KYIV — 4A Studios said in a first look presentation that the ongoing war in Ukraine reshaped the story of its upcoming game Metro 2039, which will release this winter on Windows, Xbox Series consoles and PlayStation 5. The studio said everything it had planned for the title changed in 2020 and more substantially in 2022, prompting a rewrite focused on choices, actions, consequences and the cost of having a future.

Metro 2039 is set in the Metro universe established by Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels and returns players to the tunnels of the Moscow metro. Survivors of a nuclear holocaust trapped in underground stations have been united in a Novoreich under a new führer called The Hunter. The Novoreich regime promises a bright future on the surface but uses propaganda to incite survivors to kill "the enemy".

"Now, war is our reality, and the message has shifted to be about the consequences," executive producer Jon Bloch said during the presentation. In the pre-rendered trailer shown during the presentation, the protagonist known as The Stranger experiences nightmares in which he is restrained by chains and sees children suffering under a misinformation campaign.

Founded in Kyiv in 2006 and now officially based in Malta, 4A Studios has a team spanning 25 countries, the majority of them Ukrainian developers. Many of those developers have had to rely on electricity from generators or batteries and to shelter from drone attacks during the workday because of the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in 2022. Glukhovsky was forced into exile from Russia due to his outspoken criticism of the war in Ukraine.

The studio is using its own engine and tools to develop the game, which it said enables detailed, ray-traced worlds without relying on prefabricated and repetitive structures. Environments are being designed to depict "frozen stories", capturing moments in time interrupted by a death or sudden departure. Incidental details include spilled tea, an unfinished card game on a table, and a gun-wielding corpse surrounded by spent shells. The environments are designed to tell stories without a single line of dialogue.