Huw Beynon on Metro Last Light and the hell that is E3

THQ's global head of communications takes us through a demo of the Metro 2033 sequel, and talks about the reception of this fringe success.

Huw Beynon is a very serious man. All of his responses are carefully measured, punctuated with a series of pauses that makes dictaphone recordings of them refreshingly easy to type up.

It's rare you'll see him smile, which is understandable given how stressful his job must be. The one picture I could find of him online is scarily accurate, given that this is the expression he wears much of the time.

As the developers of Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, the upcoming sequel, are based in the Ukraine, they have a whole wealth of problems with language, logistics and visas when it comes to showing their games outside of the country – so Beynon is their point man in the wider world.

The relationship with this scrappy studio (that boasts 80 employees, now, which is still small compared to the teams of hundreds that work on most AAA titles) has led to him getting more and more involved with the project. He's certainly quick to correct me when I say the first game wasn't as popular as it should have been.

"Through word of mouth it's passed a million sales on PC alone, and looking at the Xbox Live reports we're close to around a million unique players on there, too," Beynon says. "Two million would be a good number for any game, and that'd typically be released on PS3 as well.

"I think, by THQ's own admission, they did a miserable job of promoting it and marketing it the first time around. That was more to do with the fact that, at the time, they were going through some re-organisation and all eyes were on their internal studios with games like Red Faction Guerrilla and the first UFC title coming up. This, in their minds, looked like a niche Eastern European title with limited appeal."

A quick reading of the synopsis suggests such an outlook wasn't entirely unexpected. The games are set in a post-apocalyptic Russia, and follow lead character Artyom's struggles to survive against radical military groups and roving supernatural terrors in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Play takes place in cramped, bunker-strength Metro tunnels or across a blasted, irradiated surface world – resources are scarce and fighting for replacement air canisters to let you carry on breathing is the sort of desperate measure the game has you taking on a regular basis.

"They realised too late in the day what an unpolished gem they had, waiting to be discovered," Beynon says. "As a result it was released with very little fanfare from THQ for what is, actually, an extremely high-quality game with a few flaws that kept it in that cult classic status, rather than an outright classic."

The success of the first title – even though it took a while – is admirable, considering where the studio had come from and how little attention the game received from the publishers.

The gaming culture in Eastern Europe doesn't have the benefit of the four decades of gaming history that the West has gone through. Studios are formed not of lifelong game-makers, but people who had other (fairly serious) jobs before they took up the mantle of game designer – among 4A's staff are ex-theoretical mathematicians, fine artists, and pure scientists. The head of creative was, back in the day, a mechanical engineer.

"All of those Eastern European sensibilities and aesthetic tones and qualities are being brought to bear in some really interesting ways on it," Beynon says. "It lends them a different perspective, and a different process. I think you see that reflected in the game.

"They seem to be under much less pressure to conform to trends that get established by some of the flagship studios; they're obviously cognisant and aware of those developments and you can see elements of Western games coming into titles like Metro, but they're drawing from a very different set of influences, both cultural and historical, and I think it guides their game development from a very different perspective."

E3 2011 proved to be a stern lesson in not conforming to trends. In an effort to show off the shooting and stealth elements of the new title on the show floor, the studio put together a 12-minute patchwork sequence of different moments throughout the game, many of them involving blazing away at waves of enemies with fully-automatic weaponry.

While it overlooked a lot of the traditional elements of stealth, deprivation and exploration associated with the shooter – and replaced them with a minecart section – it did its job. The trailer stood out, but perhaps a little too much. Fans were disappointed.

"We'd received comments about shooting and stealth, so we showed you all 12 minutes of lots of the stuff – and, of course, after that, the people who really liked Metro said they were worried that we'd turned the game into a Big Shooty Thing," Beynon says. "Even after we expressly asked you to write that we hadn't done that."

The E3 show floor is, it seems, a harsh mistress. In the heady wash of lights, sound and colour it's easy for slower-paced games like Metro to get overlooked in favour of louder titles if it stays true to its roots – and easy for it to come across badly, if it doesn't.

