Metro Exodus may ruin the bullet economy

One of the main frustrating bugs I’ve only had once or twice was the humanoid looking mutants just not registering shots. In one tiny space there was a half dozen total and one of them literally took all my ammo and didn’t die when normally they were dying with a single head shot.

With the scarcity of my resources at that time I was not thrilled, but I have not had any crashes yet and only occasional hitches when there seems to be an area where there’s loads of fog being lit.

Overall I’m really enjoying it so far.

Man, there sure are some weird issues with this game. I hope it gets fixed up as soon as possible because it looks magnificent otherwise.

Jim Sterling put up an impression video, surprising he didn’t like it. You can hear his disappointment in not finding it fun.

He even mentions he loved 2033 and liked Last Light.

Almost seems this is a Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 situation where by adding in open world segments made the game less fun.

I cannot speak for Jim but I am finding the open world exploration and general gameplay loop to be a ton of fun.

Good review, I appreciate him explaining why he felt that way. It made me want to buy it. Slower paced, less claustrophobia, more open world and overly detailed sounds more like my kind of shooter than the previous Metro games.

Man I’m reading about problems with hdr, stutter, crashes, soft locks, dx12, subtitles, audio mixing, and more.

Thing is, I don’t remember Last Light being like that, it was fairly well polished.

Resetera is bitching central. But yeah in this particular case those bitchings are actually warranted. I mean I haven’t seen BSOD in like a decade, and Exodus gave it to me.

Oof, the blue screen of death is something I haven’t seen in forever either, but hearing you experienced it in Exodus is enough for me to wait at least a couple of weeks before jumping in.

Well to be fair it only happened in DX12. Once I switched to 11 I haven’t seen any issues yet, although I have only played for about an hour. I ordered 2080Ti so I am waiting with further playing for that and for the controller sensitivity fix.

+1 that has pretty much sold me on it too!!

Gamers With Jobs podcast talked about how the game autosaves poorly. Such as right after you fall off a cliff plunging into water that Artyom can’t swim in creating an endless loop of deaths after reloading.

I heard there were some issues with autosaves so I do copious quick saves (F5)

Great review. I don’t really follow Jim, does he usually go this into depth on gameplay? Because he really seems to nail the things the player should be concerned about.

I found the benchmark utility, so I ran two benches. One at my current settings (Ultra, which is what it defaulted to what for some reason what I thought the max is and have been playing at for that reason) and then a second one at Extreme. In both cases I turned off Hairworks and Advanced Physics because in my experience those are frame killers and don’t add a lot (though in Metro I suppose Hairworks could make some creatures look cooler, like in Witcher 3). Still, given how amazing this game looks I can’t complain at the numbers.

Ultra

Extreme

This is an older i7-4770K, 16GB DDR3, and a 1080Ti GTX for reference.

I watched both videos/benchmarks and I didn’t see any difference between Extreme and Ultra, which is often the case. If I had them running side by side I might see some difference here and there, but I don’t play games side by side with different settings, so I’ll keep it at Ultra for the extra FPS. It’s been running like a dream so far, I don’t see any overwhelming reason to make any changes. I may play with the hairworks stuff though, maybe I’ll run another bench with that on and with Ultra settings.

EDIT:
Interesting. Either there isn’t much in the benchmark in the way of showcasing/testing Hairworks, or it doesn’t really hit the performance too hard. I only lost a few frames on the average with it on. I guess I’ll turn it on and see how it goes in real world use.

The benchmark tool is btw vastly more demanding than the game, so you can generally add 20 fps to its results.

There’s a Digital Foundry interview today that dives into some of the graphics technology. I found it incomprehensable :)

Yeah, this seems to be completely true - I just played for about an hour on Extreme and my actual FPS hasn’t changed/felt any different over Ultra. I don’t have an FPS counter running (EPIC doesn’t seem to have one built in like Steam does, and FRAPS doesn’t work) but I’m not finding any functional difference so far. Then again, it also doesn’t look any different than on Ultra so far, either, like I said - I doubt the differences are super vast.

Well, I guess people who have it have been playing this weekend. Anyone want to write impressions?

So far this is exactly what I was hoping for. The more open spaces are giving me serious Stalker flashbacks (in a good way) and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

Haven’t run across any more buggy humutants, but twice I’ve watched bandits in combat literally walking around in the sky. One that I shot, zorped back comically to the roof of the structure I was fighting next to. Not sure what is going on there, but in general the bugs have seemed only occasional and really goofy.

This happened to me, but only once so far.

Here is my hot take.

To sum up, this is also what I was hoping for, it’s a really fun shooter with shades of Doom and Wolfenstein as well as a bit of the exploration, side quests, and interactive bits that something like a Far Cry has, all while being in a much richer world space.

I mentioned before but I really like the gameplay loop - in that, you get to a new area, and have a big map to explore. But while it’s not crazy big, it’s big enough to feel right and it’s packed full of stuff to reward exploration, from materials to weapon mods and upgrades to your armor/suit such as motion detectors, night vision goggles, and the like.

It’s a pretty game, with a really nice day and night cycle that combines well with the world. At night, human enemies are sleeping for the most part, save a few sentries, but the mutants and creature populations are more prominent, and in at least the early area, lightning balls can form randomly and wreak havoc at night. During the day, it’s a bit safer to travel, except for bandits and such. There are, peppered through the first map at least, safe houses where you can work shop and craft more ammo and rest to change the time of day, as well.

The reactivity of the game hasn’t been talked about much but it’s blowing my damned mind. Walking up to some villagers that believe electricity is a sin at night, and they complimented me for not having a “demon flash light” turned on, and thanked me for having my weapon holstered. I’ve been complimented on things I’ve done elsewhere, optional stuff even, from not killing my enemies to how I completed a quest, or if I talked to a specific person. It’s really impressing the hell out of me, and it seems to happen fairly often.

Only the one bug (above) so far, visuals have been out-freaking-standing while the tech runs like butter even on my “aging” hardware (I’m glad I didn’t invest in upgrading my PC last year like I was thinking, there was literally no need if I can run Exodus at Extreme 1440p @60fps, in my book), and every time I sit down to play something, I find I am launching this one more and more often than any other game I’m into.

On a side note, I read that playing with the native Russian voice work and English subtitles is a really immersive experience. I’m not finding that option anywhere, so if anyone knows how to pull that off I’d be up for trying it.