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The Metro series has its roots in war-scarred post-apocalyptia, as such, it grapples with a lot of themes: The indescribable cost of nuclear war, the grim, complicated grey at the heart of humanity, and the cost of human life in a world no longer built to support it.
Which, to those developers who founded the studio in Ukraine and have been under similar duress as their contemporaries at GSC, has become all too real of a prospect. The studio even tragically lost one of its animators, Andrii ‘Nizrok’ Korzinkin, who fought and died in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Speaking to Eurogamer‘s Dom Peppiatt in an interview concerning the studio’s latest game Metro 2039, executive producer Jon Bloch tells the site: “The previous games were about preventing war; the themes and the morals and all that supported this idea that revolved around ‘how do we as humans stop the cycle that we keep finding ourselves in’.
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“And when Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that brought war to our doorstep. Now, our team has been living in a state of war for the last four and a half years. And that changes things. Significantly.”
This manifests for 4A Games as a major shift in how it thinks about morality. Namely, this idea that a post-apocalyptic world has to deal with shades of grey—the ‘everyone is the hero of their own story’ idea that comes from an imagined world where resources are scarce and everyone’s starving.
But faced with the evils of the real world, that’s shifted: “in a situation like this, as the story explores what authoritarian regimes do, and what happens when one takes over, and what happens as they grow and take more and more power… there is nothing good about that. There is only evil involved in that.
“And so the grey morality of the past needs to be more defined now. It needs to be more specific and clear. And so our approach needed to change and, therefore, the story needed to change … Now that war is here, we need to talk about the consequences of it. We’re not building this based off of literal real-world events, but Metro has always been political and it continues to be that in the lessons and the morals that the game tries to teach.”
Co-creative director Pawel Ulmer concurs, telling the site: “we have this chance to show people what can actually happen if the world would stop working on preventing war. And ironically, we’re making [a game] in a world which is already dead! But our world – the real world—still has a chance.”
“Metro was always about the cult of war, the propaganda, people dying, and the cost of others’ ambitions. It didn’t become politicalised; it always has been. But what’s become uncomfortable is that the franchise’s very nature is getting too close to reality.”
It’s perhaps easy to dismiss the role that any art—not just videogames—has to play in the bluntly horrifying existential circumstances the modern day finds itself in. But given Russia itself tried to spark a boycott of Stalker 2, a game that nonetheless grew so popular it throttled Ukraine’s internet for hours, it’s clear that these studios continuing to put their experience into art is vital.