"We were on the show floor on E3 [last year], and you're showing to an assortment of retailers and all sorts of people who everyone says have a five-minute attention span, but I don't think that's right," Beynon says.

"I think their attention spans are actually a lot longer. I think we do people a disservice sometimes, but there we are.

"This year, we showed in the much more refined environment upstairs, in nice quiet theatres where people had plenty of time to hear a preamble beforehand to put them in the mood.

"It's actually about eight or nine minutes before you pull the trigger and fire a shot [in the demo shown], and while there's a lot of other stuff happening on-screen, for a first-person shooter it doesn't necessarily revolve around shooting people endlessly and repeatedly in the head. Which is refreshing.

"It's preferable for a lot of the media to come to a well-lit, quiet room so they're not struggling over the noise of Just Dance 3 blaring through in an environment where everyone habitually turns up the volume until all you can hear is headshots and handclaps."

With that, we roll the demo – shown behind closed doors at E3, and now doing the rounds on the UK PR circuit. Artyom (the hero from the first game) returns, and he and a friend brave the radioactive surface world on their way to a friendly station.

A stopwatch shows your remaining oxygen, and although it's possible to pick up replacement canisters from unlucky corpses along the way, survival in the toxic atmosphere isn't guaranteed. There are more pressing issues than the environment to worry about, though.

Firstly, madness – or psychic messages from supernatural creatures, it's unclear. The effects remain the same, though. On exploring an office block, Artyom hears inexplicable voices ringing from long-dead telephone receivers.

In the wreckage of a crashed passenger jet, he's treated to a series of flashback hallucinations as he progresses through the cabin, culminating in a genuinely moving sequence where missiles streak off into the sky, a mushroom cloud blots out the sun, and the plane makes its final catastrophic landing slap-bang over the entrance of the underground station you're trying to get to.

Secondly, mutants. Everywhere. Leathery-winged demons flap through the sky. Packs of Watchers – horrendous rat/wolf hybrids with patchy hair and a mean attitude – migrate across the landscape as you move throughout the world, and swarm you in huge numbers at the end of the level.

First, you're forced out of your defended position as they pour through gaps in the walls, then after a running battle, they stalk you down a broken escalator to your eventual location.

Holding them off with molotov cocktails is the order of the day, but survival seems a fairly close-run thing as they leap out of the way of the flames and edge down narrow shelves and handrails.

This is survival horror, rather than the all-guns-blazing montage of last year's experience, and it's good to see. At one points Artyom's torch runs out of power, and must be laboriously recharged by hand-pumping a dynamo.

Flies, spiders and spilt blood all land on the plastic visor of his gasmask and must be wiped off by hand. Monsters are big, scary and dangerous and it seems that often the best route to success is not knowing when to shoot, but knowing when to run and hide.

But even with all that, it seems a little easy. Ammunition seems too plentiful, and the stopwatch never runs below two minutes of remaining oxygen.

"Seeing as this is for demonstration," Beynon says, "we've put a lot of resources out in the open. Once the game's released, players will most likely find themselves – like in the last game – forced to explore and go off the beaten track to get what they need to survive.

"But Metro is fundamentally a linear game, and we don't think there's any shame in that."

The Metro series remains a little difficult to comprehend – it offers a mix of directed first-person action, survival horror and resource management, detailed weapon upgrades and merchant systems, and emergent stealth gameplay which sees you unscrewing lightbulbs and dousing cooking fires to stay in the darkness.

But whatever 4A comes out with, the combination of different game styles and the unique lineage are sure to result in something worth playing.

"Our goal isn't to try and reach a mythical 'mass audience' for a game like this because it's a more cerebral, sophisticated shooter," Beynon says.

"I think there's a much bigger audience clamouring for a game that breaks the mould from the corridor whack-a-mole that most single-player experiences have descended to these days, and is actively looking for another Half-Life or a Bioshock or looking forward, like I am, to Dishonoured or Bioshock Infinite.

"It's good to see there are a few other studios out there as well trying to do something a bit different."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2012/jul/13/metro-last-light-game-preview

 

Yes I know, all information is just all regurgitated but presented differently. All I got from it was that Huw is a serious man, but I knew that anyway lol