4A Games’ fourth installment, Metro 2039, will have an Xbox showcase this Thursday, April 16, providing details on the upcoming title.
A new Xbox-branded announcement is expected later this week. 4A Games confirmed today that they will be hosting a digital presentation for the first-person action-shooter Metro 2039. This will be a first look at the upcoming fourth installment, set for Thursday, April 16. 4A Games confirmed they will continue to work alongside franchise creator, author, and activist Dmitry Glukhovsky on this project.
Metro Exodus was the last sequel game, released back in February 2019. The game followed iconic protagonist Artyom as he and his crew fled the Moscow Metro and trekked through Russia and parts of Kazakhstan on a locomotive called Aurora. It introduced a new open-world gameplay element. The team experimented with excluding mission markers to allow players to explore naturally. To keep the game immersive, the game had a minimalistic head-up display, as in-game information was physicalized through Artyom’s gear and equipment. This was one of the first games in the series to focus more on Artyom’s personal story and relationships, forgoing some of the supernatural elements found in previous games for a more grounded story.
“This will be the fourth mainline entry from 4A Games in the series based on the iconic novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky,” Xbox said, “all of which tell the stories of survivors of nuclear devastation living in the Moscow subway tunnels and the world that surrounds them.” Metro 2039 has been in active development for several years, and according to 4A Games, it will be heavily influenced by the experiences during the ongoing Russian invasion of their home country, Ukraine. 4A Games was founded in Kyiv, Ukraine, and later expanded into Malta.
“Metro has always had a hard-hitting, political, anti-war and often emotional story—and you can be sure these themes will continue thanks to our ongoing collaboration with franchise creator, author, and activist Dmitry Glukhovsky,” the developer said last year. “Dmitry has always spoken out against the war in Ukraine from the start—a courageous decision for any Russian that has seen him sentenced to jail (in absentia)—and we are proud to have him as a friend and co-creator as we tell this next, and never more relevant chapter of Metro together. Rest assured, you are in for quite the ride.”
This is crazy to think that the last game, Metro Exodus, came out a couple of years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Stripping away the supernatural elements of the games, the in-game dystopian world unfortunately reflects the situations of those living through the war. The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014 with Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. It will be interesting to see how Glukhovsky and the 4A Games team craft a story that weaves this piece of history into Metro 2039. The digital broadcast is expected to begin airing on Xbox’s official YouTube channel on Thursday, April 16, at 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET. Tune in to find out more details.
