UE5 powers masterful immersion in VR game Metro Awakening
As the first VR title in the long-running Metro series, which has been around in various forms of media since 2005, developer Vertigo Games knew that Metro Awakening needed to deliver a level of immersion unlike anything fans have experienced before.
To achieve this, the team turned to Unreal Engine 5 and focused on generating a believable atmosphere filled with interactions both fascinating and terrifying while pushing the player’s courage, and sanity, to the limit.
So, how did Vertigo Games blend the familiar action and atmosphere of Metro’s previous outings with the freshness and immersion of VR? Which Unreal Engine 5 features helped create the believable, tactile experiences at the core of this Game Awards nominee for VR Game of the Year? We shine a light on those details and more in our developer interview below.
Congratulations on the release of Metro Awakening! Could you please provide a high-level overview of the game?
Samar Louwe, Game Director: Metro Awakening is the first VR game in the Metro franchise. At its core, it’s a story about Khan, a fan-favorite character we know from the Metro 2033 book and the video game series. We learn how he became the enigmatic spiritual guide that we know him to be from the earlier stories.
The Metro world is a unique, sometimes terrifying place. As a VR exclusive, what were your goals when setting out to immerse players in the story and world of Metro like never before?
Louwe: Our first and foremost goal was to create an experience that makes you forget you are playing a VR game from your living room. Immersion, indeed, was key. This is why we focused a lot on atmosphere and the feeling the world instills in your body.
Sometimes that’s terrifying—for example, when you stand face to face with a deformed mutant—or it’s nerve wrecking when you’re hiding from hostile humans. But it’s also about more than that. The Metro franchise is also known for its stories. We wanted to make sure we hit the right tone for fans and newcomers alike to pull them into the world with a gripping narrative.
What challenges did you face when attempting to create an experience that feels familiar to series fans while taking advantage of the unique capabilities of VR to offer something fresh?
Louwe: The perk of working with such an amazing existing IP is that there is a lot of great work already done that you can pick from. We had a thorough look at what features and environments would do well in VR. The challenge comes with making it so it feels true to the way the world of Metro lives in players' minds. A lot of our focus went into making the interactions feel tactile and as real as possible. This is also why all our interfaces are diegetic.
Things like the backpack that you physically have to pull from your shoulder, or the gas mask that becomes quite claustrophobic when you wear it on your face. All these interactions feel logical and simple, but that doesn’t come easy. It takes a lot of work to make you forget you’re actually interfacing with a digital world using your head and hands.
Luckily, the sheer nature of letting you experience this world in our medium, and allowing you to feel it in your stomach when things get serious, makes it inherently a fresh take on what we already know. That, and the fact that we were able to further explore the origin story of Khan together with the original writer of the series Dmitry Glukhovsky.
Can you tell us a little about the design of the shooting mechanics in the game? Were there any considerations you had to take into account to nail these for VR?
Louwe: Like many other things in VR, shooting a weapon is a physical activity. You have to align your iron sights and keep a steady hand to land your shots. On top of that, we wanted each bullet to count. That’s why our gunplay is perhaps a more challenging experience than other VR shooters. Reloading is a manual effort that requires multiple steps. If you want to know how many bullets you have left in your magazine, you’ll have to take it out to count them.
Additionally, our hitboxes are tweaked to require a high level of accuracy and each weapon has its own recoil values for one or two handed wielding. This was all done in an effort to give the player an experience that feels real. However, note that we are not trying to actually simulate reality. We only want the player to believe it. That’s why all those manual steps are guided by animations to help players perform the action they have in their minds.
As an example, when you bring your magazine close to its slot in the weapon, animation takes over and places the magazine in the slot for you in a split second. The player won’t think about it too much and simply accept that they performed this action.
The inventory system is very cool. Where did the idea of using the backpack to store items and equipment come from?
Louwe: As mentioned before, we wanted this to be a believable and tactile experience. We went out of our way to make sure we have as little UI as possible. That of course posed some challenges as you carry more than a couple of items with you on your journey. We experimented with more UI driven interfaces at the start, but it just didn’t feel right to have a menu pop up while we worked so hard on making the world feel as real as possible. That’s when we committed to having each item show up on your backpack.
Initially, we only allowed you to carry two weapons at the same time, your handgun on your hip holster and a secondary weapon on your shoulder slot. But we noticed the game just became more fun if you weren’t constrained to only carrying two weapons. So, we added a second backpack on your other shoulder that holds all your weapons. This might have made it a little less believable again, but there’s a balance to strike between usability and a creative aspiration like a believable level of realism. In the end, I’m happy with where we ended up.
