The problem with game of the year lists, if your feet are suitably submerged in the PC Gaming swamp, is that they don't tend to highlight anything you won't have already heard about. That's less true for ModDB's Mod of the Year Awards, which can shine a light on experiences that may have slipped under your radar.
This year's publicly voted for crop (as with most year's crops) was heavy on mods for old-school shooters, though mostly not too old-school for me to skip them. Second place was won by impressive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat overhaul Anomaly, while first place went to Half-Life 2 mod Entropy: Zero 2. Check 'em out below, along with the runner ups.
]]>On every PC gaming forum, there’s a question that pops up without fail: “Now that I’ve completed Stalker, how should I replay it?”
There’s clearly more than one answer to that. I’ve never known a game to be quite as autopsied by its own fans as the Stalker series (or, technically S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but who has the time). The three games - Shadow Of Chernobyl, Clear Sky and Call Of Pripyat - have all kinds of mods, and those mods have their own mods. On and on it goes. Every release has its own style, aided by the developer’s willingness to let modders use their assets and engine to a remarkable degree.
]]>The past few years have been amazing for fans of the gritty survival shooter sandbox series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Between a vague but permissive modding agreement and an engine-code leak, fans had all the tools they needed to make their own successor. The likes of Lost Alpha, Dead Air and the upcoming multiplayer Ray Of Hope are all impressive, but the recently re-released Anomaly is the closest we've seen to an unofficial sequel. Free, standalone, polished and stuffed with irradiated promise, here's why Anomaly is a must-play whether you're new to Pripyat or know it like the back of your hand.
]]>Despite mods, abortive sequels, and spiritual spin offs, the promise of "like Stalker, but x" never quite comes true. I've just now realised this is why Ray Of Hope is so named.
"Multiplayer Stalker" is such a pipe dream that it took ten minutes of uninterrupted footage to convince me there was more than a slim chance this will deliver. What I've seen of this standalone mod is enough to turn my head. You too can injure your neck below.
]]>It was a great surprise when GSC Game World announced Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl in 2018, given that they previously scrapped it when the studio essentially shut down in 2011 and its makers had long-since left. It's simultaneously a) less and b) more of a surprise to see GSC Game World announce S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 again in 2019 because a) we knew b) wait they're announcing it again? Indeed GSC are, repeating that they plan to release S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in the year 2021. If anything, them repeating this with little new to show after ten months makes me lose confidence in this 1) happening 2) being good. But I'm told of a distant and hidden place named the Room, where wishes are granted, and if I can find a guide to get me there...
]]>Two minutes ago, I was controlling a robot in Ukraine. Thanks to Isotopium: Chernobyl, you can too - right from your browser and all.
Remote Games have set up a scale model of Chernobyl and populated it with tanks hooked up to the internet. You can jump into one within a minute, though you'll probably only get to play for just as long before you're asked to throw down some cash. I'm not sure about that part, but this is otherwise fantastic.
]]>I had a fine time with Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden's post-apocalyptic, ducking good blend of real-time stealth and turn-based combat, but one concern dogged me throughout. Used repeatedly throughout the game are two beyond-familiar terms: 'zone' and 'Stalker.' Names scorched into the very soul of anyone who's played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games/seen Tarkovsky's Stalker/read Roadside Picnic.
How what why? I asked Mutant Year Zero's developers to explain this anomaly. (And then I spent far too long researching the Swedish release dates of cult 1970s sci-fi).
]]>Whilst raw forms of horror work through shock and disgust, the eerie is felt more as a threat. Perhaps something seems to hover over or follow you -- there’s a rustling just behind you, or a shimmering in your peripheral vision. Usually eeriness pertains to places rather than people. Places that seem to move, shift or even act when they really should lie still. This sense is just as likely to be found in an empty room as an open moor. Sometimes, however, this sense manifests, becoming a force that can reach out and grip us.
]]>Good news for fans of uncompromisingly bleak and incomparably atmospheric Eastern European sandbox shooters: an official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel is on the way, original devs GSC Game World have confirmed.
The less-good news is that we’re all going to have to continue playing mods for the original games for a while yet. According to the announcement, the game isn’t due until 2021. And for those itching to pass the time with the similarly-themed Metro Exodus, that's slipped to next year.
