A copy of Deep Silver and 4A's blog on the Metro: Last Light DLC pack, The Tower Pack.
The Tower Pack[]
Across the Metro: Last Light campaign we mix a lot of different gameplay styles, but there are three main categories that our levels tend to fall into.
The first is exploration – typically around our Station Cities, where the player is free to wander at their leisure.
The second is survival – whether deep in the tunnels or on the hostile surface, where we mix classic survival horror style gameplay with more scripted moments and set piece to craft a specific experience.
The last is combat – and for what is supposedly (at least by genre definition) a first person shooter, you might be surprised how little actual gunplay there is in the game. There are only a few levels dedicated to combat, and most offer a completely non-lethal stealth based alternative to the player.
Nonetheless, one of our biggest goals for Metro: Last Light was to overhaul our combat experience, particularly in light of the lacklustre reception the gunplay in Metro 2033 earned.
We changed everything – from the control scheme, to our animation system, AI, projectile modelling, audio… We wanted to find the right balance between combat that felt deadly and satisfying, but also meant the player was always aware of their own frailties and weaknesses.
And ultimately, all this work only really came to bear in a few gunfights spread across the campaign!
We wanted to create some DLC that took advantage of these new, refined combat mechanics, that allowed players to explore the system in more depth – and so the Tower Pack was born.
The Tower is a ‘combat simulator’ – completely separate from the Metro: Last Light campaign, it is a fantasy arena where you can endlessly indulge your combat strategies free from the burden of Artyom’s mission.
All enemy variants and weapons are present, allowing you to experiment with the unique Metro arsenal.
And for this DLC, we have added a challenge component and online Leaderboards, so you can compare your skills as a gunslinger against other would-be Rangers.
As an virtual combat simulator, the Tower Pack also allowed our level designers and artists to create combat environments that were no longer bound by the rules of ‘realism’ that apply to all our campaign levels. In Metro: Last Light, every combat location still had to have a sense of place and purpose – for example, the Nazi’s hydroponic farm, or the Red’s Armoured Train factory.
In contrast, the Tower Pack environments were designed as abstract combat zones – we use classic arena-style layouts and a cleaner, minimalist set of asset tiles to capture the sense of being inside the ‘virtual combat simulator.’
Our next piece of DLC is the ‘Developer Pack’ – it will follow soon after the Tower Pack and represents, once again, a completely different way to experience the Metro.
-by Deep Silver on Thursday 29th of August 2013