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Metro developer 4A Games briefly discussed its ambitions for next-gen graphics in a recent interview with Digital Foundry (opens in new tab), and after the visual splendor of Metro Exodus (opens in new tab), any graphics tease from 4A Games is mighty tantalizing.
“We are fully into ray tracing, dropping old-school codepath/techniques completely,” says chief technical officer Oles Shishkovstov. “Internally we experimented a lot, and with spectacular results so far. You will need to wait to see what we implement into our future projects.”
Shishkovstov’s comments are the footer for a lengthy discussion on the making of the Metro Redux Switch port, and with PS5 (opens in new tab) and Xbox Series X (opens in new tab) on the horizon, they’re some of the most interesting. The focus is on ray tracing here, which is basically a lighting technique that enables GPUs to better display and account for light direction and reflection.
Ray tracing has been around for a while now, but it only came to games relatively recently, and it was largely off-limits on current-gen consoles due to computational limitations. However, it’s clear that 4A Games is investing in ray tracing for its next-gen projects, which suggests the feature will be much more available in PS5 and Xbox Series X games.
Separately (opens in new tab), Shishkovstov added that, as far as next-gen features go, “I am more excited for not yet publicly revealed things.” We’ve known for a while that next-gen games and consoles will deliver plenty more than better lighting and visuals, but many features and figures have yet to be seen. We’d like to know what’s got Shoshkovstov so excited, whatever it is.
For now, here are 10 things we learned (opens in new tab) from Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s big Xbox Series X blog post.
