Metro Exodus may ruin the bullet economy

Slightly annoying the dlc is half off at both Epic and Steam but not Windows.

Hang on - the base game isn’t on Gamepass any more, so I would need to rebuy it somewhere to try the dlc? Hmm, that’s not goin to happen.

Just finished this, I really enjoyed the outdoor levels. And despised the tunnel levels. (Which is also why I played Metro 2033 for all of two hours.)

Holy shit the mute main character. Sooo dumb. But he talks in the loading screens! I really don’t get it, at all. They don’t have to go full RPG, just record even a dozen or so responses per level and it would have been enough for them to write around it without it being ridiculous, like it is with a mute protagonist. My favorite was when Anna or Miller would call me on the radio. What, do they really expect me to respond? I can’t! So dumb.

Visually more Stunning.

I gave that another go on some Stadia trial and there’s just so much linear/cutscene exposition early on it was really irritating. In my mind the game starts in those open swamp and desert regions but I didn’t have the patience to even get that far on a second playthrough.

It’s on sale on Xbox Live, for $12 I think. Last day of sale. I’m thinking of getting it tonight, just because it’s getting ray tracing support on XSX and PS5:

Sounded to me like it was going to be a new SKU? Are you sure that buying the current version is going to get you the upgraded ray tracing?

Here’s the page where I got that:

Relevant bit:

Back in November last year we revealed our roadmap for the Metro series and confirmed that Metro Exodus would be coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2021 as a free upgrade that would take full advantage of the power of these new consoles.

Series X and PS5 getting 4K/60 and all lighting ray traced. But PC is getting some advanced ray traced reflections and DLSS 2.0.

Series S will target 1080p/60 and all lighting ray traced.

Yes and all upgrades will be free if you already own the game, unlike the Control “ultimate edition” bullshit.

I’ll be very surprised if the XSS can handle 1080p60 with RT global illumination. 1080p30 seems plausible, 60 not so much. If they do it, that means MS (and thus Windows/AMD) does indeed have some form of machine-learning upscaling functional.

Digital Foundry get their hands on it. Only runs on cards with RT hardware I think? It’s like Quake 3 all over again.

Comes out in a week or so.

Yes, it’s enhanced for current-gen consoles, both of which have RT. The PC version just comes along for the ride.

And the sweet DLSS 2.0 upgrade.

Alex Battaglia is in his own special heaven :)

Don’t think they could possibly get happier than the Crysis remaster. Those dudes love Crysis. In a very sexual way.

Looks like quite a change in feel in some scenes.

Designers hand-placed fake lights in the original rasterized version. Turns out they made many scenes much darker than they actually would be but that was their artistic vision, which the new release changes. Whether it’s an improvement thematically is I suppose up to each person’s preference, but it looks more “right”, and that aids immersion.

I’d love another play though… too many games though :/ I guess saves won’t carry over from the older version.

Actually it’s insane this was a Gamepass title - I’d forgotten that. Our cups runneth over.

Actually thinking back to 2019, as I recall, the original RT version was too dark, much darker than the rasterized version. So really this new one with more than 1 RT bounce may come closer to the original artistic vision too.

I really like this game but never finished. The reason is that IMO they made a major mistake. For the forest section/area of the game, to get the “good” ending (yes, I spoiled myself) you have to play through almost entirely stealthily AND avoid any combat. This just ruins the game flow, which up until that point was a straight up shooter where you used stealth at time to gain the advantage or avoid certain unnecessary combats. This section is pretty long and it just took me entirely out of the game and I just lost interest. I loved it up to this point but this section totally bored me because the game play was so different than the rest of the game. Yeah, I guess I could have ignored trying for a certain ending but that’s just me. I don’t think games just change what they are doing mid way through for such a large area and it really hurt the game IMO.

Best Metro yet…loved it. I will do a full trilogy playthrough later this year, with first time playing Redux versions and than this raytraced extravaganza.

Awesome work by DF as usual.