Metro Exodus is disturbing me

[DigDog]

i'm playing - with long delay, as i didnt have *nearly* the storage space necessary until a few months ago, and the whole experience is stressing me.

1. downloading 40Gb was long and tedious. my internet is currently bad (should be back to normal in a couple days) but 40gb is 40gb
2. game crashed several times on start, but it's stable now. Also, even at less-than-perfect detail, it still makes a hell of a lot of noise. (probably just my CPU that's crap)

3. i should jump ahead and say that i'm quite far ahead now, in the desert, and there are parts of the game i enjoy very much. BUT, the first part of the game is more of an interactive film than anything. I've had to wait HOURS before i could make a game decision.
And this happens throughout. The game is very, very heavily scripted. Many sections are so linear, that i dont even pay attention to the map, i just go forward (and it works).
4. throughout the game, there are some visual details that are amazing; we kill a guy, and slowly there is a pool of blood spreading from his body. The entire game is packed full of these details that must have taken hours to put in.
5. the ambiance is really good. Mob rushes are not so good, and a section i just played had spam wave after spam wave of the same identical model, so, it's a bit bad. But otherwise the world design is easily better than STALKER.
i am happy that they have loosened the reliance on mask and filter - it was something i hated of the first game.
6. i dont like guns jamming. This is not really *that bad* of a problem, but the way it is designed, once a gun starts jamming, it jams harder than Bob Marley and it's practically useless. Ammo is plentiful, and all you need to do is occasionally backtrack to a workbench.
7. the AI is pretty dumb. Like, pretty hardcore dumb. Again, this game is more of a visual spectacle than a proper stealth-ops shooter, but, i'm several hours in and i haven't died once. It could use a buff.

I don't know if this game is horrible or excellent. The free roaming is great, mostly because of how gorgeous the world looks, but the game also has many issues which make me cringe.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I haven't played it yet strictly because one of the best reviews someone said to me was, they felt like they were playing a new S.T.A.L.K.E.R almost the entire time until those precious moments when the game pulls you back in just to remind you that you aren't playing either (Metro or Stalker). I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series with a passion (yes even Clear Sky) and the Metro games are fantastic but I died a little when I heard my buddy say that (he shares the same love for both series as I do). I'm sure it's not as bad as he says and it's one of the titles I'm saving until I build a new PC, so I'll just have to wait and see.

 

[aigomorla]

This game is on my bucket list, just haven't had time to get to it yet with all the other stuff i have been trying to catch up on.
But i didnt expect that much, as i thought the second metro was very linear compared to the first which was pretty epic.

Seems like the third one is even more linear from the way your describing.

 

[DigDog]

Seems like the third one is even more linear from the way your describing.

the first couple hours are strongly linear, to the point where you, as a player, have very little to do. mostly it's just waiting and participating in a few quick-time events.

After that, make it 3h mark, you get to the open world section which is better, however within it, there will be some very linear maps. For instance, you will attack a few enemy bases. In these bases, you're sold on stealth, and clearly told "here is the approach point to attack the base". And you go in, and from there on - while the game *does* offer you the option to change course, it also holds your hand with "hey look, a secret corridor! and where does it lead to? a secret hatch! and where does THAT lead? to another secret door, all right in front of your face, all designed to effortlessly place you in a position where you can stealth-kill the guards without ANY chance of missing".

Add to that the atrocious AI, and you'll see that Exodus is a game that only really knows how to look good.

 

[DigDog]

i've finished it.
this has to have been one of the most excruciating experiences i have ever had in gaming. The final act - 2 hours long - starts with a half hour cutscene. Sure some parts are interactive, but there is no option for me but to drive along one fixed path while scenes happen and characters talk. HALF HOUR.
I want to play. *I* want to make the decision, aim my guns, dodge monsters. I do not care about your story if i do not get to play a game.
The ending is a long corridor, that occasionally twists, but there is only one way you can go. They made a vague attempt at a boss fight having a hitherto unseen mutant chase you, badly, through this linear path - which you can just avoid.
There are sections that run for 10 minutes where you'll just row a boat in a canal. Or walk in corridors. Or drive along a single-path road. All while bombarding you with effects that slow down the experience even more.

I really don't know what sort of praise this game could get.
Visually, it's good, but in order to serve these visuals, the game has to be on rails.
It's not a survival game, because, while ammo is scarce, there is always ammo right there for you to replenish. You can't really waste it anyway because the number of mobs are set, there is basically no respawn. You can't make really any decision because almost all mobs are in scripted events along the storyline. I'm basically a witness to a game that plays itself.

this. game. is. garbage.

