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AusGamers: Ladies and gents, welcome back to AusGamers. You’re here once again with Stephen Farrelly; we’re out at Tokyo Games Show and continuing out tradition with not actually looking at any Japanese games, we’ve found a game that you all know, Metro: Last Light.

I’m here with Huw, who we’ve spoken to before -- you guys might remember that we spoke to him at E3 -- and we got a lot of really good information about the PC and how it’s running this game and making it look really good, even though it [the PC specs] wasn’t juiced as as much as we thought it might be -- because it looked so damn good.

What we want to do today... I know you can’t really talk too much about multiplayer, because that’s stuff that you’re revealing a bit down the track and I know you can’t really reveal too much about the story because of spoilers, but I’m going to try and see what I can get out of you anyway.

One of the things I wanted to know is that in that opening sequence -- that everybody can see in the video of the E3 demo -- how much geometry is actually there? Because that looks like you could walk quite far into the distance -- the engine is obviously quite powerful.



Huw Beynon: Yeah, it’s pushing quite a lot of detail in the opening scene. That was built very much as an environment to set up the scene, so whether you actually play through that exact level [in the final game] I think is going to remain to be seen.

We do have some pretty large outdoor levels. As you’ll remember, we have some fairly extensive outdoor spaces in the first game - I think that big outdoor section before you got to Black will kind of give you an idea of the scale of some of those outdoor levels.

AusGamers: Also, in the fascists scene, where it’s pretty scary walking through all those crazy people: is there an actual number of characters on screen there? Because that looks like a lot of people.

Huw: I don’t know the exact number, I think it’s certainly over 50. That’s where we use some of the DX11 techniques, using tessellation and depth of field as you’re approaching and move closer to the characters in the near-field it adds progressive layers of detail as you move past so they still look absolutely fantastic -- that’s one of the nicer DX11 tricks we have.

AusGamers: And you guys obviously worked pretty closely... I mean we’ve talked about the first game being the poster-child for DirectX. What’s being pushed out of that this time around?

Huw: At this stage in development, a lot of the work has gone into optimising the engine as it stands, so I think as we’ve said before, we’ve been running this on kit that’s off-the-shelf -- that you can conceivably buy today. So the demos you saw today, I think these guys got their hands on a single Nvidia 590 card. It’s an i7 processor and I think it’s packing something like 16 Gig of RAM -- which is always fun.

So that’s something that you can conceivably go out and buy. It’s going to cost you a lot of money, but it’s not a mythical supercomputer, it’s within the reach of the consumer and by the time we release next year, I think that kind of benchmark is going to be much more accessible.

We’re already using some of the same DX11 techniques that we did last time, but at this stage we’re still quite a long way from release. Hardware’s going to change over the next 12 months; there’ll be more things that we can do. The engine itself is very, very scalable, so... I don’t mean to boast, but we’re not really pushing the hardware at the moment. We’ll wait and see where the cutting edge is next year, then we’ll figure out what we can do to really take advantage of that so it’s really only going to look better.



AusGamers: Well just on the whole PC front, one of the other things I want to know is, is the multiplayer going to be large scale or small scale? And if it is large scale, will you guys be looking at things like dedicated servers?

Because THQ kind of have a bit of a byline of making sure that the PC community is looked after and [that it] is the best possible product there and obviously the game in and of itself speaks for that. So I know you can’t talk too much about it, but it would be nice to get some kind of assertion as to whether or not that’s what you would support.

Huw: I can’t really talk too much about multiplayer at the moment, but the studio’s heritage is very much on the PC side and I’d like to think we’ll make the right decisions for the PC audience. That’s pretty much all I can say at the moment.

AusGamers: Right, ok. Because I was going to ask if multiplayer would include something along the lines of co-op? Because -- especially in the demo that you've shown -- it seems like it would be pretty fitting for the game to actually have a co-op component.

Huw: Yeah, in this phase where we’re not really talking about multiplayer, I hear plenty of really great and interesting suggestions about what the multiplayer might be. Pretty much all that we can say at the moment... I guess there are two things to say about multiplayer. First of all, I think there’s that because we were a single-player game only the first time around that a lot of people ask the question “Why are you adding multiplayer to it?”. There’s this fear that it’s somehow going to detract from the single-player experience, whereas in reality it’s very different groups of people working on it and our primary objective, first and foremost, is to create another crafted single-player experience, because that’s what fans of the original really want.

