Metro 2039 is Moving Away from What Made it Special, But It Needed To

Time sure does fly, especially when you haven't seen the sun in years. Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky first launched the first version of Metro 2033 online in 2002. In those 24 years, the series has garnered sequels and spin-offs by the dozen, but none of them have come close to the popularity of the 4A Games adaptations.

Although all Metro games are fundamentally different, they all have a core premise: you play silent protagonist Artyom, the world sucks, and you are pressed into making hard choices that will challenge your moral compass. That was the essence of the Metro series, but those days are numbered.

The world has changed a lot since Metro Exodus came out in 2019, but no change is felt more in the Metro universe than the shift from a silent protagonist to a voiced one. There is narrative merit to both choices, but is any of it worth sacrificing the series' signature format?

Goodbye, Artyom

If your first experience with the Metro series was with the books, then having the games completely turn characters around won't be anything new.

Although Artyom is the protagonist of the mainline editions of both games and books, these might as well be two people who share the same name and some vague connections.

In the books, Artyom is extremely opinionated, but is mostly busy trying not to die from the horrors of the Metro. The conversion into a first-person shooter essentially made him into Russia's own John Rambo, able to gun down everyone and everything, while also not saying a single word outside of chapter summaries.

At the same time, the game design and its karma system are built to let you 'speak' for Artyom through your actions. By making Artyom silent, you get to be him and imagine what responses you would utter in the situations he's put in.

When you mix this with the immersive interface and the oppressive atmosphere of the games, the Metro trilogy puts you right in the thick of it.

By shifting the focus from a silent Artyom to the very vocal Stranger, Metro 2039 is doing away with one of the biggest tools previous games had to immerse you in the world.

Hello, Stranger

Whatever theory about The Stranger you subscribe to, the fact is that this is a colossal change for a mainline Metro game. Moving from a silent protagonist to a voiced one feels akin to changing the perspective in a novel between first and third person.

Those pauses in dialogue sections no longer give you breathing room to take it in, because The Stranger's voice actor is already going to be chiming in with a reply.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the long pauses in earlier Metro games felt a bit jarring without Artyom replying, especially when there were no interactive elements present, but the immersion made the tradeoff worth it. Moving away from this is abandoning part of the identity of the Metro games, but the destination is also going to feel familiar.

Metro Exodus is still my favorite entry in the series, and I've logged 250 hours in the game since its release. The core game remains one of the most impactful gaming experiences I've had, but it is one of its DLCs that stuck with me the most through the years.

Without spoiling too much on the odd chance that you haven't played this masterpiece yet, The Two Colonels tells the tale of Colonel Khlebnikov as he tries to save his son beneath a dead city.

The DLC takes about 3 hours to complete, and is a fairly linear experience in line with the first two Metro games, but what sets it apart is that Khlebnikov is a voiced protagonist.

From Shooter to Cinema

Unlike in your trials and tribulations in Artyom's shoes, where you are in control of most of your actions, The Two Colonels lets you live out a fateful winter as Colonel Khlebnikov.

As Khlebnikov comes to terms with the situation unfolding around him and his son, you get to hear his thoughts, his fears, and his hopes. The entire story feels like watching a movie, in a kind of immersive cinematic experience that is as moving as it is engaging.

From everything we've seen in the promotional materials and comments by author and story writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2039 is going to be a much darker, more traumatizing experience than the previous games.

Glukhovsky was always involved in the Metro games, but it seems he will have an outsized influence in Metro 2039. Gone is the more 'welcoming' world of Metro of yore, where everything can be solved with a bullet. We're looking at an oppressive new world that many of us are still scared to look in the eye today, but it's there all the same.

The gravitas of the new story and the channelling of personal traumas by Glukhovsky and the team at 4A Games might well have been unsuitable for the more open-ended style that the Metro series had gravitated toward up until Exodus.

By enforcing a voiced protagonist in The Stranger, the developers want you to listen to what he has to say and think. It is a reasonable choice in a narrative that is so personal to its creators, but it firmly closes a chapter in the Metro series where you and Artyom were one.

In the presentation following the reveal trailer, co-creative director and lead audio designer Pavel Ulmer says that Metro 2039 is 'all about you'.

Respectfully, from what we've seen, it's actually all about The Stranger, and the decision to make such a mysterious entity a voiced protagonist all but confirms it.

To Ulmer's credit, with the way things are going in the world, maybe we should all see ourselves in The Stranger's position, and it is about us in the sense that we relate to someone who has witnessed everything they love be torn apart by an oppressive regime. But empathy does not equate being.

I'm looking forward to diving back into the Metro as The Stranger, but that's because his story and the world seem interesting. Those will never feel as personal and 'mine' as my experiences playing as Artyom, and that's OK. The world has changed, and Metro had to change with it.