Along with last week’s news that THQ Nordic’s parent company Embracer Group had acquired 4A Games, the Metro studio teased its long held desire of developing a multiplayer component for Metro. During an investor call at the time, the developer simply hinted it wanted to craft something “really immersive and ambitious.” Now the team has revealed a bit more about its plans and what it would take to execute them.
Responding to questions submitted by Video Games Chronicle ahead of last week’s meeting, 4A Games Executive Producer Jon Bloch spoke candidly about the resources required to invest in multiplayer. Notably, 4A recognizes that multiplayer demands just as many resources and just as much manpower as the single-player experiences it’s so used to producing. Bloch explained,
We appreciate that having a multiplayer mode takes an entire team the same size as the single-player experience, and just as much time. Doing both at the same time would require some significant changes, and most importantly we would not want to sacrifice the quality, scope, or experience of the single-player experience of Metro for something like this. If we did explore this further, it would need to be done right.
He also divulged that multiplayer is something the crew has attempted in the past. “Prototypes were made but never really got anywhere,” Bloch noted. “We wouldn’t want to just make a generic multiplayer for the sake of doing it. And we wouldn’t want something to feel tacked on just to tick a box.”
During the investor call, 4A’s CEO Dan Sharpe elaborated further. According to him, the studio’s burgeoning relationship with Embracer-owned Saber Interactive will make a potential multiplayer endeavor even more of a possibility. Sharpe said,
One of the other things that makes this relationship so enticing for us is that we have for a long time wanted to do a really immersive and ambitious multiplayer component to Metro, which has been elusive to us up to this point. I think that now that we have the backing and the resources of somebody like Saber, that has the technology and also the know-how, I think we’re going to be able to do something really, really amazing.
In addition to a possible multiplayer mode for Metro, 4A Games and Saber are teaming up for a brand-new AAA project. What this aspect of the collaboration will entail remains to be seen.
[Source: 4A Games, Embracer Group via Video Games Chronicle]
