METRO 2039 gets first full trailer

Metro 2039, the fourth game in the long-gestating Metro series, has received a new trailer.

The Metro series is set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, where the survivors of a nuclear war in 2013 have turned the Metro into a series of underground cities linked by the old rail lines. Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light depicted the complex, multi-sided battle for control of the Metro, whilst Metro: Exodus saw a group manage to escape from Moscow altogether and find out what happened to the world beyond.

Metro 2039, set four years after Exodus, sees a mysterious stranger arrive in Moscow on a mission to kill Hunter, the leader of the Novoreich which has overrun most of the city, and find a missing friend.

It's unclear if the game will continue the move from Exodus to larger, open-world environments, or a return to the more linear levels of the first two games.

Metro 2039 will launch in February 2027 on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.

Metro: Exodus

2035. The political struggle for control of the Moscow Metro, where ten thousand survivors from the 2013 nuclear war that ended the old world live with their descendants, has stabilised with an uneasy peace. For Artyom, the hero of the battle at D6, it's an opportunity to follow his dream of finding out what's happened in the world beyond the city limits. The discovery of anomalous radio signals and the capture of an armoured steam train, the Aurora, gives Artyom and his friends their chance to abandon the closed-in world of the Metro for the open skies of the world beyond...and their own, unique dangers.

Metro: Exodus is the third game in the Metro series of video games, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and based on the novels by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky (currently living outside of Russia due to his opinions of the current political situation). It was preceded by Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013), with remastered versions of both games later released as Metro Redux. Metro: Exodus is something a mild reset of the series, removing detailed references to the events of the first two games in favour of the story at hand, and a new gameplay format.

The basics of the game are more or less unchanged. You play Artyom, a survivor of the nuclear war who has learned the hard way how to survive in the Metro. The game is ostensibly a first-person shooter, though mild survival and crafting mechanics are present and there is a strong focus on stealth. An opening section in Moscow is very much linear business as usual, until you and your allies (many of them recurring from the first two games) find a train heading out of the city and realise you can escape to the open countryside, and find out what the hell happened to the rest of the world.

From here the game adopts a structure more akin to the original Far Cry, with sequential, large and open-ish maps with a primary objective but various sub-objectives you can explore along the way, and with freedom of action in how you approach each mission. You can rush each area by doing the main objective ASAP, but going off the beaten path to explore side-areas will reveal more loot, upgrades, lore and subplots. As with the first two games there is a hidden moral metre, and behaving in a more moral and enlightened way (minimising kills, sparing surrendering enemies etc) will open up new branches in the storyline. Allies you may drive away by adopting a murder-hobo mentality will instead stay on, and provide more support in later missions.

This new approach is refreshing, allowing the introduction of open-world elements without going full open-world with a single massive map on which the whole game takes place and the main storyline takes a back seat for hours or tens of hours at a time. This structure instead allows for a degree of exploration and freedom but not too long before you have to progress the main story, which is quite enjoyable.

This is basically the Road Trip from Hell, made the worse because you don't have full control over your route (you need to stay on the rails, obviously) and even a minor setback can have massive consequences. The Russian rail services ceased to exist twenty-two years before the game takes place, so if a mudslide has washed half a kilometre of track into the Volga, you're screwed and have to go back and find another route (and hope that is passable). But it is fun, as you can repair to the train between missions and chat to other characters, building up relationships and following subplots. The characters in the Metro series have always been a lot of fun and catching up with them here is enjoyable. The main exception is Anna, Artyom's previous girlfriend turned wife, who was a formidable fighter with a sharp sense of humour in previous games and here is a bit too squeeing over Artyom, which feels odd.

Exploration is a lot of fun, with your growing equipment collection allowing for better exploration and detection of possible supplies. Some of the maps provide you with vehicles for exploration, including boats and buggies, which are an enjoyable change of pace. Each map, separated sometimes by thousands of kilometres from the last one, has its own set of characters and factions, making the game sometimes feel like an episodic road trip TV show, which is enjoyable. Making sure you close off the subplots in each region before moving on can be a bit hit-and-miss, and the game sometimes can be unclear on what you should or should not be doing. I had a rather limited experience on the Caspian Sea level, for example, by inadvertently killing what turned out to be a major NPC during an early scuffle, closing off a bunch of options for resolving that particular crisis more peacefully.