So I don’t want anyone to think that the addition of multiplayer is somehow to the detriment of the single-player campaign. In terms of what that multiplayer is, I think we have a really interesting setting to play around with -- it’s not military, it’s not sci-fi, it’s taking everything that’s true about this Eastern European... this Russian vision of the post-apocalyptic world and injecting multiplayer into that. As you’ve seen we’ve got some phenomenal tech at our disposal -- but maybe you don’t see that used in the multiplayer context so much -- and we have a really fascinating set of weapons; the hand-made weapons that are original weaponary but frankensteined with all these various attachments and so on and so forth.

So that could probably give you some ideas as to what a multiplayer component might look like, but as I say, we’ll show it when we’re ready to show it.



AusGamers: Ok, well that’s a really good segue actually, because one of the other questions I had was about the weapons. When you pick up the really big... I don’t actually know the name of it is, but I guess chain-gun type weapon early on in the demo, it looks like it’s laying on a bench with a bunch of tools and I’m just wondering if there’s going to be any weapon crafting in the game?

Huw: We’re looking at how you change and upgrade your weapons. In the first game, you literally just swapped out your weapons for an alternative -- whether you were buying or picking it up from the ground -- so some of the weapons had lots of different upgrade paths. For instance with the pistol, you could add stock to it, you could extend the barrel, you could add a silencer, you could add a scope.

We’re still experimenting with exactly how that process works -- whether, again, it’s a straight swap out or whether it’s something that you can kind of build up over time. As I say, we’re still pre-alpha at the moment so quite a lot of those elements are still being worked through as we speak.

AusGamers: And obviously there’s a bit of a change to the currency system -- which was ammunition in the first game. It seems like in the demo it’s being spent quite thriftily against the enemies...

Huw: Well part of that was... we’ve made no bones about the fact that the demo was originally crafted to be shown at E3 and that demands a certain type of experience to cater for the audience there. So we really wanted to focus on the more action side of it. Not least to show that we’ve made those improvements to the core areas that I don’t think we did so well last time around.

We will be having that... ammo is an incredibly valuable commodity and in the full game, you will be expected to hunt for ammo; you’ll want to preserve it; it will have a value to you. It’s very difficult to demonstrate that in a fifteen minute demo, so for the purposes of what we showed you, we didn’t worry too much about the ammo side. We wanted to be able to show the player using lots of different weapons freely so you got a sense of the new weapons that we were adding and the effects of the weapons.

But ammo is very much an important commodity and currency. We still haven’t decided whether it’s going to be exactly the same system as the previous game. It was a great concept and idea; it was certainly true to the novel. Whether we explained it as good as we could have done and allowed the player to make good informed decisions about whether they should be spending or saving their currency is something that we may be able to address with balancing and tweaking and just keeping the system the same, or we may need to make a few changes to it, to make it work better as a gameplay device.

But it’s something that we feel very strongly about that we want to include in the game and I think overall that idea that all resources are limited -- whether it’s health, or air, or light, or ammunition -- those kind of dynamics really lend themselves to the survival-horror vibe of certain passages of the game. So we definitely want to keep that.



AusGamers: Now also for the purposes of the demo, I’m wondering two things. One, there’s basically no HUD, so I’m wondering if that’s for the purposes of the demo or is that an actual intended gameplay component? And if so, what’s the contextual feedback for players in understanding how much ammunition they’ve got left and health and things like that. And part two to that is: I realise that light is a really important element of the game, in that killing light means that you’re basically going to be out of sight.

But in the early part of the demo, you are shooting out lights with people in pretty close vicinity but they’re not really responding to the gunshots. So I’m wondering if that’s another demo-specific thing and if you are working on the idea that the AI will react to occlusion and things like that?

Huw: So as I say, we’re still relatively... we’re a long way from completion at the moment. We will be revising the HUD. It’s perfectly possible to play the game without it; I think it was an option that we had with the original version of the Ranger mode and it kind of makes you realise when you do take it away entirely and let the player who’s maybe played through once before, understands all the shortcuts and they don’t need the weapon-wheel to come up and they’re comfortable counting in their head how many bullets they’ve got left -- it is actually perfectly playable like that now.

For me, that’s the perfect way that you should play Metro. You don’t automatically have a counter in the bottom of your vision that tells you how many bullets you have left. But then, videogames are never the most realistic things in the first place anyway, so let’s not get too carried away in terms of saying that by having no HUD it makes it more realistic than not.

But we will be introducing some kind of HUD; it will be redesigned from the original game. We want to make it as as unobtrusive as possible and still try and communicate as much as we possibly can to the player without the use of the HUD -- simply so that when they choose to discard it, they feel that they’re getting the information that they need.