 

[ondma]

I too am disappointed in this game. Thought perhaps it was just me. I was really looking forward to it, but it just seems....off somehow. Started it once, then restarted hoping to get a better feel for the game, but still couldnt get into it. Some of the mechanics even seem off. Mouse control is laggy, and the dialogue and subtitles are out of synch.

 

[aigomorla]

Sigh just finished it.
The game is completely linear.
Story as well, was disappointing.

 

[EXCellR8]

I don't think the game is garbage, I mean that's a little rough; whether or not you take the time to explore the parts that aren't as linear (the whole game isn't a straight line GTFO with that exaggerated crap) isn't really the game's fault. Yes, I'll agree that the AI isn't very good and some of the segments are boring/scripted but compared to the previous titles, it shook up the formula a bit which I think was brave of them. I suppose I'd much rather be in the Metro tunnels but we've already done a TON of that, so getting out and seeing some of the other locales was more interesting.

The end level was certainly a drag with those hulking dudes; the anti-climatic wrap up genuinely annoyed me with the whole "you killed a few ppl so this is your fate nonsense" but I still had fun with it.

 

[aigomorla]

Errr well...

These are heavy game spoilers, so read them at your own risk.


The game has 2 outcomes each chapter and only two outcomes.
This is reflective on how you played the chapter.
If you did all the objective, the companion would stay with you, if not, he would essentially be stolen by the female lead NPC every chapter.

The ending only has 2 endings as you speak as well.
Did you go down the bloody trail of slaughtering everyone, which would make you automatically fail two chapters in perfect ending.
Or did you do all the mission objective listed in that dayam map pad on the back side. (which no one tells you about)
The ending them depends on how many of the original crew stays, and how much blood they can donate to you.
If enough members stayed, you get what is called the nice ending... if not, its the ending you describe.

It just felt way too linear....
The world was no as open as i would of liked it to be.
There is no point roaming around in the world, as the monsters you kill really supply you with nothing to farm.
I was hoping for a bit more... really... and what makes me not understand is the new game plus mode in the game.
The game is a bit too linear to enjoy new game plus.

 

[DigDog]

whether or not you take the time to explore the parts that aren't as linear (the whole game isn't a straight line GTFO with that exaggerated crap) isn't really the game's fault. Y

i feared i was not clear on this part, and i will elaborate.

There are free, open world sections, which i liked very much a little bit. For example, "get to the broadcast tower" in Desert. The world design is nice and many of those open world sections have different points of approach.

This is good. This is plain simple fun, as i get to decide how i will assault a base full of enemies. However, once i do attack, the really weak AI kinda trivializes the effort. I still like how the maps have been designed, i liked that there is no HUD map, the weather effects are nice - although i dont like my mask getting so disgusting right away - i want to be able to see. Human brains have a see-through function that allows said humans to ignore things which would obscure our vision, so if you try to implement a as-reality visual blockage, you get an exagerated effect.

Then, you get some super-lineaer section, some of which are indoors (i would say that all or nearly all indoors sections are exclusively linear - there is only one path between entrance and exit), and some of which are in the open world section.

One of the worst offenders is .. uh .. i can't really remember, a bandit base where you need to open a gate. I know that there's at least four five such base-with-gate, but this particular one has an entry point, and then a press-action-button-to-stealth path that is designed so to hold your hand aroudn the map to place you in a location where you can stealthkill all the mobs. Then after each group of kills, another hidden door / crouch-passage / slide-through-opening that is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE takes you to the next stealthkill location.

That's .. childish.

Now, that's two, separate problems. Then you got the worst offender, the cutscene / interactive cutscene. I am not exagerating when i say, you get a character talking to you for five minutes, then you press E to sit down, another 3 minutes of talking, then press E to stand up, press A to drink coffee to move to the next speech section, then press E to stand up, wait through another speech, wait in a unpassable corridor for the NPC to SLOWLY WALK ALONG, STOP AND TURN BACK TO YOU AND REMINISCE, WAIT MORE FOR THEM TO MOVE ALONG, and finally go to ANOTHER INTERACTIVE TALK SEQUENCE.

