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.
]]>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.
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.
]]>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."
]]>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.
]]>Quite a lot of mod news this week, apparently, even though there's very little for you to actually play. There's a long-awaited update from Jurrassic Life, as well as plenty of other gubbins related to Half-Life 2, Crysis, Stalker: Clear Sky, Portal 2 and Dirt 3. That's a lot of games! Read on to find out what's what.
]]>This is a random sort of update, but it's just a polite recommendation for all of you. Way back in the mists of 2009 I took a look at the state of mods for Clear Sky, and concluded that while a markedly improved experience was possible, none were a perfect fix to that flawed gem. I'd like to revise and update that, having spent the weekend playing Clear Sky with its Complete mod. That's the most fun I've had playing an FPS since, well, since I played Call Of Pripyat. And the Complete stuff cranked up to maximum on everything seems like the best way to exercise a decent PC. I've spend quite a bit of time marvelling at the visuals, but lots more time enjoying the challenge of the unscripted manshoots. It really is something.
]]>A few people have mailed us over the past few weeks suggesting that we take a look at the Total Faction War mod v1.8 by PhoenixHeart, Darkenneko and Smoq2. I finally got around to doing that this week, and I've written up some thoughts below. Long term readers will recall that I previously attempted to mod the errant son of the Stalker dysnasty into a place in my heart last year, with mixed results. This is the first mod I've had installed that comes close to fixing what was otherwise the weakest aspect of Clear Sky, even after modding: the factional warfare.
]]>There aren't many things that could possibly lure me back to STALKER: Clear Sky, knowing the series' troubled second game is bookended by far finer titles. One of them, however, is hearing that Artistpavel, the acclaimed modder who compiled the spectacular Complete 2009 tweak'n'fix'n'upgrade collection for the original STALKER, has just released the first iteration of Clear Sky Complete. You'll probably want to treat your graphics card to this.
]]>This is the kind of thing we'd normally leave for LewieP to herd into his weekly Bargain Bucket post, but if we wait to mention it till Sunday, most of the great offers will be gone. So, call this the RPS Bargain Jar or something. Quite a few of you have griped about digital store GamersGate's general design over the past few months, and it seems they too were aware of their fugliness. There's just been a big old redesign to make the site sleeker and noticeably faster - and, if you ask me, just a little bit GoG-esque. Shiny! And, thank Vonnegut, it doesn't demand to install yet another icon into our heaving system trays. To celebrate, they've a week of ultro-discounts - a new price-slashed game each day, plus a particularly splendid one lasting the course of the week. Buy buy buy!
]]>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?
]]>We'll be talking more about Clear Sky soon, once gamers have had a chance to actually play it rather than just shout conspiracy theories about the mixed-bag scores it's been receiving. On the pre-eve of the game's European release, however, there's already a patch out. Notably, it addresses a few of the things Jim's, Kieron's and my respective reviews complained about, such as easing the penalties from bandit muggings (note to everyone in the world: the multiple random, avoidable bandit muggings and the single, cutscene-based, unavoidable bandit mugging that happens partway through the main quest are not the same thing), improving performance, increasing the cash won from missions and vague talk of balance improvements. I've stuck the complete patch notes beneath the cut, too.
Even if it's as good as it sounds, I'm really not convinced it can lift the game to the level of its predecessor, but I'll be glad to be proved wrong. I adore Stalker, and I had dearly hoped Clear Sky would be awesome. I'll give the patch a spin tomorrow and see whether it takes the game any closer to my obscenely high standards.
]]>After Jim and Alec's reviews have found their way into the world, Eurogamer eject my take on Clear Sky onto the Internet. In it I say things like:
]]>Bad news for Stalker: Clear Sky - it's been recalled from stores. Well, only briefly - apparently the initial shipments didn't contain CD keys, cleverly. So it's been delayed a few days while some poor sod presumably prints out a load of stickers, meaning its September 5th release date in the US ain't gonna happen.
]]>Well, we've had more than a week of E3 coverage, and I'm sure you're sick of it by now. So I'm finishing up! I checked my huge pile of notes, recordings and press materials and found I have only one thing left to write about – Stalker: Clear Sky.
This sequel/prequel/remake of the acclaimed, if divisive, FPS is an interesting one because it's the only game anyone at RPS specifically asked me to check out at E3. Jim Rossignol all but demanded I find out if there was going to be "terrible new English voice acting and music" in the upcoming title, and so I obliged by chatting with GSC Game World's Valentine Yeltyshev.
