I just have to say first that while, the Story is kind of weak, it's at least serviceable enough as a mechanism to drive the characters from point A to point B with minimal strained backflipping. I never felt like what I was doing was a logical leap for the characters in story. Only jarring from the perspective of a narrative. It holds together well enough as long as you aren't trying to pick it apart. It's main weakeness is the lack of an overarching plot and, as you say, the jarring placement of the Yamantau reveal which sort of causes the pacing to stumble.
At a guess, this is partly the Metro series design philosophy tripping itself up. There is a general story conceit in Metro to ground its world in the pre war one. Hence Metro's iconic loading maps that show your progress through the metro system. However, confined to the Moscow metro, there were many oppotunities to bend the rules. Stations could be drastically different, owing to their years of habitation and modification by their occupants, and your path to and from them could travel through fictitious service tunnel short cuts or vaguely defined above ground journeys through the bombed out ruins to reach the places that made sense for the sake of story.
This is more difficult when Metro's world extends outside of Moscow. As the travel times and distances grow and as the game's conceits have to grappel with vast and varying environments. Quite simply, I think the Yamantau scene was set close to the beginning of the game because mount Yamantau is relatively close to Moscow compared to the other locals. It is Russia's major, known, nuclear command bunker and therefore the logical place to position any continuance of government in the fictitious world of Metro. And so it was a location and encounter that the writers, rightly or wrongly, felt had to be resolved.
Juding by the rail layout of Russia, there's no reason why Miller and crew wouldn't make a bee-line for its location. But this tripped up the rest of the plot by placing the reveal early on. And there probably weren't adequate resources to expand the game to include a second encounter with Russian remnants.
Personally, set so early, I think Yamantau could have been handled better. But more in terms of the threat that was faced. Miller's delusion than there was still a government to serve was fine, as was his disillusionment when he discovered that Yamantau was a fraud. These were important to inform his later actions and forgiveness of Artyom. The idea that the facility had been corrupted and thus helped in ensuring the failure of many survivors who could have made a difference outside of Moscow is also good and helps to further explain the crapsack world that the Spartans are traveling into.
I just wish the threat had been commensurate with the psychological build up. Like instead of cannibals, bring back the psychic monster from the Metro Novels. The one that loured people into the Kremlin. Players of just the games might take it as simply derivative of D6 from the first game, but it would have been a great opportunity to bring back that psychic horror that Artyom is so good at handling and saving his companions from.
It also would have allowed Yamantau to be more hospitable thus explaining how many refugees were able to reach it. Instead of trapping the cannibals inside with radiation. The mutant could be immotile, unnable to leave its den, only louring people in. It could also remain dormant for long stretches. Only playing the part of Russian command on the Radio to draw people into the range of its psychic powers.
What's more, it would have segued perfectly with Miller's delusion. He was so hopeful to begin with that the player may not realize at first that his the first to succumb to the draw because he
wants Yamantau to be real.
And just the thought of it sends chills down my spine. Instead of the clumsy maskarovka Miller fell for, a cold brusque voice giving out instructions that, in retrospect don't seem to match up exactly as natural reponses to Miller's words. Instead, the reveal is that they were not intelligent responses at all. The creature does not think. It simply picks the brain of some hapeless coms tech it consumed, and regurgitates canned lines into the com system, like a crude chat bot.
