Microsoft announced it will hold its inaugural Xbox First Look event with the revelation of Metro 2039 on Thursday.
The reveal will happen with 4A Games, the developer of the Metro games, and publisher Deep Silver, at the Xbox First Look, a digital-only broadcast offering a world-premiere look at the next title in the beloved post-apocalyptic first-person shooter series.
Some studio history
This will be the fourth mainline entry from 4A Games in the series based on the iconic novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky, following Metro 2033 (2010), Metro: Last Light (2013), and Metro Exodus (2019), all of which tell the stories of survivors of nuclear devastation living in the Moscow subway tunnels and the world that surrounds them. (Metro Awakening (2024 VR title) was made separately by Vertigo Games via Embracer).
As you may recall, 4A Games Ukraine put Ukraine on the game dev map with the Metro series. Now it is renaming itself as Reburn and is unveiling a new intellectual property called La Quimera.
4A Games was founded in Kyiv in Ukraine in 2006, and development of Metro 2033 began. The company built its own 4A game engine.
In 2007, 4A Ukraine worked through its Cyprus office to sign a deal with THQ to fund development and publishing of Metro 2033. The IP rights went to THQ as part of the deal, but the IP rights to the game engine stayed with 4A Ukraine.
The title came out in 2010, and it was a hit as a triple-A game. Then THQ signed up for the development of Metro Last Light.
But in 2012, THQ went bankrupt and the rights to Metro Last Light were acquired in an auction by Koch Media, operating under the Deep Silver trademark.
In 2014, Russia attacked Ukraine for the first time. Part of the team left and founded their own studio in Malta.
That studio became 4A Malta, and they agreed to jointly develop a third game, Metro Exodus. Both studios worked together closely on it. The Metro Exodus title released in 2019, and both studios had grown enough to want to work on their own games independently.
In 2020, 4A Malta was acquired by Embracer Group, which also owns the Metro IP. But 4A Ukraine received additional funding to independently fund its own development of a new project based on its own IP, La Quimera. And now it has rebranded as Reburn.
The 4A trademark remained with 4A Malta, but both firms can use the 4A engine. Reburn launched La Quimera into early access but it was poorly received.
4A Malta is now 4A Games and it is doing the Metro 2039 game.
The broadcast details
Xbox has always been a home for the franchise, and Microsoft said it is honored to continue that relationship by bringing fans a first look at this next exciting chapter.
The broadcast will happen here on Thursday, April 16, at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern / 6pm UK. Xbox First Look: Metro 2039 will be available to watch as a YouTube Premiere on YouTube.com/Xbox.
The event will have subtitle support in the following languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Spanish (Castilian), Spanish (MX), Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Just click the gear icon in the lower righthand corner of the primary stream to choose the language of your choice.
There will be a version of the show with Audio Descriptions (AD) in English on the Xbox YouTube channel, and American Sign Language (ASL) on Xbox’s YouTube channel.
The Xbox Wire team will publish a recap rounding up all the news from the show immediately following the end of Xbox First Look: Metro 2039 (including localized versions in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, LATAM Spanish, and Japanese).
Xbox said it will appreciate any co-stream efforts and aim to ensure you have a smooth experience if you choose to do so. However, due to forces beyond its control, Xbox cannot guarantee that glitches or disruptions by bots and other automated software won’t interfere with co-streams. For those planning to create post-show breakdowns of Xbox First Look: Metro 2039 in the form of Video on Demand (VOD) coverage, Xbox recommends you do not use any audio containing copyrighted music to avoid any action by automated bots, and to also consult the terms of service for your service provider.