I communicate with them daily when I can, several times a week at least. What has your level of input been with 4A during these difficult times? The Russia/Ukraine tension - that's going to affect any creative industry. Malta's a nice sunny EU country where hopefully the team can enjoy better working conditions and better access to first-party stuff. It's not officially supported by the first parties. Were there any challenges in revamping the games for the new generation of consoles? He'd get ex-Soviet soldiers writing in to tell him how his characters should reload and he factored that stuff in before the final publication. Which is no bad thing! He actually invited people to contribute when he first published it. I actually think that while the first instance was an interesting entry point for people to learn more about the game, now the game is creating more awareness for him and his novels. Metro 2033 has been successful but 2034 never got an English translation. Has having the novel available in English changed people's awareness of Metro in the west? Every one of the little conversations and side-stories you hear are something he wove together. It's his world and he's hugely invested in it. He's not a writer for hire that just scribbles down back-stories for characters. What he brings to the job is something a lot of developers would kill for. It's Dmitri's franchise and his IP, so it would have to be with his blessing. Would you hypothetically repeat the partnership for future games? In a unique twist, he then decided that he'd like to write the novel of that, so the next novel, 2035, is basically the novelisation of Last Light with additional material. We brought the story to Dimitri, who really liked the idea, and instead of having a novel to work on he basically did all the pre-production stuff he would have done for a novel and gave all the story stuff to 4A to build on. He's very much left on a cliff-hanger at the end of 2033 the novel, the conclusion of what he thought he was working for and realising he's been living under a huge misapprehension and that his actions will have dire consequences. He's described it to me as his first shot at an esoteric art-house novel, which isn't what we were looking for to continue Artyom's story. He had written a follow up which didn't really make sense as a video game story. When we came to approach a sequel in Last Light, there was nothing in the material suitable for it. Dmitri worked really closely with us and even contributed some of the dialogue. Obviously they take a lot of liberties with the action scenes, but it essentially follows the main narrative and essential themes of the novel. They discovered Dmitri's 2033, which hadn't been published in print at that point, just online. Metro 2033, when 4A formed they knew they wanted to do something special and they were inspired by Half-Life to do a more cinematic, story-driven game. **Have you modified the story at all? Last Light followed on from a specific choice you could make in Last Light, which everyone loved, or the fact that you can customise your weapons, all are built into the framework so that they can take place in 2033 as well. Some other mechanics such as the mask-wiping from The whole gameplay framework too - 2033 was a bit rusty around the edges. The tech we had for Last Light was much more efficient and you get much higher performance, so we basically rebuilt the first game in Last Light's tech. The first iteration of the engine had some beautiful effects but it was not really very well optimised and it will still bring some PCs squealing to a halt. The most dramatic changes were in Metro 2033 because it looks great on PC but it was a very demanding piece of tech. Even within Metro, seeing people get to grips with it, that tactic doesn't really work as well as it would in Call of Duty, but it does have more forgiving combat. Spartan mode is a more traditional shoot-everything mode.
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