Why Metro Exodus is so Immersive

When people talk about Metro Exodus, they often use the term “immersive”. But what do we actually mean when we use that word? Because, this is a term that is not very well defined. I’ve seen it used to describe games with hyper realistic graphics. Survival horror games. VR titles. Immersive sims. And I’ve seen people call a game immersive if it’s so captivating, you end up ignoring the world around you. It’s just a super vague term, and it's more often used as a marketing buzzword than serious game design lingo.

And yet, I totally get what people mean when they say that Metro Exodus is immersive. Because this game achieves something I don’t see very often in games - which is where I genuinely feel a sense of existing in the game’s world. In fact, i’ve only felt it a few times before, in games like Subnautica, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Event[0], and Far Cry 2. And it’s not to the extent where I forget that I’m sitting in front of a TV, and genuinely think I’m wandering around Africa or post apocalyptic Russia.

I’m not a complete idiot. But it just sells me on the feeling of being in a place - with much more effectiveness than most other games. And in a year that is already jam-packed with post-apocalyptic, open world shooters with crafting systems and drivable vehicles - Metro Exodus is the only one that really captures that feeling of being in a nuclear wasteland. And so, in this video, I want to bust apart the buzzwords and look at some super specific, totally tangible design decisions that are employed by developer 4A Games, to draw us into the world of Metro Exodus.

Now, for some background, the first two Metro games - Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, take place in the ruins of a Moscow that has been ravaged by nuclear war. The surface is a deadly, irradiated hell-scape that’s crawling with mutated creatures - but the underground Metro tunnels are safe, warm, and full of life. These games are primarily linear shooters. But Exodus is something quite different. In this one, hero Artyom and his pals decide to leave the Metro behind, and travel across post-war Russia to look for a safe place to live, overground.

They travel first on foot, and then later by train. Along your journey, you’ll stop off at various locations. Sometimes that’s for linear levels that harken back to the original games. But at other-times you get dropped off in miniature open world maps, like the icy banks of the Volga river, or a sparse sandy desert: which is actually the dried out Caspian sea. And it’s in these tiny open worlds that Metro Exodus is at its most immersive.

So the first, and most obvious way that Metro Exodus achieves immersion is the way the game rarely takes you out of the in-game world. So your map is sellotaped to a leather binder, and your quest marker is on a compass that’s strapped to your wrist. And when you’re crafting something, you’ve got to sling your backpack on the ground to get your materials out. Where other games would definitely make this stuff into menu screens or HUD elements, Metro makes them physical and tangible parts of the world, meaning the only time you disconnect from the world around you is when you pause the game, or hit a rare loading screen.

And there’s an interesting byproduct of this decision - and thats how you are left vulnerable when performing these actions. You don’t pause the game to craft things in the safety of a menu screen, but you do it in real time, in the world. So if you quickly need to craft a medkit in the middle of battle, you need to find a safe place and hastily get your bag out and patch together a box of Superdrug plasters. Of course, it’s possible to take this stuff too far.

A game like Red Dead Redemption 2 really focused on tangible and physical interactions with the world, with hyper detailed animations and menus that made you look through an authentic catalogue of cowboy hats. But, at times, it tipped the balance into tedium, and it also very rarely led to actually interesting gameplay consequences. But there’s more to Exodus’s grounded design. Something we see in a lot of open world games is upgrades.

You grab currency as you play through the game, and then open a menu to unlock new skills - from basic actions to superhero powers. Again, Exodus keeps things in the game world: So the only upgrades you can make to your character are from things you can actually find - whether that’s scopes and silencers that you rip off discarded weapons, or handy objects that you find on your travels. Metro Exodus actually feels like scavenging, while these other games are more akin to, well, shopping.

Another key way that Metro Exodus achieves immersion is by forcing you to be more aware of your surroundings and your status. It does this, in part, by asking you to constantly fix stuff. So your gas mask needs its filter replaced every few minutes. And any cracks and holes in the glass have to be patched up. You’ve got a gas-powered rifle, and you need to physically pump it by hand to keep using it. Your guns have to be regularly cleaned, or else they’ll jam in the heat of battle.

Your electrical gear, like your headlamp and night vision goggles, has to be charged by hand crank when the power runs low. And your health doesn’t regenerate, so you need to patch yourself up with medkits. It’s this sort of regular personal maintenance that means you must always be thinking about your character and your needs. We generally see this sort of gameplay in survival games, where you are constantly losing energy and becoming more hungry - and by having to always think where your next meal will come from, you become more immersed in the situation.

I’d argue, however, that a lot of these games do go too far. These meters bottom out so quickly that you end up just fretting about running out of energy all the time. And now you’re no longer thinking about the world as a real place, but a collection of The Sims-style meters that always need to be topped up. Exodus takes a much lighter touch: Artyom never needs to eat a sandwich or go to the toilet, and the only punishment for letting something break is a momentary setback.

But it’s enough of a concern to occupy some space in your mind, and make you more aware of yourself. Same goes for the harsh resource scarcity. You are regularly running out of ammo in this game, to the point where you count your bullets before every engagement because you need to be sure you have enough ammo to make it out alive. Maybe it’s better to just let the enemies walk past. You can craft stuff, as I said, but there are limitations here as well.

