Despite the controversy, review bombing, and overall reaction/counter reaction routine on the whole Metro Exodus and its EPIC Games Store exclusivity, the game is shaping up to be one of the hottest releases of 2019. With 4A Games' experience and ability as a developer having already been proven with their original Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light games, the controversy doesn't really matter: the game is expected to be a good one.

And as it stands, 4A Games is doing what it can to open up the lore and world of Metro to the highest number of people possible. As a part of that effort, they have released a brand new CGI cinematic for Metro: Exodus. Titled Artyom's Nightmare, this is a 4-minute long cinematic that showcases the beauty of pre-rendered graphics, the depth and scale of lore drenching the frames of this cutscene, and the games' mood. Even though CGI movies have fallen significantly in use, with most developers choosing the in-engine rendering mechanic, I'd argue that these story explorations are the bread and butter for today's CGI landscape, offering the most compelling atmosphere and image quality for story and content absorption, whilst avoiding the "reality check" of jumping from in-engine to CGI cutscenes (even though in-engine scenes are fast becoming virtually indistinguishable from actual CGI).

When Steam hit critical mass in the mid 2000s, digital distribution of games was close to non-existent, Internet speeds were too low to transmit 8-10 GB games that would ship in DVDs, and game patching was a mess. Steam solved many of these problems by offering distribution, DRM, aftersales support (automatic updates), and even multiplayer services across its network. Steam didn't become popular on its own, though. Valve Software was mainly a game developer, and it marketed Steam by making its AAA smash-hits "Half Life 2" (and its episodes), "Counter Strike," and "Left 4 Dead," exclusive to the DRM platform. Even if you bought those games on DVDs, they would have to be installed and supported through a Steam account. Those games served as tech-demonstrators for Steam, and how efficient an all-encompassing DRM platform can work.

Steam maintained its dominance for a good 8-odd years until big game publishers such as EA and Ubisoft wised up to the concept of multi-brand distribution platforms Steam mastered. Steam operates on a revenue-sharing model. For every Dollar spent on a game, a percentage of the money is retained by Steam toward its services. EA and Ubisoft figured it wasn't rocket-science to copy Steam, and came up with their own platforms, EA Origin, and Ubisoft UPlay, both of which are multi-brand. They figured their capital-expenditure toward running these platforms was less than what they'd pay Steam at scale. EA restricted all its titles to Origin, while Ubisoft made some of its games available on Steam, even though UPlay would remain a concentric DRM layer to those games. Then something changed in 2018.

The system requirements for 4A Games' Metro: Exodus, the studios' first open-world effort that comes with baked-in NVIDIA RTX support, have been outed. The minimum system requirements for 1080p gaming at 30 FPS uses the Low IQ settings, and should be achieved by an i5-4440 CPU, paired with a 2 GB VRAM graphics card (GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon HD 7870) and 8 GB of RAM.

For the Extreme IQ settings, at 4K 60 FPS, though, you'll require, obviously, a beast of a system. An Intel Core i9-9900K is the CPU of choice here, paired with 16 GB of RAM and the top of the line NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti. These requirements pressupose the absence of any RTX features, however, so prepare to see your maximum resolution with those features on coming down quickly as you scale the ray tracing capabilities. RTX-specific performance profiles will be released by 4A Games in the coming days.

4A Games is taking advantage of the hype surrounding CEs to increase hype for their upcoming open-world take o the Metro universe. Based on Dmitriy Glukhovsky's novels of the same name, Metro: Exodus brings a new open-world design, improved game systems and graphics, featuring support for ray tracing via NVIDIA's RTX. The new story trailer showcases both the game's graphics and gloomy, yet hopeful atmosphere, and the screenshots show exactly how it can look in the best scenarios. Look for the trailer after the break.

4A Games has announced that they're happy with the development on Metro: Exodus as it stands today, and have announced that the game has gone gold (meaning, that it is in a state where it can be produced en-masse and shipped to the achingly awaiting public). Metro: Exodus, the third game accompanying Artyom's struggle to survive in post-apocalyptic Russia, is the first game from the developer to feature an open-world design, and confidence should be going through the roof as it relates to this particular title's quality.

The game has a launch date for February 15th, and will be featuring support for NVIDIA's RTX technology (expectedly, upon launch day). We'll be here to see how that works out in this particular title, of course. In the meantime, 4A Games and publisher Deep Silver have released the full title sequence for the game, which should whet your appetites for the survival game that's coming soon.

NVIDIA is pushing its RTX dialing up to eleven, today partnering with 4A Games to launch a stunning, 6-minute trailer showcasing their RTX global illumination technology that's being baked into the next installment in the popular Metro series. An image speaks more than a thousand words, and in here, there are approximately 21,600 of them (provided there are no frame drops, eh).

Metro: Exodus is prepped for launch on February 22nd, 2019, and will leverage NVIDIA's RTX tech for its new, open-world approach, built upon 4A games' aptly named 4A Engine. It's interesting that in the presentation, RTX calculations are said to take up three rays per pixel per frame - so some quick math leads to the immense amounts of computing power being leveraged here. Is it worth it? Perhaps you can tell after looking through the video.

At Microsoft's XBOX E3 presentation, the worldwide premier trailer for the next in the Metro line of games debuted. Named Metro: Exodus, the new Metro game is expected to continue 4A games' mastering of graphical showcases and of atmospheric game worlds. The new game is still based on Dmitriy Glukhovskiy's books, Metro 2033 and Metro 2035, though there is now a divergence between the game and the story that has already been portrayed in the books.

4A games' have been known for being graphical powerhouses, especially the Redux versions (which you should grab if you already haven't). The new Metro takes away from the previous games' linear exploration towards an open-world approach. The jury, as always, is still out to see in what manner that will impact the studio's focus and storytelling ability. This is one of the more cinematic first-person experiences, if the trailer is anything to go by. Captured in-engine, I have to say this really got my eyeballs staring in awe at the amount of detail and atmosphere in the game world. And did you see those animations? Here's hoping they make the final cut for the 2018 release date of the game. At this time, Metro: Exodus has only been announced for Windows PCs and the XBOX family of consoles. Check the games' trailer after the break.