In the span of a month and a half, we’ve gone from the announcement of La Quimera (and the rebranding of 4A Games Ukraine to Reburn) to the confirmation of the release date, which is scheduled for April 25 on PC. However, select players will have the chance to try the new sci-fi first-person shooter game this weekend as part of a Closed Beta Test available via Steam.
In the meantime, we reached out to Reburn to discuss their debut project (which is also their first multiplayer game), the split with 4A Games, and more. Keep reading for the answers from Project Director Oleksandr Kostiuk, CEO Dmytro Lymar, and CTO (Chief Technical Officer) Iurii Sashchuk.
How long has La Quimera been in development?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: La Quimera has been in development since 2020, when we began pre-production with a small team. Around 2021, the project moved into full production, though the team was still growing at the time. Unfortunately, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine at the beginning of 2022 disrupted our plans and affected our timeline—like many others, we had to adapt to a new reality while keeping the project moving forward.
The press release said you received funds for it. Can you disclose the source? Did you ever consider partnering with a publisher?
Dmytro Lymar: The development of the game has been funded through profits from our previous projects, along with additional undisclosed minority investments. These funds were raised to support both the growth of the company and the development of the game. While we are completely open to potential partnerships with publishers – both now and in the future – the current state of the industry makes such collaborations more difficult than usual.
Can you discuss the split of 4A Games?
Dmytro Lymar: The split of 4A Games happened back in 2014 when there was an initial invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the annexation of Crimea. However, we continued to work on the same project, Metro Exodus, as one team. After completing work on it in 2020, we started our own project, La Quimera, while the other part of 4A Games continued working on Metro and, around the same time, was acquired by Embracer Group. Additionally, due to the confusion of having two companies with the same name now working on different projects, we had to somehow resolve this, and we agreed that it would be better to keep the 4A Games trademark with Metro, so our studio got a new name – Reburn.
Why did you choose Latin America as the central location for your sci-fi setting? Did you consult with local experts to ensure an appropriate portrayal of the culture?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: Latin America fascinated us as a setting because of its incredible mix of cultures and rich historical layers. Combined with the near-future timeframe of La Quimera, it gave us almost limitless creative freedom to build a unique and compelling universe.
We’ve consulted with Latin American experts to get feedback and help analyze our work to ensure respectful and thoughtful representation. It’s also worth noting that the world of La Quimera is very much a vision of a cosmopolitan future—where the region’s historical and cultural roots are blended with new technologies and global influences brought in by settlers from around the world.
Can you tell us a bit more about the setting and the story’s background?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: While we’d prefer to keep some of the significant plot twists under wraps for now, we can share a bit about the setting and story. La Quimera takes place in the 2060s, in a future shaped by political instability that has completely redrawn national borders, effectively erasing global states. The world now resembles a kind of feudal fragmentation on a global scale, yet with 21st-century technology. In this dystopian, post-industrial world, private military companies and corporations that control key resources—such as energy and information—hold significant power and influence.
The game takes place in Nuevo Caracas, a newly-formed city-state where elements of the past mix with future trends. The game’s lore is so rich and detailed that it could fill dozens of pages. We’re incredibly grateful to our writers, Nick and Ed, for their work in bringing this world to life. We’re also planning to launch an online encyclopedia for the game’s world, allowing anyone who’s interested to dive deeper into the setting and learn more.
You said that La Quimera is a story-driven game. I assume this means it won’t be semi open-world like Metro Exodus, right? Is there any optional side content in La Quimera?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: Yes, we are highly focused on delivering a tight, story-driven experience where the narrative acts as a guide for the player through the world of the game. As a result, we’ve chosen a more linear approach for the design of our locations. That said, players will still be able to discover secret areas and optional zones that aren’t required for the main storyline. The development of additional content for La Quimera is still in progress, and we’re carefully considering how best to expand on the experience while staying true to the core narrative.
How long do you expect the game to take for the average player?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: Given the challenges we faced during the development of La Quimera due to the war in Ukraine, we made the decision to focus on a more compact experience while still including the most essential elements of the game.