]]>Take one hundred players fighting to the death in that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds way, throw them into the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque irradiated and anomaly-ridden ruins of Chernobyl, and you might have a game like the newly-announced Fear The Wolves. This latest game to hop on the hot Battle Royale trend is coming from Vostok Games, the studio founded by some former members of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers GSC Game World. Fear The Wolves is separate to Vostok's not-very-good S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-inspired multiplayer shooter Survarium, mind, which is still in early access.
]]>The most exciting part of Survarium [official site] has always been the dream that it might one day become essentially an unofficial S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. Survarium studio Vostok Games was founded by folks who formerly worked on the celebrated open-world FPS-RPG series, Survarium is set in a very similar irradiated world of artifact hunters, and Vostok have gabbed about wanting a peristent world to stalk. Survarium is still primarily a small-scale competitive PvP multiplayer shooter but it has recently taken its first teensy tiny step into PvE with the addition of a tutorial story mission.
]]>If I was a betting man, I'd have put money on Enderal, the vast Skyrim total conversion, winning the public vote for ModDB's mod of the year. That I'd have lost all that money is why I'm not a betting man. Enderal came second behind Stalker: Call of Chernobyl, a similarly vast total conversion for the enduring Stalker: Call of Pripyat.
]]>Just before the Christmas break I was trying to catch up on all of the interesting games that I hadn't found time to play earlier in the year. Else Heart.Break() was right near the top of the list, even though I have zero interest in games that expect me to learn how to program in order to have fun. If I learn how to program it'll be so that I can become a megarich superstar game dev, not so that I can solve puzzles in somebody else's game.
So why play a game that is quite clearly about IFs, ELSEs and ANDs? The Store page description contains phrases that should have warned me off the game rather than encouraging me to buy it, and yet something appealed. I wanted to play the game because of a single paragraph in Brendan's review:
]]>The one certainty with news items about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [official site] is there's at least a 70 percent chance they've been planted by Jim. Thanks Jim!
GOG.com continues to blow the horn in support of DRM-free everything with a new game reclaiming service, which you can check it out for yourself in this generously placed link. The idea is that if you bought a game legitimately but the game no longer works because of unsupported DRM or other causes, then you can enter your original game key in order to get a free copy of the game through GOG's DRM-free online store.
]]>Discounts on the STALKER trilogy (which seems like the wrong way to categorise the series somehow, but never mind) tend to wheel around pretty often, but this is particularly good deal for the whole set. There a certain games which are buried deep in RPS' DNA, and the semi-open world, post apocalyptic survival/horror/action STALKER is one of them. If you haven't played them, you are everything that's wrong with humanity missing out some of the most ambitious and atmospheric shooters of all time.
Gosh-o! After several years of nodding politely and say "Yes that's nice but..." to news about the deathmatch-y side of Survarium [official site], developers Vostok Games are starting to share firm plans for the post-apocalyptic FPS's open-world Freeplay mode. As we've hoped from the studio founded by former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers, it's sounding pretty S.T.A.L.K.Y. as players roam across wasteland, scavenging for weapons and supplies, completing missions, sheltering from deadly storms, and being as helpful or murderous to others as they please. It has permadeath, obviously.
]]>Y'know GSC Game World? Oh, you do! The Ukrainian studio behind spookyhard FPS series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Oh, you must! You remember - they seemed to close in 2011 but held on a bit longer, still working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for a few months then cancelling it, and since only resurfaced to weigh in on confusing brand rights issues. See, I knew you knew them. Well, they're back, baby! Boom! And other exciting onomatopoeia. They've announced a return to active game-making, and chatted a little about what went down, including about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's fate.
]]>There are lots of survival games, but there are also lots of games which could be survival games with the right mods installed. Over the course of Survival Week we'll highlight a few of those games and i) write a diary of our experience playing with it ii) explain how to do it yourself.
Honour is for better folk than I. Honour is for the short-lived. Honour is for the people not playing MISERY. Accordingly, I choose to play as a Sniper. I’ll pick off monsters from the safety of a nice, cosy bush, although odds-on that’ll eat me too.