Combat remains solid, and mostly unchanged from prior games. Weapon selection is solid and a frontal assault is usually possible as long as you don't get swamped by superior numbers (and can re-arm quickly). Stealth is more more satisfying, however, with silent knife throws, critical takedowns and silenced weapons all providing excellent opportunities for stealth operatives. Lethal and non-lethal options are available in most cases, and going for the non-lethal approach can result in enemies letting you live in thanks rather than trying to kill you later on. There are granular outcomes to your choices in the game that are not immediately obvious, meaning you find yourself considering your options more carefully in a more traditional cartoon sandbox where mass violence is always rewarded positively.

The game does struggle reconciling its linear past with its new, more freeform present. The Volga and Caspian levels are huge and open to explore, but the ultra-linear Taiga level, a corridor pretending to be an open riverbank, is a little weird, and feels designed to shuffle you between cutscenes. The game feels better when it's fully embracing the open-world or when it places you in tight confines once again; a late-game visit to another Russian city with a Metro feels pleasingly nostalgic rather than irritating by snatching the open world away again. A greater irritation is that cutscenes do tend to go on a bit too long, and sometimes repeat information that is redundant. The English-language voice acting can also be a bit of a mixed bag, and hardcore veterans of the series may find the decision to completely ignore some major story and lore ramifications from the first two games a bit odd. Newcomers will be completely at ease, though.

The main game itself is solid, but these days the game also ships with its DLC. The first DLC, The Two Colonels, explains the backstory to a character mentioned but MIA in the main game. It's quite linear and very short, but it does have some interesting gameplay ideas and some great dialogue. The second DLC, Sam's Story, is huge by the standards of most such expansions. It adds the city of Vladivostok to the roster of locations, with your character exploring a fairly large area on foot and by boat, aligning with different factions and searching for vital supplies that will help your ambition of crossing the Pacific Ocean and finding out what happened to America. One of the best maps in the game and some strong NPC characterisation makes this a fine slice of the Metro series.

Overall, Metro: Exodus (****½) is a fine addition to the series. It changes things up at a point when they could have become stale. The gunplay is great, the stealth is excellent and the story is solid, with the subtle way the game handles morality, choice and consequence being refreshing. At around 30 hours (including the DLC), the game gives a solid amount of content without being too stuffed with filler.

The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, Mac and Linux. A sequel, Metro 2039 which sees a stranger arrive in Moscow, is due for release in 2027.

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Epic vs. Valve: The Battle for PC Gaming

For the past fifteen years, the PC gaming market has been dominated by one retailer above all others: Steam. An online sales, downloading and gaming service, Steam is run by Valve Corporation and has utterly dominated the market since launch, fending off several competitors along the way. But that has now changed, with Fortnite developers Epic Games launching a rival service that means to do nothing less than smash Valve's monopoly forever.

The Epic Store launcher.

Steam was launched in late 2003 as a system for updating Valve's online games, titles like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic, keeping players all in sync with one another and allowing new maps and patches to be rolled out quickly and efficiently. In 2004 the service transitioned to a store, selling new games. It was mostly ignored until the November 2004 release of Half-Life 2, arguably the most eagerly-anticipated video game in history up until that time. It was the sequel to Half-Life, the 1998 game that rewrote the first person shooter rulebook and established Valve as a force to be reckoned with in the PC gaming scene.

Half-Life 2 launched with the required use of Steam. You could buy Half-Life 2 in stores, but to install it you had to also install Steam and sign up to the online service. In 2004, when not every gamer was online and certainly most gamers did not expect to have to sign up to an online service to play a single-player-only game (Half-Life 2's multiplayer mode wasn't patched in until months later), this idea was hugely controversial. Gaming communities rebelled, some gamers tried to report Valve for breaches of the law (no such claim was ever upheld) and so on. But Half-Life 2 was anticipated in a manner almost no other game in history was, and the sheer juggernaut force of the game's hype and its overwhelmingly positive critical reception saw gamers swallow their pride and buy the game in their millions. In many cases, they used the service to buy and download the game at midnight on release day, and were playing hours before their friends could get to the shops to pick up their copies.

After Half-Life 2 showed that online PC sales were viable, other publishers signed up to the service and more and more games appeared there. Valve had been either lucky or prescient, as 2004 arguably marked the last highwater for PC gaming in the 2000s. The 2005 release of the X-Box 360, followed a few months later by the release of the PlayStation 3, saw a huge crash in PC gaming sales. Within just a couple of years, the number of big titles being developed for PC dropped significantly. 2007-08 was arguably the nadir of PC gaming history, with few big titles coming out, almost no PC exclusives doing well (The Witcher, from CDProjket, being an honourable exception) and the platform being almost dead on its feet.

