Metro Awakening is the upcoming addition to the long-running Metro series imagined by Dmitry Glukhovsky who has been writing Metro stories for over 30 years. Metro Awakening represents several firsts for the series, most notably as the franchise’s first VR entry and as the first Metro title to be developed by a team other than Ukrainian studio 4A, with development handled by the veteran VR developers at Vertigo Games.
Metro Awakening is a five-year prequel to the original game that takes place in 2028 within the Moscow Metro, the last bastion of humanity after nuclear devastation rendered the surface uninhabitable. Taking advantage of the unparalleled immersion of virtual reality, Metro Awakening is the Moscow Metro at its most terrifying as players truly come face to face with the irradiated horrors lurking underground.
Game Rant sat down with Metro series author Dmitry Glukhovsky to discuss his work on Metro Awakening, including how he approached writing a player character for a VR game, which is a unique challenge for game writers. Glukhovsky also weighed in on how writing for Metro games compares to writing for films and whether a Metro film is in the cards.
Writing Metro Awakening Is Like Writing a Movie
Q: Going from writing novels to writing games, do you feel that the experience of writing for a Metro novel differs from writing for a game in certain ways?
Glukhovsky: I think that writing for a game, to me, is closer to writing for film because the story in general, when you create the overall arc and storyline, has to be clear and compact. In writing for a book, you can really just improvise, and you probably don’t even know exactly what’s going to be happening to your main character, you just more or less understand what’s the end station for that character, and then what you want thematically, to convey, right?
Whereas when you’re writing a film script you need to structure, you understand that this is exactly the curve of emotions that you want your character to go through. So it’s more engineered I would say. Writing a video game is always closer to that. It has to go through certain emotions, right? But I think that what’s more important is that it’s completely erroneous to ignore these strong human emotions and the clear personal arc and changing transforming character and moral and ethical dilemmas and the higher philosophical things in the video game storytelling. When we were introducing that in the first Metro titles back on the Metro 2033 we had to put a heavy accent on the storyline and on the atmosphere, because that was the cheapest way to retain the attention of the gamer and to make a gamer feel emotions.
We were competing against juggernaut games that had financing dozens of times higher than ours, and the only way for us to compete was to create an emotionally overwhelming, compelling story, right so? And it just felt right in place because it was based on the book, and I’m not a game writer, right? I just know how to tell stories in a classical format, so I just brought everything I knew into that sphere, from philosophical topics to social commentary to lyrical situations and dramas and nostalgia for the lost world and a lot of darkness, and people were just pronouncing that because we didn’t have time or money to motion capture it and raw it and create CG for it.
But I think that it worked, and it was among the elements that helped Metro actually become more popular over the years, because the story is what allows you to experience the most profound emotion. You can have bombastic, 100 million dollar blockbusters that leave you indifferent because they are emotionally non-compelling. You don’t relate, you don’t give sh*t for the characters. You get used to the visual effects in a matter of minutes, right? I remember going to see Harry Potter in 3D and I stopped noticing it was 3D within like five minutes, and I was just following the story. The story happened to be good, so I kind of enjoyed it, but if it wasn’t for the story, I would be disgusted in spite of the thing.
So I believe that story comes first, but then the VR and what it does here in this particular game,. this one is so immersive. It’s just f*cking incredible to be in that world. I started the outline of Metro 30 years ago, 30 f*cking years ago. That was the first idea. I was a teenage boy myself. I was younger, much younger than my protagonist Artyom, who was 24. I was probably 14 or 15, and I was typing the first lines from Artyom and the tunnel, imagining that back in high school. Now I’m in this very cool futuristic VR gear, and I’m inside it, and it’s like, “Wow.”
You look up, you look down, you look to the sides, there is a tunnel, and it’s so realistic. And you look at the gun and it’s a real gun. I mean, you still understand it’s not real, but it’s getting more difficult to believe that it’s not real. It looks very realistic. I’m not playing a lot these days myself, because it’s quite difficult to retain my focus, to retain my interest in these ADHD 3.0 times. When the phones deprave you and you cannot focus on anything longer than a minute, focusing on a game that does not immediately devour you emotionally and drags you into the story and still makes you feel things is kind of difficult. So all the slow burn games, I really have difficulty playing them.
So I want to say something and have a good story with a good execution, and this is from my impression, this is exactly what we have gotten with Metro Awakening. It can bring you utterly to different places, but the story is always very important. So I, from my side, have done everything possible to make sure that this is an emotionally compelling, personal, dramatic story focused on very universal things such as relations between man and woman, and understanding, and family, and parent to child relations, things that we all in one form or another go through in this life and can relate to.