MISERY is a mod for STALKER: Call of Pripyat, two all-caps games which combine to form an experience which shouts death and despair at anyone who tries to play it.
]]>There are lots of survival games, but there are also lots of games which could be survival games with the right mods installed. Over the course of Survival Week we'll highlight a few of those games and i) write a diary of our experience playing with it ii) explain how to do it yourself.
Evil is nothing if not thorough. Usually I prefer to hone my experience with a series of small mods - other entries in this week-long series will do just that - but no combo comes close to the scope of the most twisted survival retool yet hatched: MISERY.
]]>I don't want to get into any speculation of my own about what's genuine and who has the right to do what in terms of STALKER's heritage right now. Let's just look at the brief in-game footage devs West-Games have finally pumped out to support their slow-moving Kickstarter, and see how we feel then.
]]>If you took a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. design document and replaced the words "Chernobyl disaster" with "weird meteorite," you wouldn't be far off from Areal. Think post-apocalyptic open world survival FPS with non-linear missions, populated by simulated life and mutants, and fizzing with dangerous anomalies. That sounds pretty enticing in itself, but developers West Games also have a few former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. folks working on the game, including the series' lead designer.
As you might guess, it's on Kickstarter. However, West Games don't have much to show of Areal at this point. Their pitch relies heavily upon S.T.A.L.K.E.R. footage and pre-existing artwork not made for the game (some even made for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). Given that they're only looking for $50,000 (£30,000)--nowhere near enough to realise such ambitious ideas--it's a mite concerning.
]]>GameSpy has officially exploded, and games are still fleeing from ground zero while green smoke and shrapnel billows every which way. It's been a messy process, to say the least, with some games finding happy new homes while others collapsed on the street side, never to rise again. STALKER, thankfully, has made it out at the last second, with whatever remains of GSC releasing a patch for STALKER, STALKER: Clear Sky, and STALKER: Call of Pripyat to migrate online functionality onto their own servers.
]]>I am standing in the middle of Pripyat in what was intended to be the site of the 1986 May Day festivities. Now an expanse of cracked concrete, the iconic rusting ferris wheel stands behind me. No one else is in sight, as I've been left here alone to get on with some measurements. Looking down at the Geiger counter in my hand I slowly make my way back and forth across the area, taking readings at regular intervals. This is my last research trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the end of six months spent tagging along with tour groups and later helping as a tour guide.
I should be used to this space now, but I feel uneasy. Occasionally I anxiously look up and scan the thick line of trees and shrubs that border this area and break line of sight with the nearby ruined buildings. I try to rationalise my way out of this fear – I tell myself the worst thing that's likely to happen is the embarrassment of trying to cobble together an explanation in Russian for what I'm doing if Pripyat's police guard wanders by.
But there's more to my unease than this. It's not that I'm alone, it's that I've been alone here before. Only the last time was whilst playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl.
]]>Stalker: Lost Alpha is out, but it's not finished. Typical Stalker, really. The game, a fan-fronted effort to reconnect all the elements that were cut from Shadow of Chernobyl, was leaked during development. The developers have chosen to release it earlier than planned, and I decided to try it out. It's still Stalker, still based on the first game, but at the same time it's not. It's as close to a remix as I've ever come across in gaming, bringing in new elements, but still reminding me of the original. It's all different, but if you loved the first Stalker, instead of reinstalling the original and modding it, when this is fixed it'll be your next install. I guarantee it.
]]>Rob Sherman, author of interactive fiction project Black Crown, asked if he could write about videogame inventories. We were powerless against the result, which pairs a personal journey through the English countryside with a treatise on the power of possessions and the reasons videogames must do better in representing them.
There was once, and still is, a boy and a man called me, and one summer, two summers ago, I could be found tiptoeing along a main road in southern England, my boots full of dusty blood.
I had only taken them off once in the last day, and at that point I had nearly wilted from the sight and smell. I took my diagnosis on top of a chalk escarpment, a widow’s peak, a combover of woodland. The couple on the bench next to me were after-work drinking from cans, and looking at the wealds rolling away from them. They must have thought that some medieval leper had staggered out of the local hospitalers, holidaying on his stumps.