This game got f* cutscenes that are half hour long. Half hour without the opportunity to actually play. I honestly went downstairs to make dinner while waiting for a cutscene to end - do we wnat that in a game? Is that "good"?
Yeah, i am witness to some pretty amazing graphic design, i spent at least 5 minutes to wonder how they made the outdoors train sequence (FYI, it's sequentially generated out of blocks), but i want to play. "Artists" forget that games - and also, other entertainment media - are not real life. Dragon Bad, Kill Dragon is really all that i need before i set out on my epic adventure, i do not need a lesson on how the dragon's effect on the ecological balance of the region has affected the previous economy. Just point me in the direction of some terrorists and give me a gun. Aliens have invaded? I better get my spaceship.

See, Exodus is masturbatory. It's an artists's work made for the sake of art, not for human consumption, because when humans try to consume it, they produce vastly negative reviews - which .. is what happened to Exodus.

Exodus is bad. it's not 100% bad, but it's the kind of bad that leaves a nasty taste in your mouth, like a Haagen Dasz vanilla ice cream with shit sprinkles.

 

[Artorias]

The game being linear is to be expected. Did you play the first two Metro games? That would have given you an indication of what style of game it is, although it being more less interactive is not good. Half Life for example has many scripted sequences and corridors, yet it does not fee linear at all, perhaps the AI offering better game play is the difference with Exodus?

 

[DigDog]

dude, half life is from 20 years ago.

 

[clamum]

I want to finish it before Cyberpunk comes out but I've only got a few hours or so into it.

I like it a lot so far (have also watched numerous gameplay vids on YT before too).

Maybe I haven't reached the part yet, but "hours" is a huge exaggeration on not being able to do anything due to cutscenes. I think the intro one was longest and that was what, like 5 minutes or something?

I think I suck these days at games (I used to be good in my teens ). I died several times in that part near the beginning, in the snow, where you have to sneak around the guards and I think get to that train. Not sure what difficulty I'm playing at but I'm pretty sure it's "normal" or whatever equivalent.

I'm looking forward to playing more and finally finishing it this summer/fall. I should just quit Tarkov; I suck such shit at it that it's not even that fun very often and it's time I could be spending on all these other games I have and never play.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I did not like this game. Way too linear with waaay too many cut scenes. It was honestly pretty boring. The first two hours has about 10 minutes of actual play time and rest is just cut scenes and following NPC's.

 

[DigDog]

I want to finish it before Cyberpunk comes out but I've only got a few hours or so into it.

total gameplay is pretty much fixed at 9 hours. You can - and will - explore a little the open world maps where you can, but you'll discover there is very little to do, story-wise. There is some good shooting to do, but i've found that it strongly impacts your story mode, as the weapons degrade ridiculously fast - even firing a single magazine will have a noticeable effect - and won't work properly when you get to the "end boss" sections, something you really want to avoid finding yourself stuck into. And the only way around this is to walk, slowly, aaaaaaaall the way back to your base to clean them.
Or just say f* it and don't do the sidequests, because they have zero real impact on the story. At most you might find a weapon scope or magazine upgrade that you'll get anyway in the very next storymode chapter.

 

[clamum]

total gameplay is pretty much fixed at 9 hours. You can - and will - explore a little the open world maps where you can, but you'll discover there is very little to do, story-wise. There is some good shooting to do, but i've found that it strongly impacts your story mode, as the weapons degrade ridiculously fast - even firing a single magazine will have a noticeable effect - and won't work properly when you get to the "end boss" sections, something you really want to avoid finding yourself stuck into. And the only way around this is to walk, slowly, aaaaaaaall the way back to your base to clean them.
Or just say f* it and don't do the sidequests, because they have zero real impact on the story. At most you might find a weapon scope or magazine upgrade that you'll get anyway in the very next storymode chapter.

Yeah I want to resume playing it but I can't peel myself away from Tarkov, even though I'm super at it. It has such a draw, IMO.

If I don't get a little better in a few months I'm giving up though lol. I'd feel pathetic but I gotta draw a line at some point.

I dunno why I'm so bad either, like I used to be decent at games like Quake and Half-Life.

Coincidentally enough I retook a reaction test that I took here like a decade and a half ago or something and my results were nearly identical, so I don't think it's old man syndrome (yet) lol.

 

[KentState]

Played this at the start of the year and is probably one of my favorite games that I've played in 2020. Didn't mind the more linear approach and story was engaging. If the story isn't engaging, not sure why people feel they need to stick out a game. Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Last of Us are two that didn't do anything for me after a few hours, but people love those. I would not want to put myself through 30-40 hours of playing something that I loathed.