The main storyline for a solo player will take seasoned FPS fans around 5 hours to complete. If you are looking for some additional challenge with your friends playing cooperatively, this should extend your playtime by quite a few hours.
This is your first co-op game, correct? Can you share the main challenges when making a multiplayer game? Also, how is it going to work in terms of hosting/joining, and will it be cross-play?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: Probably the biggest challenge was creating a story-driven game that’s equally engaging whether played solo or with friends. We wanted to ensure the experience remains rich and immersive in both cases, even though there are some nuances that make the two approaches different.
You’ll be able to play both solo and with friends or random players. At the start of each level,
you’ll have the option to choose how you want to play. As for matchmaking, it is a bit too early to say, as currently we release only on Steam, but we aim to make the multiplayer experience as accessible as possible across different platforms.
How does the game scale to take into account co-op players when they join a session?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: The game adjusts the intensity and density of encounters based on the number of players in the session. This includes the number of enemies that can be engaged in combat at once, their overall count, spawn rates, and damage output, all of which scale depending on how many players are present.
Additionally, we’ve developed a system where each player can choose their personal difficulty level in a co-op session. This difficulty will apply specifically to the player who selects it, but it will still be balanced with the difficulty levels of the other players to maintain a fair and enjoyable experience for everyone.
What is your post-launch plan for La Quimera?
Oleksandr Kostiuk: We have a lot of plans and ideas for expanding the storylines and gameplay elements within the world of La Quimera. Player feedback and impressions are also incredibly important to us as we move forward. At this stage, our post-launch plans are still in the works, but we would be excited to share them with the community as soon as they are ready.
Are you still using the 4A Engine or something else? Will the game support NVIDIA DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 4? What about ray tracing?
Iurii Sashchuk: For La Quimera, we’re using Unreal Engine 4, which allows us to create a multiplayer game more easily, having all the necessary tech and tools. However, our experience with the 4A Engine remains a vital foundation—shaping our approach to rendering, performance optimization, multi-threading, streaming, visibility determination, memory management, task scheduling, and content optimization.
Compared to Metro Exodus, we have introduced several key improvements. Notably, we overhauled texture streaming to allow for greater variety and better performance. Scene detail in La Quimera is significantly higher, which required us to develop a new visibility culling system. This lets us handle more objects in a scene without compromising performance. We also made enhancements to Unreal’s shadow mapping cache, enabling us to support more dynamic lights simultaneously. Overall, our goal has been to give artists and designers as much creative freedom as possible while maintaining strong technical performance.
We implemented a custom solution for global (indirect) lighting instead of real-time ray tracing.
This gave us better performance, broader hardware compatibility, and more efficient data storage, while keeping a strong level of visuals. We use DLSS and FSR. They are interesting technologies with frequent improvements. But we have not implemented the latest versions yet, which we plan to implement in the near future.
What do you think about the recent release of the DirectX Raytracing 1.2 preview with neural rendering support? Do you believe it will take long for it to be applied in games?
Iurii Sashchuk: We’re genuinely excited about the potential of DirectX Raytracing 1.2 and neural rendering. While La Quimera doesn’t currently use real-time ray tracing due to our priority towards achieving strong performance across a wide range of hardware, we do utilize raytracing during the asset creation process to enhance visual quality.
We absolutely see great potential in ray tracing and other neural network–based technologies. These are still relatively early in their development, but we believe they will continue to evolve and eventually become more widely adopted in production environments. As for how quickly this happens—it really depends on specific features, hardware adoption, and the complexity of implementation. We’re following these developments closely and definitely plan to integrate more of these technologies into our future work as they mature.
Would La Quimera support PlayStation 5 Pro if the game makes it to consoles?
Iurii Sashchuk: We have not yet announced any plans for consoles, so it is difficult to tell anything specific. But we always try to squeeze as much as possible from any hardware, PlayStation 5 Pro should not be an exception.
Thank you for your time.
