'The most striking on the surface thing is going to be the density of what you see' — Metro 2039 creative director says the game's new engine allows 'billions' of objects, whereas Metro Exodus allowed up to 30 million

• Metro 2039 creative director Andriy Shevchenko says the new game engine allows for "billions" of objects
• Executive producer Jon Bloch reveals it enables 4A Games to create a realistic and dense world
• Bloch says the team is working to optimize the game for lower-spec, as well as high-spec, systems

Metro 2039 creative director Andriy Shevchenko has revealed that 4A Games' latest game engine allows for "billions" of assets to create a dense, realistic world.

In a new interview with TechRadar Gaming, Shevchenko, alongside executive producer Jon Bloch, discussed how the new engine enabled the team to overhaul the game's audio system, enhance ray-tracing, and improve visual immersion by increasing the density of objects and characters.

"We're able to push so much more into the world to make it that much more realistic, that much more alive feeling, that much more tactile," Bloch said, adding that these improvements also come with challenges of balancing these features and ensuring the game is "performant."

"I would say probably the most striking on the surface thing is going to be the density of what you see in the picture of all the objects," he said.

Shevchenko added that during the development of Metro Exodus, the game engine could support up to 30 million objects, but it supports "billions of objects" for Metro 2039.

"It's all to give freedom for level art, level design, all [the] people working on this level, [to] do whatever you want," the creative director said. "We have almost endless limits. And we are reaching these limits every time."

As Bloch said, these impressive technical leaps also come with challenges, with Shevchenko explaining that there's some "black magic of balancing" and "getting rid of something really unnecessary and focusing on really cool things. But it's a really user-friendly engine," with "limits only in your head."

Metro 2039 will be multiplatform, launching on PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC, and Bloch explained that it's one of the team's priorities to make sure the game is optimized across all platforms.

"We don't develop on PC and then port later to consoles," he said. "We're developing constantly across everything that we're going to support. So from day one, we're running on console, and so we're keeping all that in mind.

"We're optimising to the low end, to the lowest spec, and then also trying to push things as far as we can with the other platforms that allow us to push, particularly obviously with PC when new kinds of video cards come out; we're like, 'Oh, what can we do with this now?' While still making sure that the lower-spec hardware can still handle things."

Metro 2039 arrives in February 2027.

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