Q: You spoke a lot about character writing. How do you approach writing a character for a VR game, knowing that players are going to inhabit the character almost physically?
Glukhovsky: You know what? I thought about it, and then I came to the conclusion that the best you can do is to create a strong, immediate drama for the character, so you will now become him. The only way for you to become him is not to give any backstory for the character. The magic of drama and of dramatic storytelling is that once you identify with him or her, and you recognize that the problem that he or she is facing is a serious challenge, and you want to help him or her resolve it–whether it’s a personal problem, global problem–your identity dissolves into his or her identity. 10 minutes into a two-hour film, and you are the character, especially in the moments when the character starts making choices of morality. You completely forget yourself. You are the character. When life gets difficult for him or her your heart is spinning, when there is something awkward you feel ashamed, when he or she is in love you almost feel that sexual arousal too.
This is how we humans are built with empathy and mirror neurons and that creates a way higher level of immersion into the character than pretending you’re him or not him. So the challenge here for the game developers and the storyteller is not to alienate the gamer from the character he inhabits with an unpleasant voice or irrelevant thoughts, something that you feel like I wouldn’t say at that point. The same applies for movies: the main character is not supposed to do something–unless it’s a comedy or some kind of weird thriller–that the person would not have done under the circumstances and given who the character is. We have the empathy superpower, and we can easily imagine ourselves being the other person, connecting to his or her needs and perspective.
So I think that the main challenge in the storytelling is just not to alienate this dictator as a gamer. Our protagonist of Metro Awakening speaks, and this is the first time excluding the DLCs from the previous Metro games and the first game in the Metro series where the protagonist actually has a voice. This is not an unpleasant voice, and this is the voice from the original, authentic Khan character in Metro 2033 because this game is focused on Khan. Khan is the protagonist. So yes, this is a kind of a prequel, but is also definitely a strong separate story that does not feel secondary or not authentic enough, or like it doesn’t serve any needs of the franchise. I think that the biggest danger here is saying “ We just need a title. Let’s stamp out some story for some character having a spin-off.” You really need to approach this as a game, from the very beginning, for the people who have never played, know nothing about it, and create a breathtaking journey.
I hope that we manage doing that and allow completely new fans to go and dive into it and feel strongly for the characters and be there with them. If this is handled properly, if this is a success, then the game has much bigger chances of being an overall success if you create a story, and you understand this is not just because the publisher or the developer decided to exploit the success of the franchise. You cannot trick the audience. I don’t like the term “audience” though, because this is stemming from marketing science. I like the term “people.” You cannot trick people. Give them a sincere story that makes sense, and make them emotional, and then they will thank you for that in a way or another. Create commercial bullsh*t, and you can shut down whatever you created before because people will be disgusted. The higher the success of the previous titles, the higher is the responsibility, because the expectations are higher, and the higher the expectations, the easier it is to disappoint people.
So this is why I’m caring a lot about every new Metro title, although I’m not getting any particular salary for doing that. I still feel morally obliged to take part in it to make sure that it doesn’t go south, but it goes in the same direction that the previous Metro titles went in, which is personal, emotional, making sense and containing additional levels of understanding, such as political metaphor or social commentary.
The Metro Series Is Philosophical, Political, and Emotional
Q: What do you feel is important to include in a Metro title? How does Metro Awakening embody that for you?
Glukhovsky: All the Metro titles have a certain darkness in them. And darkness stems from the fact that this is a world without a future, and hence very nostalgic for its past and the losses, working with loss. If there is a hope, this is the hope, in spite of everything. So desperation, but also trying to deal with the trauma and live in spite of it. To come from the ashes and then flourish on the ashes.
In a lot of ways, for me, Metro has been a satirical description of society and political regimes with the manipulations and propaganda with the designation of different is the enemy of the majority, talking about such things as xenophobia or instigating hatred towards external or internal enemies as a political tool. It has always been a key part of it. But in this particular case, in Metro Awakening, we decided to leave the political component out of it and focus on very personal conflict, such as lack of trust in a loving relationship, lack of belief in each other, ability to pardon things and also go spiritual/extra sensory, I would say extrasensorial, because our story is focused on a character that has these extrasensorial abilities, clearly the mage and the sage of the world of Metro: Khan.