]]>Initially I couldn't actually bring myself to watch this. Those that had assured me that it was "okay, I suppose", "looking a bit better the first game," and - ominously - "Jim, it's a kill x rats mission." I hoped that's wasn't true. I had to take a look.
Also: it's almost sarcastically karmic. There was me moaning about trailers that had no game footage, and then along comes twenty-five minutes of a game that I didn't want to spoil for myself by watching. Sigh.
]]>What. Okay, I think that this Clear Sky preview (new footage intermixed with the 1UP team waffling about what they've seen) shows that the incidental voice acting for Clear Sky is in atmosphere-shattering English, rather than Russian. There's also some deeply shit music. GSC, noooo!
]]>GSC have released another trailer showing off some of the environmental details for Stalker prequel Clear Sky. We've seen some of the tech-demo stuff before, but the glimpses of the new regions are rather tantalising.
]]>The image above is from this gallery over at Strategy Informer, which is packed with similar lavish glimpses of the forthcoming Stalker prequel. It seems to be showing off some of the new areas, as well as suggesting a level of detail that will cause my graphics card to shudder and slowly die. Elsewhere, our Eurogamer chums have had a long chat with Oleg Yavorsky, the GSC team's primary spokesman. He says a good deal about the new game, and also talks about the failings of the original game. He blames this in part on the reticence of the US audience in taking to the game, which he sees a fundamental cultural divide.
]]>There's a Clear Sky DX10 tech trailer over on GamersHell. Normally I'd embed it here, but I can't get it to upload to GameTrailers, and our poor little server might not be happy about much heavier traffic than it's getting already. Anyway, the video shows off some pretty spectacular DX10 technologies (realistic watery surfaces, realistic gas and smoke, etc) and makes me suspect that I might need to beef up my PC in the next couple of months. Definitely worth a download.
]]>Someone has posted a bit of shakycam footage of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky DX10 tech demo. Not convinced it looks all that much better than the DX9 game cranked up to full blast, but that could simply be the grainy video.
]]>My preview of STALKER: Clear Sky, penned jointly with Tim Edwards of PC Gamer, has been posted on computerandvideogames.com. In it we talk to Anton Bolshakov about how the original game came to be, before moving on to the nature of the new beast:
Central to that is what GSC are doing with the various factions that inhabit the zone. While there were a large number of factions in the original game (Freedom, Duty, the military, the mercenaries, the scientists, the neutral stalkers and the servants of the monolith) you were only really able to follow three paths: Neutrality, Freedom, or Duty. In Clear Sky you'll be able to join up with seven different factions, work with them, fight them, and ultimately lead your chosen side to victory.
"It's a global war of factions within the zone," says Bolshakov. "Now each faction has a fully fledged main camp with a number of key characters in there, like a trader, a mechanic, a leader, a barman, and all of those perform specific roles."
]]>So here’s my concern. I’ve played Stalker. Twice. I’ve seen the Zone. I know how it works. I’ve killed every mutant, collected many guns, many artifiacts, drunk much vodka, eaten many, many sausages. Do I genuinely want to do it again, but with the linear purpose of its wobbly but oddly affective plot removed?
Damn straight I do. The Zone was my favourite game-place to be last year. Give me more mutants, more guns, more artifacts, and all the digi-sausage I can eat.
]]>News so hot I didn't even have time to work out a proper headline, news reaches us that STALKER: Clear Sky, GSC's 1.5-equel to Jim's favourite game of last year, is going to be digitally distributed exclusively through Valve's Steam. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. In terms of business analysis, it's another game that's gone the Steam route... and it's one which hasn't even discussed how it'll be distributed in the shops yet, since they've parted company with THQ. Secondly, there's five new Clear Sky shots over on their site.
Press release beneath the cut, with Valve's Gabe Newell calling GSC "Forward-thinking" and GSC' Sergiy Grygorovych describing Steam as "the leading global digital distribution platform for games". I like to imagine people quoted in press releases winking chummily to each other when they say things like that. You should try it too.
]]>...a new Q&A with developers GSC Gameworld mentions that they're contemplating turning the sublime post-apocalyptic shooter into an MMO.
"If you mean an MMOG, then we are seriously considering it", is the exact quote. No more details than that, but it's more gossip than proto-videogames generally yield. Let there be much rejoicing.
Certainly, colour me excited.
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