]]>My conflict-o-tron is clicking like that time I discovered a 'free kitten, smoosh child' lever. I could have had a free kitten, but then there's that child. Not even imagining the cutest kittens and the worst children could get me to pull it. Believe me, I tried. Survarium has me in that same sort of headspace: a game from a lot of the Stalker devs set in a zone of alienation! Hooray! But it'll start out as a free-to-play shooter. There is some footage of a match below, and it looks lovely and lush, but doesn't play anything like Stalker.
]]>If various apocalyptic games, books, and movies have taught me anything, it's that you always side with the trees. Humans? Nah, they're old hat. On the way out. This is largely evidenced by the fact that they always find some way to bomb, globally warm, or pandemic themselves to the brink of extinction. That's not exactly the stuff of a winning team. Trees, though, they wither but never waver. Just a few stray seeds and they're back in the game. So naturally, Survarium's Fringe faction worships them, because what else do you do with an unfeeling entity that doesn't care if you live or die? See them in action - along with a new, impressively colossal map called Chemical Plant - below.
]]>This career affords me the option to write about space chickens more often than you'd think, but still not as much as I'd like. It's a real shame, but this - this right now - is a most eggcellent moment. And getting to namedrop STALKER in the same article? Well that's just the finger lickin' chicken's most prized pickins' (I'm from Texas, so I'm allowed to talk like that). But yes: Humans Must Answer, a shmup by former STALKER devs where you play as genocidal intergalactic avians, is now officially out. There's a celebratory trailer that tastes remarkably like chicken right after the break.
]]>The sun is beating the UK into sweaty submission. Flowers are blooming, there is blue where there's usually grey, and lollypops are the staple food source. Summer has finally decided to show up and make the world brighter and sort of happier, so this weekend I closed the curtains and spent my off-time fiddling with Stalker. I decided I wanted to pretty up the original game: I wanted pitch black nights, livelier fauna, blowouts, lovely skies, and more interesting weather. Unfortunately I'd forgotten I'd already modded it, so I ended up with a broken mutant of a game. I'm reinstalling now. It wasn't at total waste: on my hunt for the Shadow Of Chernobyl mods I discovered that the long-awaited Misery 2.0 for Call Of Pripyat is out this month. And it has a trailer.
]]>To this very day, I continue to be followed around by a gray little rain cloud that weeps heaving droplets over STALKER 2's demise. I have named it Probably Clinical Depression - after my great grandfather, of course. But one can only linger on the past for so long. I know this. I am a mature adult with grownup feelings, coping mechanisms, and tastes in colorful breakfast cereals. So naturally, I've decided to pile all my hopes and desires on a thing that only vaguely resembles my loss, like any well-adjusted person would. Survarium's been unabashedly multiplayer since day one, and now it's officially entered invite-only alpha. Does it at least capture STALKER's spirit? I can only hope.
]]>Update: GSC responded to our queries, pointing out two rather major items: 1) "BitComposer doesn't have any rights as to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., except for distributing our game Call of Pripyat on some territories," a rep clarified. "They may have purchased the rights for the game based on Roadside Picnic, but it has nothing to do with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or its universe." 2) "GSC is seeking ways to continue the series, and we're also considering selling out the brand to a decent developer or publisher." Hear that? Somebody amazing, BUY STALKER.
Original: I always wanted to be able to tell people STALKER will never die, but I'm not sure I wanted it to be like this. First, German publisher bitComposer claimed to have obtained the rights to develop games about Chernobyl's implausibly bad luck with nuclear power via a book-series-shaped backdoor. When doubt was cast upon the validity of their claim, they confirmed to Jim that the rights are theirs, but hesitated to comment any further as to what that could mean for the series or the sadly defunct STALKER 2. Now, though, the thought-to-be-corpsified remains of original STALKER dev GSC Game World have caught wind of the controversy, and they're returning fire with fighting words.
]]>UPDATE: Just got off the phone with bitComposer, who tell us that they DID acquire Stalker rights from the late Boris Strugatsky. Quite what this means for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise isn't clear, as they can make no further comment at this time.