It was very interesting to describe how Khan has become who he is, and I just had the idea that he had not always been the same person. Probably he has been transforming. It’s been a journey in which, from somebody who does not believe at all in spiritual stuff, he has become someone who does not only believe that, but can actually manifest things and do things that other people don’t even believe in. It’s a small spoiler in this particular game, but you will find some things that belong to the source book and the source game and that we wanted to make part of the first game, but we didn’t have the resources to do some of the very cool parts of the lore that are in the Metro 2033 book and never made it into the video games. I really love it.
So all in all, from playing it, I really, really have the impression that we’re going hardcore true to the original Metro story. And at the same time, it’s not restricted for those who know all the three parts of the franchise, because it’s a new character. It’s completely open to the people who have not played Metro before. So it does allow you to fully immerse in that universe for the first time.
Q: Earlier you mentioned how writing for Metro games feels similar to writing for film. Are you interested in a potential Metro film? What would that look like to you?
Glukhovsky: It’s been a very long journey for me. The first time I ever arrived in Hollywood was probably 17 years ago. I was 27, and I went there to negotiate a film rights deal. 17 years later, we’re still where we are. The three video games have been released, and then three books and a lot of things happening in this universe, and still there is no audiovisual project based on that story. I’m hopeful. There are some recent developments that I’m legally not allowed to spoil, but you know, in the world of film and TV, you never know. Things can happen in a moment, completely smashing your expectations and hopes. I’m a bit superstitious, so I’m not disclosing that thing I am working on, on different projects as a screenwriter.
There’s gonna be a release later this year, a thriller film that I wrote that is based in America. It actually has nothing to do with Russia, but this is something that’s coming out later on. It’s too early to say, but I definitely think that the Metro franchise is very much created for being adapted to other formats, to the other transmedia outlets. It could be a series, it could be a movie, they could be a massive multiplayer online game. It could be a phone game.
This is just as if it was created to become a transmedia monster. My other stories are not that at all. I’m not trying to create stories in particular to turn them into like transmedia franchises, but this is just born like that. Why should I prevent it from becoming what it is destined to become?
Q: What do you hope players take away from Metro Awakening ? Are there certain emotions you’re trying to evoke or thoughts you want them to consider?
Glukhovsky: First of all, I’m very hopeful that the game in a couple places will make them laugh, and a couple of places it will make players cry. I was feeling my eyes water when I was writing certain scenes, and I hope that this emotion goes through. First and foremost, I would say this is about our ability to understand others in a close relationship, trust them and believe that if their perception of the world and people is different from ours, it’s not because they’re lying or trying to make something up just because they perceive the world slightly differently. So our ability to believe them that they’re not pretending, they’re not manipulating, they’re not lying to us, they’re not making things up, but they just see things that way and deserve attention and trust from us, and we have to learn to pardon people who hurt us if they’re part of our love circle like family, or relatives.
So I guess the emotional part is focused on these two things, and they are universal and tremendously important. I don’t want to spoil more, but I think since we’re playing a male character here, it is focused on a male perception of a lot of things in a rational, strict, non-mystical way of pursuing things. I hope that a lot of male gamers will relate to and understand and then think about their real lives too. But definitely, I’ll be super happy if women play this game as well to try and better understand us stubborn males.
Q: Is there anything that you are particularly proud of in Metro Awakening that you’d like to shed some light on?
Glukhovsky: Yeah, I think that, first of all, this is a very professionally made game. I played it again today, and I loved it. I’m not a big fan of horror, and I know that Metro is routinely described as a survival horror game, which it also is, but to me, it’s a lyrical, philosophical shooter that makes you feel things and raises topics that you have to discuss, its controversial, moral dilemmas.
But the horror elements are really cool. You’ve got all those giant spiders springing at you or ghouls walking behind you in the darkness, and you turn in reality, then you spot in virtual reality some kind of a shadow there, and then it attacks you. This freaked me out many times. So this kind of thing is really cool.
Plus the level of detail: you have a gun in your hand that is a real gun, and then you have this range of all kinds of self-made devices from the metro. And then you have the backpack that you pull out with your hands and your gas mask is hanging from it, and you take the gas mask. All of this is very cool, and it improves the immersion multiple times. The immersion is, I think, the greatest thing here, just being this there in the world. This is a game developed by a Dutch team, so this is the first game not developed by the core Ukrainian team, but with their support and my support. So it became very faithful to the spirit of the game, and it feels as if it was the original game. So I think that it feels like Metro, but in VR, and that’s the coolest thing. I’m thinking of getting myself a VR set to be able to experience this at home.
[END]
VIA: GameRant.com
