intricate picture of the lighting environment consisting of something that is effectively akin to millions of individual light sources. In turn, we can use that unprecedented level of lighting detail to deliver the most realistically lit images that we have ever produced. And in addition to that, far more importantly I think, we now have that done completely in real-time with a 100 per cent dynamic lighting simulation and a similarly dynamic environment.

Other games contain ray tracing features to some extent, but they often elect to focus on a single phenomenon, something like reflections or shadows, for example, but as ray tracing pioneers, we have delivered for our creative teams a full suite of lighting tools to simulate all of their lighting needs. And to our players, we have delivered the most comprehensive ray tracing experience ever to feature on a home console, and all of that running at 60 FPS,” Benjamin Archard, 4A Games’ senior rendering programmer, told VGC.

(Install sizes. Digitally, the base game takes ~72.2 GB, The Two Colonels needs ~1 GB, while Sam’s Story requires ~6.4GB, which is a total of 80 gigs. From a physical Complete Edition install; the Xbox One needs no install, as all the content is on disc. On Xbox Series X, a total of ~80 GB for all content is needed. And for PlayStation 5, the expansions are download only, The Two Colonels: ~1 GB, Sam’s Story: ~6.4GB)

The upgrade also has a 4K texture pack which adds a new level of detail to most assets. „Also of note is the dramatically reduced loading times which could reach around three minutes in the worst of cases on Gen 8. They are now all under one minute for even our largest level and in some cases can be almost instant, particularly when coming back from death or otherwise loading a save during gameplay. Overall, this update provides a huge increase in the quality of the experience – a quality of life boost, if you will,” Jon Bloch, the executive producer of 4A Games, said.

They worked a lot to eliminate controller input lag: „There were issues in our initial launch with, I guess you could call it controller lag, controller responsiveness, and we did a number things to update that as soon as we could after launch. It’s also something that we’ve further optimised for this release, so there should be additional improvements there. But one other main element to this is all the Metro games are, well, it’s not a twitch shooter, I guess, so we’re not a multiplayer shooter, it’s a story-driven experience. We do have a lot of immersive animations, all these things come together and it’s a very cinematic experience. And so it will play differently than other games, so there is an element to it that is kind of supposed to be there.

But when it comes to actual functional issues like the responsiveness of the controller, those things are not supposed to be there and we’ve worked to try to remove them as much as we can, so hopefully the experience should feel a lot better aside from all the other things we’ve improved, like even simply going from 30fps to 60fps, it will feel a lot smoother for that,” Bloch said.

He also praised the DualSense for more immersion: „One of the ways we typically try to push immersion in our games is with very tactile animations that make you feel like you’re a part of the game world, you’re attached to it, where you have a lot of animations where you see the player character interacting with things, touching things, picking things up, grabbing things, and so any items which might realistically have some sort of feedback for you based on this interaction, it made sense to use this feature.

You can think in simple terms of just firing a gun and getting some kickback, but also more so specifically for Metro, things like pumping air into the gas canister on your Tihar. You imagine the more you pressurise the canister the more resistance you’d get from the hand pump in real life, so it would make sense to do the same thing in the game, and so those are the sorts of things that we’ve implemented, wherever those kinds of interactions make sense. We tried to make them as unique to the type of item it is as well, so a shotgun has a different kick and trigger pull than a pistol for instance,” Bloch added.

On Xbox, the saves work on a chapter-to-chapter basis: auto and mid-chapter saves won’t carry over. On PlayStation 5, you can’t use your PlayStation 4 saves: „We need platform support for that, and at the time we were finishing up development on this, that wasn’t available, so we didn’t have a way to do that ourselves, unfortunately for PlayStation specifically,” Bloch said. So it’s on Sony once again. However, this is why 4A Games has a chapter unlock feature which enables players on any platform to jump in at any level, but you will have to use a default loadout and achievements/trophies will be disabled.

There are no plans for further DLC. „We’ve now effectively shipped something on this console generation, so now we know, at least today, what we can do with it and we can take those learnings to our next projects to make sure if anything didn’t work or had to be kind of slapped together with glue and hope, that maybe we can go back and rebuild it a different way to make it work better,” Bloch said.

Source: VGC