 

[loki1944]

i'm playing - with long delay, as i didnt have *nearly* the storage space necessary until a few months ago, and the whole experience is stressing me.

1. downloading 40Gb was long and tedious. my internet is currently bad (should be back to normal in a couple days) but 40gb is 40gb
2. game crashed several times on start, but it's stable now. Also, even at less-than-perfect detail, it still makes a hell of a lot of noise. (probably just my CPU that's crap)

3. i should jump ahead and say that i'm quite far ahead now, in the desert, and there are parts of the game i enjoy very much. BUT, the first part of the game is more of an interactive film than anything. I've had to wait HOURS before i could make a game decision.
And this happens throughout. The game is very, very heavily scripted. Many sections are so linear, that i dont even pay attention to the map, i just go forward (and it works).
4. throughout the game, there are some visual details that are amazing; we kill a guy, and slowly there is a pool of blood spreading from his body. The entire game is packed full of these details that must have taken hours to put in.
5. the ambiance is really good. Mob rushes are not so good, and a section i just played had spam wave after spam wave of the same identical model, so, it's a bit bad. But otherwise the world design is easily better than STALKER.
i am happy that they have loosened the reliance on mask and filter - it was something i hated of the first game.
6. i dont like guns jamming. This is not really *that bad* of a problem, but the way it is designed, once a gun starts jamming, it jams harder than Bob Marley and it's practically useless. Ammo is plentiful, and all you need to do is occasionally backtrack to a workbench.
7. the AI is pretty dumb. Like, pretty hardcore dumb. Again, this game is more of a visual spectacle than a proper stealth-ops shooter, but, i'm several hours in and i haven't died once. It could use a buff.

I don't know if this game is horrible or excellent. The free roaming is great, mostly because of how gorgeous the world looks, but the game also has many issues which make me cringe.

I'd actually say the world is much more limited than in the STALKER series.

 

[Midwayman]

I liked this one. Its been awhile since I played. A little linear, but honestly I'm not a big fan of 'sandbox' games anyways. I prefer a story driven game to one that just gives you toys and says 'have fun'. Usually I'm a completionist and by the time I get to the end I'm kinda ready to move on. I didn't feel that way here. Not every game is for everyone I guess.

 

[wilds]

I finally picked this game up having played Metro 1 and 2 but never the Redux versions. Big mistake. I had no idea that TAA is forced on Redux and Exodus. The game is blurry as heck unless you disable TAA in config file, but then awful shimmering occurs.

I used Nvidia's game filter to help make it look less blurry, but I ended up getting a refund through Steam.

Metro has always been about the amazing graphics and gameplay for me. Gameplay felt good, but the game was so blurry it felt like I had bad vision until I turned off the TAA. The game looks incredibly crisp apart from the terrible shimmering.

 

[Artorias]

Games on sale over at Steam.

Metro Exodus on Steam

Flee the shattered ruins of the Moscow Metro and embark on an epic, continent-spanning journey across the post-apocalyptic Russian wilderness. Explore vast, non-linear levels, lose yourself in an immersive, sandbox survival experience, and follow a thrilling story-line that spans an entire year...

store.steampowered.com

 

[ondma]

Still cant get into it. Started it once, then gave up and restarted (thought maybe I was missing something).
Played to where I got to before, stopped for a while, started again for a few hours, and now havent played for a couple of months. Having more fun replaying Witcher 3 for the Nth time.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Still cant get into it. Started it once, then gave up and restarted (thought maybe I was missing something).
Played to where I got to before, stopped for a while, started again for a few hours, and now havent played for a couple of months. Having more fun replaying Witcher 3 for the Nth time.

Did you enjoy the previous Metro games? I've heard a few of these comments about this game and I'm trying to figure out if this game just strayed too far from what Metro used to be or if it's just a personal taste thing.

 

[Artorias]

I played both previous games. Just started a first playthrough through ranger hardcore.

 

[ondma]

Did you enjoy the previous Metro games? I've heard a few of these comments about this game and I'm trying to figure out if this game just strayed too far from what Metro used to be or if it's just a personal taste thing.

Yea, I enjoyed both Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light. Not really sure why I cant get into Exodus. Maybe it is just another post apocalyptical shooter without the atmosphere of the tunnels. Partly also I think I am tired of endlessly trying to get the good ending by using stealth instead of killing enemies. When I go back, I probably will just turn the difficulty down and shoot my way through as quickly as possible, ending be damned.