This is not a game where you can sellotape together a helicopter, after all. So, for one, Metro Exodus only has two crafting resources: metal and chemical. And because everything comes from the same source, you’re constantly having to make decisions about where to spend your scrap. Do you make health packs? Or ammo? Or filters? Or grenades? You can’t have everything. And, also, Metro limits the things you can craft based on your location.

Because while you can piece together bullets when you’re at a crafting workbench, the only ammo you can make when out and about is ball bearings for your pneumatic gun. So you have to think ahead about what you’ll need to carry with you. The main way that Exodus makes you more aware of your surroundings, is by not doing what most open world games do - which is filling your map with icons and question marks and tiny points of interest.

No. In Exodus, your map is empty (outside of your mission marker) and it’s up to you to fill it up. You can do this by getting somewhere high, pulling out your binoculars, and focusing the lens on curious locations. When you actually reach that location, though, Exodus is - again - very different to your usual open world game.

So, the third way that Exodus lures you into its world, is by never giving you full information about what’s going on. You see, when you play something like Rage 2, it will tell you exactly what each area on the map is as soon as you get within 100 metres. In this case, it’s a bandit camp. And so, just like the 20-or-so other bandit camps in the world, you know that this location has a number of bad guys that you need to kill.

It even tells you what resources you can find there, because who doesn’t like checklists? But Metro Exodus gains a great deal by not telling you this information about its world. So, here, I came across a wrecked airplane hangar. Outside, I found and killed a flying gargoyle mutant. Then I went inside, and found a bunch of monsters - only to suddenly hear a bunch of bandits pull up outside and start shouting at me. I then fought them off, until one gave up and surrended.

I didn’t know exactly what was happening and I didn’t know what to expect. And I didn’t know if I would be rewarded for my efforts. I just had to become fully immersed in the experience at hand. Because when developers have systems in their game, it’s really up to them how much they reveal to the player. Games like Rage 2 and Far Cry New Dawn are extremely open - but more immersive games can withhold that information, and keep you from ever being able to predict what will happen next.

Like, when enemies surrender, you’re left asking… what happens if you leave them? Will they sneak up behind your back? Or run away? What happens if you kill them? You just don’t know. Here’s another story. There was a time in the Caspian area where I got ambushed by roving bandits in a truck, and was plunged into a frantic, dusty firefight. And then a short while later I slept in a safe house, only to be woken up by enemies surrounding me outside.

I genuinely still have no idea whether these were scripted events, or systemic moments driven by the AI. But it doesn’t matter because the effect was the same: they were surprising, unpredictable, and anxiety-inducing moments. Compare that to something like a scavenger in Far Cry New Dawn. They’ve got an icon over their head, and a tool tip in the corner of the screen, and it’s immediately obvious that this is a distinct, authored chunk of content that will be repeated over and over again.

It feels gamey and inauthentic. As always, there’s a balance to strike. some games end up being so withholding about their systems that they are completely impenetrable. And players need a certain amount of information and predicability to make effective plans and play with intentionality. So it’s not just about being completely random - it’s about stopping players from ever finding the edges of the simulation.

The final element, is player reactivity. I think the most believable and immersive game worlds, are the ones that most effectively react to your presence and decisions. Metro Exodus certainly has a bunch of this. You can holster your gun as you approach people, and they’ll realise that - and some will appreciate it. And choosing to save characters, like slaves and captured prisoners, can have consequences later on. In one section in the Volga I saved some people, and got given a key.

And then, later, I used that key to unlock a door in some flooded train station to find a pair of night vision goggles. That felt amazing, and the goggles became a powerful reminder of one of my wasteland stories. Exodus also has characters who ask you to find stuff for them, like a guitar or a lost teddy bear. This doesn’t turn into a checklist in your quest log, and there’s rarely a tangible reward for your actions.

But the way the game reacts to your kindness with heartfelt character moments makes it totally worth going out of your way. This all plays into the morality system, which is one of the weaker elements of Metro Exodus. It’s one of those systems where it weighs up your quote unquote good and bad actions, and then plays a good or bad ending cutscene depending. And the bad ending will probably get canonically binned by the next game in the series.

And so there are games that do player reactivity better than Metro, and I’ll come to them in the future. But it’s an important part of immersion, and definitely worth talking about.

So Metro Exodus shows four key ways to make a game feel immersive. It keeps things grounded by having all of your interactions be physical, tactile, and in-world. It asks you to be hyper aware of your existence in the world, by asking you to maintain your equipment, and scout ahead with your binoculars. It withholds information about the game’s underlying systems, so feel like you never quite know what will be around the next corner.

And it reacts to you, by commenting on, rewarding, and remembering your actions. The immersive thrills of Metro are about more than just the realistic graphics, the cracking sound design, or the fact that you can play with Russian voice acting turned on. ANNA: *Speaking Russian* And there’s more to it than the simple fact that the game is first person, and the main character doesn’t speak. Those are all important, but it’s these design decisions that - together - mean Metro Exodus feels like more than a game.

It’s a harrowing, unknowable, uncharted place that you travel to.

Hey, thanks for watching! Remember that the GMTK Game Jam begins in August - and full details will be coming next month. GMTK is paid for by fans who support the show on Patreon.com, and I massively appreciate everyone who supports the show - no matter how much, or how long they give for!