Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
When Metro Exodus launched back in 2018, it was a very ambitious title in a technical sense. It managed to straddle the line between console generations and offered glimpses of what games could look like a few years down the road. 4A Games, the studio behind the Metro series, spent a couple of years working on Metro Exodus and re-launched the game earlier this year on PC as the ENhanced Edition, collecting DLC and offering a visual overhaul. This version of the game is now ready for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles and launches today.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a special release solely on its technical merits. 4A Games spent lots of time reworking the game for ray tracing features. The biggest change comes with ray-traced lighting and global illumination. All the rasterized lighting was removed from the game and the visuals are now the result of ray tracing. Environments look more realistic, shadows are now accurate, and light bounces off of surfaces like in real life. I wrote a feature prior to the PC release of the Enhanced Edition that dives deeper into the changes 4A Games made for the game and provides better explanations of how the graphics features work.
The new consoles have beefy GPUs that offer some ray-tracing acceleration and owners of those machines can now experience the game in a similar fashion to a high-end PC. While the accuracy of the ray-traced effect will be a closer match for the lower settings available on PC, the effect on the look of the game is transformative. This is the first game with AAA production values to use entirely ray-traced lighting.
This new upgrade is available on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X now. Owners of Metro Exodus on the PSN or Xbox Live digital storefronts will have their copies upgraded for free according to the official Metro Exodus website. If you love shooters, trains, or almost freezing, we can’t think of a better way to spend the upcoming weekend.