4A Games, the creators of the successful Metro series, have revealed their thoughts on the hardware used in the soon-to-be-announced next-gen consoles, and how they’ll be taking advantage of them in their games. In an interview with Eurogamer, CTO Oles Shishkovstov talked about the studio's excitement for using ray tracing technology in future games, citing ray tracing is the key feature of the next generation of consoles.

The interview centres around the success of launching Metro Redux on the Switch, but when asked about his reaction to publicly revealed details on the hardware used in next-gen consoles he said: “we are fully into ray tracing, dropping old-school codepath/techniques completely.”

It seems that Elon Musk’s fever dream of living in a simulated universe is slowly starting to become a reality, as ray tracing is the next step in achieving hyper-realistic graphics. Though it is exciting in many ways as we see old games a new light (literally) with added ray tracing support like the recent Quake II RTX remake, for example.

That said, with all the buzz surrounding ray tracing at the moment it’s not surprising that more and more developers are experimenting with the technology, especially now considering that the next generation of consoles will include ray tracing capabilities as well. When asked again about how ray tracing has evolved since the release of Metro: Exodus, Oles said: “internally we experimented a lot, and with spectacular results so far. You will need to wait to see what we implement into our future projects".

We still haven’t heard of everything there is to reveal regarding the hardware used in the next-gen consoles, but Oles mysteriously concluded with: “I am more excited for not yet publicly revealed things.” What could those be? We’re not sure, but maybe we’ll see the grand return of the guncon controllers, now that would be an exciting reveal!

Are you excited for ray tracing technology? Or have you already got a GPU capable of supporting it? Either way, tell us what you think!