I found myself at a converted church, cut in half by a river, and its welcoming hosts turned dark. This time, I followed Anna, and this path was generally kinder, but it quickly got weird. I rebooted the demo, admitting defeat to Exodus's brutality. I almost immediately burnt through all of my ammo, health, and resources.
![e3 half life 3 e3 half life 3](https://www.petrofilm.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/55d8ed0d55573image.11015432_std.jpg)
Almost immediately, I was hounded by a four-strong pack of mutant wolves a trio of human frontiersman and a nuclear pterodactyl. When I disobeyed her command, she shouted a firm-but-understanding retort about my sway to stray. I quickly learned what not to do when I skipped away to the south, after my opening-game companion Anna asked me to follow her to the north once we'd disembarked from a freshly derailed train. Metro Exodus has a clear philosophy about side quests: they are equal parts must-do and must-avoid. What Beynon misses in that description is crucial.
![e3 half life 3 e3 half life 3](https://press-start.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Half-Life-3.png)
But Exodus quickly makes apparent why a player would-or would not-want to skip the beaten path. Each open zone's map only has its primary missions marked, either by icons on a mini-map or by NPCs yelling for you to follow in their direction. Its players will explore one open-ended hub world at a time before completing a linear mission that connects to the next open-ended hub space. Rather, 4A has applied its brutal style of difficult combat to something gorgeous and harrowing-and in doing so, may have turned the concept of open-world quest design on its head.ĤA describes Exodus's design as a mix of open-world and linear. That's not to say the Metro Exodus demo I played was a remarkable take on Valve cornerstones like experimental weapon design or first-person narrative framing. Instead, it vaguely refers to modern gaming as "the era of the best single-player games in years." That's its competition, the studio says.īut after two hours playing through the massive, harrowing, open-world terror of Metro Exodus, it's hard to escape the feeling that 4A had a specific goal in making a new, epic game with the word "Metro" on the title: not to beat an existing game, but to make the open-world version of Half-Life that Valve never got around to slapping the number "3" onto. So what, then, has driven inspiration and development on next year's sequel Metro Exodus? 4A isn't specific. A 4A representative at a pre-E3 event in May cited Valve's linear storytelling and knack for cinematic presentation as defining tentpoles for the games Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, which the studio now calls "two halves of the same game." SANTA MONICA, Calif.-The Ukrainian game developers at 4A Games don't hesitate to list Half-Life 2 as a defining inspiration for Metro, their long-running first-person shooter series.