]]>Was my decision to write this story influenced strongly by the fact that I'd get to include the phrase "space chickens" in a headline? Future scholars will argue over the answer to that very question for generations, and they'll be wasting their time because duh. But eggstraterrestrials galaxy-faring coop-flyers are - believe it or not - only part of what makes Humans Must Answer intriguing. The other half of that equation, then, is the oh-so-silly shmup's pedigree. Developer Sumom Games, you see, rose from STALKER 2's irradiated ashes when GSC Game World ceased to be. So now the team's making shmups starring “intelligent and dangerous chickens," naturally. Apparently, though, the storyline - which sees said chickens encounter hostile humans - is "subtle and surprising." I honestly can't tell if they're joking.
RussianUkrainian blogger and marketing man Sergey Galyonkin - who tipped off the closure of the STALKER 2 project earlier this year - has claimed that Bethesda now have the rights to make a publish a STALKER game. They apparently do not have rights to the extended universe. GSC owner Sergei Grigorovich has not sold the brand, but apparently Bethesda could now make a game based on the property with their own technology. We'll report more on this as we get it.
'Cinematic' should rightfully be a dirty word when discussing games and yet Max Payne 3's marketing wears it proudly, like a sweat-stained vest or an inappropriately jaunty tie. A cutscene is cinematic, every detail and angle just so, no room for accident or deviation, but to aspire to a ‘cinematic’ experience during play is to ignore so much of what makes experiences within a game unique to the form. We run, gun and react in worlds that rely, for the enjoyment they bring, on the accidental and the curious as much as they require adherence to a plan. Here’s to the unexpected, the unplanned and the unforgettable.
]]>I had a jolly good time with Crysis, mostly just watching things fall over and cooing with delight, but if I could have changed one thing about it I would have made it less about wearing a nanosuit and punching people through buildings and more about being STALKER. Nothing against Crysis, it's just my way of looking at things. In my least impressive moments I'll rabidly argue that Peggle should be more like STALKER. Turns out I'm not alone, on the Crysis front at least, as a group of Russian modders by the name OWL Game Studio have been working on a Zone-based anomaly-ridden bleakness of an experience called CryZone: Sector 23. The stabilisers are coming off and it's going to be a standalone game.
]]>Over Christmas I drew up a list of little things about games that have always intrigued, interested, or appealed to me. I've been adding to it over the past couple of weeks, and I'll be writing about these little nuances of gaming in the coming months. These are just idle musings, but I hope you'll find them to be food for thought. Today's is about the odd joy in seeing AI entities getting into a fight.
]]>GSC have announced their arrival at Good Old Games with a bundled package of some of their most fondly remembered titles. Yes, it's the Cossacks Anthology, containing Cossacks: European Wars and its two expansion packs. Now, I do have very fond memories of Cossacks' take on the historical RTS, throwing around thousands of units at once, but of course it's the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games that most people know GSC for. Further titles will be appearing but I'm not even sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is old enough to be considered anything other than a GG. The Cossacks Anthology is available here, priced at $5.99. Maybe if everyone in the world buys it twice, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 appears immediately?
]]>"The Stalker team is extremely happy! Why? Because we are continuing work on Stalker 2 after the holidays." That makes me extremely happy too. That's the official line from GSC, although it's not quite as simple as that. Speaking to Edge, the studio's Oleg Yavorsky reveals that “We are still in the process of seeking funding to back up the project. We are hopeful things turn out well eventually." Which still sounds pretty precarious, but given the situation last month was that the studio and the game were flat-out closing down, it's still a good day for Stalker fans.
]]>A surprise Christmas present from GSC, at which there appears to remain some life despite the awful news that they (and with them Stalker 2) had apparently been shut down earlier this month:
]]>The sudden apparent closure of GSC GameWorld and death of Stalker 2 is, for me, the saddest gaming news of this year, and a whole lot of other years to boot. Jim eloquently summed up why over the weekend. The waters of explanation remain deeply muddied however, so all we can do is hope that some glimmer of life emerges from the ruins. We got a small hint of that earlier, with the GSC Twitter account suddenly offering "We will do our best to continue. However, at this moment, nothing is certain."
