Metro: Last Light's Custom Engine Has Many Improvements

4A Games, the developer of the upcoming Metro: Last Light shooter, is quite proud of its custom game engine and revealed that it allowed the team to add all sorts of features into the upcoming experience.

Metro: Last Light is out in March and, as we saw from the brand new gameplay video earlier this week, it's looking extremely impressive in all sorts of ways.

According to 4A Games and THQ, the two companies behind the new shooter, much of Metro: Last Light's impressive nature is owed to the proprietary game engine, which has seen a variety of improvements done during the development of the shooter.

"Well it's across the board really," THQ's Huw Benyon told CVG about the updates made to the 4A engine for Metro: Last Light.

"The lighting obviously continues to be a huge focus. We've introduced a lot more destruction and interactivity into the environments. Huge improvements in animation across the board. AI improvements have been perhaps the single biggest focus."

The custom nature of the engine allowed 4A to focus on improving and creating new sections instead of trying to repurpose existing ones that were made by other developers for different mechanics.

"It's kind of been everywhere, not just one single thing and the advantage of having the tech and game engine in house means we can add the features that we want as we need them to support the gameplay rather than trying to figure out a system and fudge what they've built for a completely different purpose. I really don't think there's anything else out there that would be able to create the world of Metro, the way the 4A engine does."

The custom engine has been both a blessing and a curse for 4A, as the relatively small studio was forced to stop working on a multiplayer mode for Metro: Last Light in order to complete the story before the game's release in March 2013.