So whether that’s gas masks frosting up, or a large number of weapons you can actually see the amount of bullets left in the magazine when you hold it up in front of you -- having that information visually told to the player is, I think, one way of really immersing them within the game.

In terms of “do the guards notice lights being shot out?”, well they will notice a light being shot out. A lot of it will depend on a very sophisticated balance of how far away they are from it at the time, the weapon that you’re using to do it -- even silenced weapons for instance, they can overhear. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Tihar which is the pneumatic weapon that fires ball bearings -- it has the pressure gauge that shows how powerful the shot’s going to be.

If you pump that up fully, it overcharges the shot, which gives you a more powerful shot, but it actually gives the weapon a bigger audible range. So you need to be careful that you’re not creeping up behind someone with a fully-pressurised Tihar.

So if you see something in the demo, whereby you think an AI hasn’t heard or noticed something happening, it probably means that at the moment it’s outside the range that the rules of logic say that should happen. But that’s something we’re constantly working on and refining.

I think that again, it comes back to that question of realism. Games are not going to be realistic, so it’s more important that they are consistent and you kind of explain the rules of engagement. So if I the player shoot out this light, it will create a pool of darkness that I can move into: am I going to get noticed or not? If I am going to get noticed, I wouldn’t do it. I need to know whether I will or won’t because that helps me form a strategy and then execute that strategy.

So it’s more about consistency, rather than trying to be completely realistic. So long as we explain the rules to the player and they realise what they can get away with and what they can’t, I think that will make a much more interesting experience that trying to say “well if it’s completely realistic, then where are these guys' toilets? Where are they getting their food from?”



AusGamers: You would just descend into pedanticism.

Huw: Yeah, you’d just kind of go down the rabbit-hole. “How is it really that you can recover health from just sticking an adrenaline syringe in you?” It’s that balance of realism and gameplay mechanics that actually makes a game fun and enjoyable to play.

These guys out in Ukraine, they love trying to introduce as much realism as they can into a game, but sometimes you can go too far with that. It’s important to balance it with clear mechanics that actually make the game fun.

AusGamers: Another mechanic is that you have a much more robust destruction model this time around. One of things I noticed is that it seems like fire propagates just a little bit, so I’m curious to know if you can actually use fire as a tool to cause your own specific destruction?

Huw: Yeah, well we showed a similar style of playthrough [at TGS] that you maybe saw at E3 -- we start with stealth then give ourselves away and it all goes guns blazing -- but there are multiple ways of playing through that level, including one whereby you can ghost your way through -- not fire a single shot, not get detected by anyone -- and breeze through in about two minutes if you know what you’re doing.

There’s another interesting playthrough where we have a hidden stash of claymore mines -- these brutal hand-made concoctions obviously -- that you can pick up and place them around the entrances to that ground floor building. Then you may have noticed there are some of those paraffin lamps around there that cause the fire to spread, you can actively shoot one of those out to create a few, which will then alert the guards and they’ll come rushing out and trigger the claymores as they go there.

So it’s a very small level -- that environment is a very small compact level -- but there are so many different ways that you can actually get through it using different bits of the environment -- using the physical properties of the environment. Whether it’s shooting the water over the fire -- which both attracts them over and creates that pool of darkness -- to using fire to create a distraction, or shooting through bits of cover to give yourself a line of sight.

So it’s really about making the environment as rich and dynamic as possible to give the player options.

AusGamers: Is that indicative of a lot of the game? Being given those systems for emergent play, In that players can basically just choose tactically how they want to play the game.

Huw: Yeah, we’re trying to mix it up. It’s particularly relevant against the human AI, which behaves more rationally and can be maybe be guided in certain ways. So, we’ll use it when the environment is right.



AusGamers Now finally -- because I don’t want to hang on to your time too much longer -- let’s bring this one back to the PC components: have you guys thought about and would you like to throw something out to the mod community as well?

Because again, this game seems like the sort of thing that would actually work quite well with modders. You’ve got such robust tools and a great looking game, and the setting alone just screams for some user-generated content.

Huw: To be honest, that’s something that I personally don’t know how to answer for you. I know that there’s undoubtedly a demand for that. I don’t know if it’s something that the studio are planning or feel able or comfortable to do, so I don’t want to make a promise that I can’t keep on that one. But we definitely hear that request.

AusGamers: Alright, well we’ll leave it there Huw. Again, the game looks fantastic, so please show us some more as quickly as possible.

Huw: Sure. Thank you.

AusGamers: Thanks.