Metro 2039 is not terribly far away now, launching on February 4, 2027. While that game will truly bring the franchise to current generation consoles, developer 4A Games is launching next-gen updates for the first two games.
Both Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light were incredible tech showcases for their time, but they haven’t exactly aged gracefully. Despite getting an intial remaster all the way back in 2014, Metro 2033 doesn’t play super well with modern hardware, and I’ve needed to tweak it every time I’ve gone back to play it. Luckily, these next-gen updates should bring some long-needed bug fixes to the game.
The update will look different on console and on PC. For PS5 and Xbox Series X, the Metro games will run at either native 4K at 60 fps or an upscaled 4K at 120 fps, with PSSR on PS5 Pro and traditional temporal upscaling on the Xbox consoles. Over on PC, though, the game will finally have DLSS support, along with some unnamed quality-of-life improvements.
4A Games hasn’t shared a lot of details on the updates coming to Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, but it does promise to share full patch notes ahead of its October 22 release on PC and October 29 release on consoles. Either way, as long as the games are more stable, I’m all in.
As a lifelong PC gamer, all three of the Metro games hold a special place in my heart, for all the torture they’ve put my graphics cards through in the past. Luckily, if you don’t like putting your hardware through the wringer, it doesn’t sound like 4A is going to add ray tracing or anything crazy to 2033 or Last Light, so they should be significantly easier to run at high settings than they were when they launched in 2010 and 2013.
We’ve already gone hands-on with Metro 2039, and it seems like an incredible and brutal post-apocalyptic shooter — just like I’d want out of the franchise. The visuals we’ve seen so far look incredible too, so I can only imagine that it’s going to stay true to its roots of pushing PC hardware to its limits. Although, it is launching in the middle of an ongoing RAM crisis, which is going to limit its already niche appeal a bit when the benchmarks start rolling out. Here’s to hoping 4A Games finds a way to make a Metro game scalable at launch for once.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
