4A Games is the development team behind the popular Metro franchise and last year’s critical hit Metro Last Light. A few weeks back, DeepSilver, the new publisher of the franchise announced that the a remastered edition of Metro 2033 and Last Light will be hitting the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sometime this year.
4A Games are based in Ukraine which is seeing a series of protests and crisis and as you can understand it’s not easy going for the public. This also means that 4A Games are also facing challenges in developing the game.
“It’s frightening times for the guys, they were very involved in the protest. I told them to keep their heads down once the bullets started flying around and thankfully they did. They really wanted to be a part of this progressive movement and change, it’s still quite frightening times in Kiev and there are headlines coming out of Ukraine everyday and we don’t know what is going to happen. It is an extra ordinary set of circumstances and they work under anyway without all of this stuff going on,” Huw Beynon, Global Brand Manager for 4A Games, said in an interview with The Escapist.
“Just to give you an idea of how they are working. We have to smuggle dev kits in hand baggage. You can’t send anything by courier to Ukraine, you will be stopped by customs and they will charge you any figure they like.”
“We are building the PS4 versions on two devkits, one of them I personally took in for myself. We are trying to get the Xbox One dev kits out to them but we could not cause all of this kicked in November-December and we actually got them in January this year once things calmed down. It gives you an idea of the challenges that the team is facing,” he explained further.
4A Games must be commended for their efforts towards games development and despite the tough situations they are still able to churn AAA experiences.