]]>With the news that iconoclastic Ukrainian developer GSC Gameworld has closed its doors, putting the future of the Stalker series in jeopardy, thoughts turned to the games they had made, and the hopes we'd held for a sequel. There are a few reasons why the Stalker series is so important in the greater scheme of gaming, and as of 2011 those reasons seem more pressing than ever.
]]>LATEST UPDATE: GSC's twitter this morning announced there will be an official statement on Monday.
1c Ukraine's Sergey Galenkin has blogged about the closure of GSC. He states: "GSC is closed, a fact confirmed by all. The team is almost completely dissolved, the state has only a few people." Galenkin blames the cost of developing a PC only shooter for a European audience, and a failed console publishing deal, for the collapse of the developer.
The rest of the story, as it happened, below.
]]>So I've finally got around to installing the Shadow Of Chernobyl "mega-mod", Narodnaya Solyanka. It's a tangled compilation of Russian-language add-ons, put together by a Russian team, which has been roughly translated into English by enthusiastic bi-lingual Stalker-fans. The translation is interesting. Overall, though, Narodnaya Solyanka provides us with a vast amount additional content, including new maps, maps pulled in from the other games, and a daunting radioactive salad of minor Stalker mods. It hugely expands the size of the zone, and reportedly adds another several hundred hours of missing-driven content. It is also a bizarre and off-putting experience, as my initial dabblings have discovered. "It all gets better after the cave," is the mantra that appears across various Stalker forums. And they're right. Because the cave is a horrible mess. What lies beyond, however, is intriguing...
]]>This is it. The end. This column you are about to read will be the last ever Mod News. Sniff. It’s been a pleasure, guys.
But no, really, it has. Over the past year, I’ve had a fantastic time as RPS’ mods guy, and it’s been a real honour to write this column every week - even if it is essentially just a roundup of all the latest happenings on a particular gaming scene. I can assure you that the end of Mod News coincides with the Hivemind’s bigger and better plans for mod coverage in the months ahead. You’re being left in very safe hands.
So, folks, would you join me for one more dance? Here’s the last and final week in mod news, including stuff for Half-Life 2, Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion, Morrowind and Stalker.
]]>Where were you all last week? I turned up and no one was here, honest! What's that? No, I'm not crossing my fingers behind my back, and you definitely didn't see him heading off on holiday. What nonsense. Anyway, to make up for it, here's an extra-long edition of Mod News to cover the past two weeks. This time: Crash Bandicoot, a Warcraft III art mod, a surprising number of trailers and a bizarre remake of Deus Ex...
]]>Popular Stalker mod series Complete has arrived at its third iteration, with the completion of Call Of Pripyat Complete. Complete hooray! The mod overhauls the visuals, the audio, the AI, the UI, as well as adding a bunch of other features such as the sleeping bag (for sleeping anywhere), and the fate of stalkers caught out in the emissions. There's a trailer below. It's rather pretty, in a bleak sort of way. You can completely download it here.
]]>The Stalker TV show was pretty much the most unexpected news item of the week, and I just had to drop a line to GSC to find out more. Below you can read my quick chat with GSC's Oleg Yavorsky, in which he stresses that the TV show's production is intended to be as faithful as possible the source game, and reveals that it will be timed to air on the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
]]>That's what GSC are suggesting with their Quest Contest. There are bunch of rules and stuff over on the competition page, but what it comes down to is this: "The best ideas from the contest may be implemented in the new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. This said, the developers retain the right to change the quest looks or implementation, while preserving the key author's idea." Quest authors will also get the name in the credits. They're looking for less than a side of A4, so it's not exactly an insurmountable challenge. Might as well have go, eh? It can't look bad on your CV, either.
]]>The next GSC S.T.A.L.K.E.R. project will be... a TV show? Yes, it seems to be real. You can check out the trailer below, and the teaser site here. I've contacted GSC for comment. I wish I had something profound to add, but really I am just pleased that it looks like it's trying to be faithful to the game. Weird. Possibly awesome.
]]>Having grabbed some mods and restarted Call Of Pripyat, it turned out that both Jim and Alec were playing through this most recent Stalker title at the same time. It seemed logical, therefore, to have a bit of a chat about the game. Earlier this year Jim had called it “one of the most interesting shooters we're going to see in 2010”, but does that still hold up? And what about those mods? Let's see what the chaps said, below.