Remarkably, though, Steam had continued to grow in popularity and success. Valve jumped on the rise of indie gaming, adding lots of popular, low-budget titles to the platform. Valve also pushed their big sales hard. They won back support from big publishers through various tactics designed to promote sales. Rockstar Games had released the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV after a long delay, but noted that although initial sales had not been as high as the console versions, the "long tail" of the game was significant, with sales picking up years later every time the game was put in a sale, making it far more profitable in the long run on the PC platform. By the start of the 2010s the platform had recovered most of its losses, bolstered by the arrival of Kickstarter as a platform for funding niche, mid-tier games. By the end of 2018, Steam had 150 million accounts (30 million more than Netflix) and dominated the PC gaming market with a share of between 18 and 20% (but 75% of the online market). According to some reports, Microsoft has offered over $20 billion to buy the service and the company behind it outright, but Valve's owner, Gabe Newell (who worked for Microsoft in the 1990s, quitting to co-found Valve), had rejected such overtures out of hand.

Understandably, other services have tried to compete with Steam. CDProjekt launched GoG (Good Old Games) as a rival service which focuses on getting older games updated to work on modern hardware. Their main selling point is not using an form of DRM (Digital Rights Management), which they feel hinders the customer experience. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts, UbiSoft and Blizzard-Activision launched rival services to exclusively launch their games, respectively Origin, UPlay and BattleNet (although many UPlay games are also available on Steam). With relatively small game catalogues and niche target audiences, these services have existed alongside Steam, rather than trying to compete directly with it.

This has now changed thanks to a company whose pedigree in PC gaming is even older than Valve's: Epic Games.

Founded in 1991, Epic Games spent the 1990s releasing a large number of low- and mid-budged action games before releasing their first 3D shooter in 1999, Unreal. Unreal was followed by both sequels and the immensely successful multiplayer spinoff series, Unreal Tournament. In 2006 launched a new single-player focused series on console, Gears of War, which was immensely successful. They also made immense amounts of money by licensing their Unreal Engine to other companies and publishers. In 2017 they redeployed the Unreal Engine to make a new, fun and lighthearted co-op shooter called Fortnite: Save the World, and its multiplayer spin-off, Fortnite: Battle Royale. Better known just as Fortnite, the game has become the biggest global success story since Minecraft, with Epic Games making significant profits from the game's downloadable extras and content.

Late last year, Epic Games launched the Epic Store, which they proudly proclaimed was going to take the fight directly to Valve. At first gamers chuckled and moved on: many companies had vowed to do the same thing and all had failed. But then Epic Games started doing something that no other would-be Steam-killer had done before: actively seeking out PC gaming developers and offering them staggering sums of money for a 12-month exclusivity period on PC. In addition, Epic Games offered to take only a 12% cut of the sales of games, as opposed to Valve's huge 30%. Developers, watching profit margins drop steadily over the years due to an inability to keep development costs down and also an inability to raise prices accordingly due to market saturation, started signing up enthusiastically.

The first casualty was Metro: Exodus. The third game in a popular first-person shooter series, following on from Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013), Metro: Exodus's Ukrainian developers were offered a huge sum of money for a 12-month exclusivity period. They agreed. Fans of the series and more casual gamers railed angrily against the development, citing it was bad form for a company to wall off a game behind a new service, especially a new service that did not have the ease of use or many of the most basic features of Steam. They were also suspicious of Tencent, a Chinese company accused of spying on customers, which had acquired a 40% stake in Epic in 2012. Despite these complaints, Metro: Exodus sold exceptionally well on release, outselling Metro: Last Light more than two-and-a-half times on launch day.

Last week Epic flexed its muscles by locking in Phoenix Point to an exclusivity period. Phoenix Point is the eagerly-awaited new turn-based tactics game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop and his company Snapshot Games. Using an approach similar to Firaxis's recent XCOM games, the game goes for a more simulated-based approach and has been praised for its gameplay decisions. For a tiny company like Snapshot the deal was apparently "impossible to resist," as the money offered could keep the company going for "years." For fans, the anger was much more palpable this time around and also more readily supported: Phoenix Point had been crowdfunded with the explicit promise that the game would be available on Steam and GoG on release day, and that was now not going to happen. Possibly the most eagerly-awaited PC game of 2019 became reviled overnight, with an absolute flood of refund requests pouring in.

