Metro 4 returns to Moscow. Why?!
There is no official information, trailers or screenshots from Metro 4 yet. It is known that the game is in development since 2020, and the authors are trying to express his own traumatic experience and the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war in a new project.
“We’ve never hidden the fact that the Metro series has always carried a strong political and anti-war message. Yes, we’ve always wanted to entertain and immerse you [players] and immerse you in our post-apocalyptic world, but we also needed to tell something more. n our post-apocalyptic world but there’s also been a bigger story to tell. And the war in Ukraine has made us re-think what kind of story the next Metro should be about. All the themes of Metro – conflict, power, politics, tyranny, repression – are now part of our daily-life experiences. So, we’re embracing them and weaving them into the game with a renewed purpose,” says the latest update on the studio’s website, the first in almost two years, by the way.
On the other hand, there was a recent Tom Henderson’s leak which says that the game is already fully playable and will be announced sometime in 2023, with an eye on a release in 2024. Again, there aren’t many details, but it seems like Metro 4 starts with the main character sleeping, after which he wakes up in a base. Whether it will be the same Artyom as in the previous parts of the series is currently unknown.
But, as the editors of Mezha learned from their own sources, the events of Metro 4 are again taking place in Russia, and even more so, partly in Moscow, and this seems … … … strange. In Kyiv, a 30-minute drive from Bucha and Irpin, to make a game about Moscow under missile strikes?!?!
I’m sorry, but the only option in which Ukrainians will be able to accept Metro 4 in Moscow is to play as a landing party of the Special Operation Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which burns the entire Moscow subway to concrete walls. Everything else is unacceptable. In fact, after everything that happened after February 24, 2022, even the thought of playing as a Russian in a post-Soviet Russia setting is disgusting. Whatever the most powerful and important anti-war and anti-totalitarian message this game carries. The time to talk and hint at something to the Russians has already passed.
It’s actually very surprising that 4A Games didn’t jump at the idea of moving the events of Metro 4 to the US and continue “Sam’s Story”, making him, and not a Russian, the main character. That would solve all the problems.
We will remind you that the creative director of 4A Games Andrii Prokhorov, who managed the creative part of the development of all Metro, has not worked at the studio for several years. In 2020, 4A Games became part of the Swedish holding company Embracer Group (formerly Nordic Games), which transferred the studio to the management of Russian Saber Interactive.
And although Saber Interactive is officially considered an American company, it is not. The first and largest Saber studio is located in St. Petersburg (Russia) and in 2001-2015 the studio was mentioned in the Russian gaming media exclusively as Russian. The lion’s share of the studio’s employees, we are talking about more than 90%, are Russians. In addition, Saber has a branch office in Minsk (Belarus), as well as studios in Saransk (Russia) and Veliky Novgorod (Russia).
As far as the editorial team know, it was because of the transition of the studio under the leadership of Saber that some of the old employees of 4A Games decided to quit.
The editorial team of Mezha have been trying for several weeks to get at least some kind of response from 4A Games studio regarding Metro 4. All our letters and messages have been ignored.