There are lots of pleasing tactile aspects in Metro Awakening—from cranking the hand generator to wiping the condensation from your gas mask. How important was it to bring physicality to the functions in the game?
Louwe: It was one of the main creative aspirations so I’m happy to hear you like them! We doubled down on the tactility of interactions as both the VR medium and the Metro franchise are known for it. Sound, haptics, and visuals all play a crucial role in selling the interactions. But a lot of work has also gone into iterating on these interactions in the prototyping phase. That work isn’t directly visible to the player, but the interactions have become what they are through a process of experimentation, reflection, and iteration.
The sound design in the game is awesome. Did you use MetaSounds for this and if so, how did you find using the system?
Steijn Kistemaker, Technical Director: Thanks! The sound design is a very important part of the storytelling and setting the mood for the player. We used MetaSounds for almost all of our sound effects. It has allowed us to achieve very dynamic audio using a set of simple parameters to create a much more believable world. Examples of these are squeaky doors that sound differently on how fast you push them or generators that come to life as you pull the cord.
We were also able to make some really punchy sounding weapons with MetaSounds that adjust to the environment they are used in. One other big benefit of MetaSounds is that it allows us to do much more sound design in the editor itself, saving us valuable time going back and forth between Unreal and our audio authoring tools.
How big is the Vertigo Games team that worked on this project?
Louwe: It differs per phase of the project, but I would say that generally we had between 50 and 75 people working on Metro Awakening.
Considering prior Metro games were developed using internal tech, why was switching to Unreal Engine 5 for this project the right move?
Kistemaker: Prior Metro games were developed by 4A games in their proprietary engine aimed at flat-screen games. Metro Awakening was designed from the ground up for VR. At Vertigo Games, we have a long-standing history with Unreal Engine and have tailored it to get the best possible results in VR. Having a cutting-edge game engine that is open source and where customization and extension is baked into its DNA has always been of great benefit to us.
Specific to creating a VR experience, were there any particular features of Unreal Engine 5 that stood out to you during development? Please explain.
Kistemaker: For VR experiences immersion and storytelling is very important. We made heavy use of Unreal Engine 5 features such as MetaSounds, Control Rig, Motion Warping, and Sequencer for narrative sequences or combat sections. In VR, we have to achieve high frame rates to not make our players nauseous. We rely heavily on offline content optimization through HLODs and light bakes. For the latter we used GPU Lightmass. Lastly, we utilize OpenXR to support multiple VR devices and release platforms.
Going back to immersion, could you please describe your approach to lighting and the UE tools you utilized to achieve your goals?
Kistemaker: In Metro Awakening, we use a combination of baked and real-time lighting and shadows. Our baked lighting is calculated using GPU lightmass, which we run automatically every night. On all platforms, we additionally use real-time shadows, although the amount of lights that do so varies per platform. On Quest, we use clustered forward rendering and on PC and PlayStation we use deferred rendering. This allows us to use techniques like volumetric lighting on devices that support it.
Considering the range of hardware capabilities on the game’s supported platforms, how did UE5 help you optimize the experience?
Kistemaker: Unreal Engine 5 has been great in allowing us to scale between multiple platforms. One of the primary mechanisms to do so is utilize Unreal’s scalability settings. This allows us to enable/disable different features or scale in quality between the different release platforms. It also allows us to expose configurable quality levels to PC players. Our baked content is split per platform to allow us to tailor the output to the specific platforms.
Additionally, there are sublevels with detailed set dressing using instanced static meshes that are only loaded on platforms that can handle the additional load. Lastly, we use many of UE’s profiling tools to detect bottlenecks. In particular, Unreal Insights has proven very powerful to analyze problems related to CPU or memory utilization.
Do you have any advice for other members of the UE community who are looking to develop for VR?
Kistemaker: The fastest way to get started is to download Unreal Engine and create a new project from the Virtual Reality template. It comes with a lot of pre-built functionality that allows new developers to quickly get something up and running. From a creative perspective, it’s important to understand VR is a different medium than flat screen games. Immersion and physical interaction are key features of VR that make it so unique and game design should be looked at through this lens. We’re also always looking to hire talent that can help us build even better UE VR experiences. If you’d like to work with us at Vertigo Games on challenging VR titles, take a look at our job openings.
Thank you for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Metro Awakening?
Louwe: The easiest place to start is of course https://metroawakening.com/, but the good thing about Metro fans is that they are very active themselves as well! There’s a ton of great content to find on YouTube and a thriving community on Discord. Thank you for your interest in Metro Awakening!
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