]]>I've just started a second playthrough of Call Of Pripyat, which impressed me a great deal earlier in the year. Since a few people had been asking me about mods for the game I thought I'd link to the mods I am using this time around. I've merged the installs for Atmosphere 2, TGS EZ (pictured) and RCOM. The resulting mixture seems to retain the audio and weather cleverness from Atmosphere, while adding the colour palette and textures from the TGS mod, which introduces a much more washed out, bleak aesthetic. In the first area at least, I think is a considerable improvement on the vanilla version, and hides some of vegetation/texturing problems of the aging game engine. RCOM is a weapon balancing and AI mod, which introduces a bunch of changes, making weapons more powerful, and making it much nastier to get shot. This means that long range single shots from an assault rifle will generally drop an enemy, but it means the AI can give you a beating from range too. Overall this mod mix makes the game slightly prettier and considerably tougher. I'm enjoying it.
]]>I've been doing some guest blogging for splendid architecture site BLDGBLOG. You can see my previous offerings here and here, as well as an interview here. The latest piece - here! - delves deeper into my obsession with GSC Gameworld's Stalker games, and the wider fiction - and reality - surrounding them. Go have a read of the rest of BLDGBLOG, too. It will surprise you.
]]>The third Stalker game, Call Of Pripyat, has been out in Europe and Russia for quite some time, but it has only just made the leap to English-language release. The UK version due on Friday. I've recently completed that edition of the game and my account of that experience follows.
]]>Below is the first part of our intricate guide for PC gaming in 2010. There's a horde of muscular-looking titles on the horizon, many of them likely to stop you and demand your money, like ludological bandits. Meanwhile, others that we expected to land, such The Old Republic, have already fled to 2011. Read on as the clouds in our crystal ball roll back...
]]>Koch Media have confirmed February 5 as the release date for S.T.A.L.K.E.R : Call of Pripyat in the UK, Italy, and "Nordic", although which countries that stands for isn't quite clear. Russia, Germany and the rest of Europe have had their versions of the game for a while now, and all feedback points to good. I've spent quite a lot of time with the early English-language version myself, and wrote up impressions here. In short: strong stuff, especially in the direction of open-endedness, but I have a few reservations. I'll be playing the hell out of it when the full version arrives too, obviously. There's no news about what's happening with a US version, but presumably it'll find its way to digital download before long.
]]>Looks like we're all going to need some cheering up after that last item, so how about some bleak Ukrainian apocalypse to give your day a bit of buoyancy? This new trailer for Call Of Pripyat flies through Pripyat itself - so I suppose it's a kind of spoiler - but it gives you some idea of how large the new maps in this game actually are. I've yet to get there in my own playthrough of the game, which I talked about here, but last night I did discover a neat "looped" dungeon, which uses some kind of portalling to always bring you back to the same place - a kind of Escher level. Which is odd, because it's exactly the kind of design I'd been looking to find in games recently, and here it pops up in a minor side-quest in Call Of Pripyat. Interesting stuff.
]]>This week I've been playing the English-language version of Stalker: Call of Pripyat. While the game is already out in Russia and Germany, the English version isn't coming out until January. The version I am playing is therefore a preview build, and incomplete in a number of ways, mostly in UI English and some bits and pieces of presentation. What does seem to be complete, however, is the new and transformed zone, and its surly denizens. My impressions of this, the third Stalker game, follow.
]]>Sergey Galyonkin sends word that he's posted pictures from the heavily-attended Stalkerfest 2009 over on Flickr. You can check out the mass of cosplayers (reportedly around 500) and also see GSC's developer band getting up on stage top strut their stuff. For those of you down with the local language, there's also a blog account of the event here.
]]>So it seems that DirectX 11 will be supported by Call Of Pripyat, although it's not clear what difference that will make to the visual fidelity of the game. This new video (below) shows off lots of lovely real-time shadows and stuff, but I was under the impression that Stalker did that in DirectX 9 anyway... (There's a slightly bizarre comparison of DX9 and DX10 versions of the game here, in which I'm not sure whether one mode could identifiably called "better" than the other from the stills on display.) The trailer, fortunately, also features an encounter with a monstrous psychic dwarf (above), just for good measure.