But this has not stopped Epic's onslaught. In the last few days they have announced a blizzard of new acquisitions and deals. Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds, another of the most eagerly-awaited games of 2019, has joined the exclusivity deal (or, more accurately, publisher Take Two signed up for them). Quantic Dream, known for their moody console games with jaw-dropping graphics, were offered a deal so lucrative that they have gone back and dusted down all of their previous games going back to 2010 for release through Epic (comprising Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human). Remedy Entertainment's promising Control has also signed up, along with RTS Industries of Titan and The Sinking City. The full list is extensive and surprising, encompassing many mid-range upcoming PC games, which are the bread and butter of the platform.

This is nothing less than a full-scale assault on Valve's control of the PC gaming business. Whether it can be sustained is unclear, but it represents the biggest challenge to Steam's supremacy in over a decade. Valve will have to respond and in some respects it already has, promising to fix long-standing problems like people gaming the review system and offensive zero-budget, zero-effort games being shovelled onto the platform. The real test, I think, will come when a real AAA big-hitter that should be on Steam goes Epic Store exclusive. Take Two putting some games exclusively on Epic has to be a major concern. It's an open industry secret that Take Two and Rockstar Games are prepping a PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2, 2018's biggest game on console, for release likely in 2020. If they decided to make that game an Epic exclusive, it would be a huge and fundamental blow to Steam's position in the marketplace.

This battle could determine how PC games are bought, sold and played in the 2020s, so is hugely significant. But it may also be futile, as waiting in the wings is Google's Stadia system, which may offer a completely different, more Netflix-esque approach altogether. How this pans out will be very interesting, and no doubt contentious.

E3 2017 tidbits

The annual paen to shiny graphics and explosions, E3, is underway in Los Angeles at the moment. It's the year's biggest video game expo, a time for companies to make big announcements and grandiose promises that occasionally pan out but mostly don't. There is oddly little to get that excited about this year, but a few things stood out.

Metro: Exodus

The Metro video game series (comprising Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light) has been one of the most satisfying first-person shooter series of the last decade, going for Russian bleakness and evoking a sparse atmosphere of building tension and horror rather than going for bombast and lots of explosions. Metro: Exodus will apparently expand away from the Moscow metro (the setting for most of the first two games) and feature larger, less linear levels. Although highly promising (the red star steam engine looks cool), the concern remains that the first two games executed a single story brilliantly and ended at just the right moment. Here's hoping this third game enhances, rather than degrades, that legacy.

Total Warhammer 2

Or that would be the game's real title in a world that made sense, rather than the brain-numbingly silly Total War: Warhammer 2 (I'd take Total Waaagh!: Warhammer 2 at this point). Still, this sequel to the Creative Assembly/Games Workshop collaboration takes the war across the western ocean to Lustria, Ulthuan, Naggaroth and the Southlands. High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen and a "secret" race (who are totally not the Skaven) will join the roster. The sequel will have a stand-alone campaign but will also bolt onto the original Total Warhammer to unleash a massive, world-spanning conflict.

XCOM2: War of the Chosen

This is a comprehensive expansion for the splendid XCOM 2 which will add ruined, post-apocalyptic cities, complete with zombie-like mutants, as well as adding rival rebel factions you will be competing (and maybe fighting) against, but can also ally with against the alien threat. The game will also add new special alien bounty hunters who have been sent to take out your forces. Riffing off the Nemesis System from Shadows of Mordor, they will gain experience and level up as the game continues, becoming constant thorns in your side until you can finally take them out.

Anthem

A brand-new BioWare IP - their first in a decade - was always going to be a headline-grabbing moment. Unfortunately, the reception to Anthem didn't quite go the way BioWare were expecting. This is an action shooter which borrows - quite significantly - from the anime series Attack on Titan in its worldbuilding and setup, from Titanfall for its mechs (albeit much smaller than in that game) and from Destiny for its focus on co-op gameplay. Those hoping for a big, deep BioWare RPG like of old, or even another action/RPG hybrid like the Mass Effect series, were bitterly disappointed. Possibly prematurely, as the game actually looks pretty good.

Perhaps more notable were the games that didn't appear. Bethesda's science fiction mega-epic Starfield didn't make an appearance, despite heavy rumours, suggesting it's still a way off. Likewise CDPR held fire on Cyberpunk 2077, lending weight to the rumours it's now looking more like a 2019 release. Other games that looked reasonably interesting included Far Cry 5 and Bastard's Wound, an expansion for the excellent RPG Tyranny.