In the first post on its studio blog since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv-based 4A Games has provided a brief update on its status and released out of the blue a full modding toolkit (opens in new tab) (or SDK) for Subway Exodus (opens in new tab). While “the Kiev office is sometimes out of reach and power and water can be a luxury,” it seems that the studio has taken its time working on several projects, one of which – the Metro SDK – is now paying off.
The SDK is the full-fledged, real-deal toolkit that the developers used in-game: 4A says it’s the “Editor as it was back in the day [the studio] released Metro Exodus”, which I (as someone with exactly none of the technical capabilities required for modding) I have to assume puts quite a bit of power in the hands of modders. Mod.io (opens in new tab) integration too, which should make it a bit easier to manage and share the things you create with the toolkit.
As long as you own Metro Exodus, you have access to the SDK. On Steam it’s in the Tools section of the client, it can be found in the Additional Executables section of the launcher on GOG, and Epic Games Store users will have to poke around in the sdk>bin_x64 folder to find it.
But the update is also noteworthy because it gives us a glimpse of how life in the Ukrainian studio has changed since the Russian invasion last February. 4A says some of its employees have “lost homes to bombings”, others “joined the armed forces to defend Ukraine”, all the while “colleagues, friends, families have been injured” and “several have lost their lives”. lost”. . 4A says it is providing “financial and logistical assistance to the team across Kiev and beyond” to try to improve the extraordinary conditions many workers find themselves in.
4A says it will continue to work on the next Metro game despite all this and that the game’s content has of course been influenced by the ongoing war. The studio says “the war in Ukraine has made it [it] rethink what kind of story the next Metro should be,” and that “all of Metro’s themes — conflict, power, politics, tyranny, repression” are now part of the developers’ day-to-day reality, so they’re “going to them with a renewed aim in the game”.
Don’t expect that game anytime soon though. The studio says it also needs to ‘manage’ [its] expectations”. While everyone is trying to live “as normally as possible”, it is still necessary to deal with “power and water cuts, families having to move, friends and colleagues volunteering or being called to the front”. thankfully not an expert, but I think it’s probably hard to make a game under those circumstances, let alone one on the scale of Metro.