]]>Many things worry the tiny minds of the RPS team, but one of the most oft-concerning thoughts is whether Stalker: Call Of Pripyat, the third (possibly final?) instance of the games of the zone, will ultimately be the best . Can GSC make up for the misstep of Clear Sky and land a game that has the atmosphere and precision of the original, while still being different enough to be worth playing?
If nothing else, the new areas that will feature in Call Of Pripyat should give us plenty of scope for exploration: the clogged, radiation-pooled river valley, a buried and abandoned village, and finally a district of the city of Pripyat itself. All these can be glimpsed in the new trailer (I particularly like the anomaly coming out of the side of a building) which largely consists of fly-through sequences of the new environments. Go check out the spooky new bloodsucker effects.
]]>The announcement of a new Stalker game, Call Of Pripyat, offers an intriguing prospect. It's a trilogy-completing work - with Clear Sky acting as prequel - and it proports to show what took place in the zone after the events of Shadow Of Chernobyl. The initial announcement seemed to promise a great deal: enhanced A-Life, more freedom, and more survival conditions to consider. But what else is in there? And what did the Ukrainian company learn from Clear Sky? GSC's Oleg Yavorsky took some time out to answer our questions, and to reveal a bit more about Call Of Pripyat. Foolishly, I forgot to ask about the mystery of the bread. (The images in this article can be clicked on for their full-size.)
]]>We've known about this for a while, but the official announcement has only just turned up. The third Stalker game is due for release this Autumn, and covers the events immediately following the end of Shadow Of Chernobyl. "Having discovered about the open path to the Zone center, the government decides to hold a large-scale military "Fairway" operation aimed to take the CNPP under control." Needs to say, things go awry. It falls to the player, as a Ukrainian security agent, to figure out what went wrong. Full details after the jump.
]]>The past week of my gaming time has been dominated by Stalker mods: downloading, testing, crashing, deleting, reinstalling, and even a few hours of playing. For Shadow Of Chernobyl there's pretty much a one-stop shop for changes, which is the extraordinary Oblivion Lost mod. It's a comprehensive, colossal piece of compilation modding, much of it done by the author, and the rest factored in from across the community. It isn't to everyone's taste, especially since the list of changes is immense, but it includes drivable vehicles, sleep, alcoholism, and reworked NPC behaviour. (And that means grenades, annoyingly.) Oblivion Lost is, given the difficulty of combining and over-writing various Stalker mods, a worthwhile download - but it also completes Shadow Of Chernobyl on a profound level. This is modding at its finest. The problem for me, however, was that the Stalker I wanted to return to wasn't an augmented Shadow of Chernobyl, but a fixed Clear Sky, which I hadn't played since the pre-release review version. Could it be time to go back?
]]>Certain game experiences seem to suggest other, older games, and leave me longing for them. Age Of Conan, which I've been playing a great deal for the PC Gamer review, somehow left me longing for Oblivion. There was something about the way that Age Of Conan tantalises you with elements of single player gaming that left me quite hungry for a proper RPG romp, and so I reinstalled the last Elder Scrolls game and plunged in.
To tell the truth, I'd been meaning to go back and play Oblivion a some point this year after being reminded of it in PC Gamer UK's Top 100 meeting. Tom Francis had talked about the moment he'd be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It's wide open and it feels like anything is possible.” It's a feeling that, in some ways, is only possible in a game of Oblivion's calibre. That kind of feeling could be an antidote to the pressures of real life, and definitely an antidote to too many hours in a traditional MMO. I wanted to recapture that, although I had wondered whether Francis' was simply being hyperbolic. Was Oblivion better than I remembered?
]]>A couple of months back I went to a dinner party. It was a modest, grown up affair, albeit it with a bout of arm-flailing Wii play dominating the evening. I didn't know the host all that well and, as we found common ground, we got to discussing his game collection. We sat and picked out titles, as I imagine menfolk might have discussed a shelf full of books or vinyl records in previous decades. One of the games he had on there was Stalker, which he had played through once and not bothered with again. Too gloomy, he said. And there really wasn't much to it.
Needless to say, my feelings were quite the opposite.
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