The Metro series has traditionally deployed a pretty interesting system to help determine which ending scenes you ultimately receive. In Metro 2033, Last Light, and Exodus, Artyom would be awarded 'Karma Points' for actively and passively undertaking different actions – this is largely hidden away from the player, operating quietly in the background to help encourage you to better understand the Metro, its people, and the strange phenomenon hanging over it.
Metro 2039 is bringing players back to the Metro system after Exodus steered us into the wilderness beyond Moscow. There's a new protagonist, the Stranger, an exile returning to a world that's now under the rule of one centralized faction – the fascistic Novoreich.
This new frame means that 4A Games is changing the way that we see and perceive the world. "If you look at our previous games, they're dealing with preventing war in their themes – and in the morality of the player's actions, choices, and the story around them," says Jon Bloch, executive producer.
"Where there was kind of a moral grayness in our previous games, we wanted to make sure that the morality was clear in Metro 2039. There is no hope, no future – except the one the Führer is promising to bring in," he adds. "Metro 2039 is exploring the consequences of war, because war is here."
I wondered whether this change in how morality is viewed would also affect how 4A handles Karma. Bloch assures me that the system is alive and well for this descent into a more hellish Metro system, but there will be some changes to how it functions.
"Every game has had a different way of approaching the same idea of a karma system, and Metro 2039 is no different. The same idea of actions having consequences, that remains. We're just approaching it a little bit differently this time. We have to every time because it needs to serve the story."
Bloch won't be drawn on how the system will be interpreted in Metro 2039, or which actions will ultimately affect the Stranger's Karma in both positive and negative ways. I can say from my time with the game that it didn't appear to indicate when Karma Points were received with any type of colored HUD hue, as in Metro 2033 and Last Light – and that's despite me doing the best that I could to listen in on every conversation that I could, explore every corner of the overworld, find every abandoned stalker nest and frozen story, and dispatch human antagonists with non-lethal takedowns.
Still, with the Karma system making a return for a far darker, more hostile world – one where the Stranger is on a mission to not only tear down a fascist empire that has overtaken the Metro, but contend with the haunting ghosts of his past – I'm certain 4A will have found another unique approach to judging morality in a fractured world.
