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.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat announced
30 April 2009GSC Game World is glad to announce a new project in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (working title) for PC.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat will become a third stand-alone game in the highly-acclaimed Survival FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The project is slanted for release in autumn 2009.
The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: 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.
According to the operation’s plan, the first military group is to conduct an air scouting of the territory to map out the detailed layouts of anomalous fields location. Thereafter, making use of the maps, the main military forces are to be dispatched.
Despite thorough preparations, the operation fails. Most of the avant-garde helicopters crash. In order to collect information on reasons behind the operation failure, Ukraine’s Security Service send their agent into the Zone center. From now on everything depends on the player.
Key game features:
* Photorealistic exclusion Zone – Pripyat town, Yanov railway station, Jupiter factory, Kopachi village and more, recreated by their true-to-life prototypes.
* New story, a number of unique characters.
* Extended system of side quests.
* New monsters: Chimera and Burer. New behaviour and abilities for all monsters.
* New A-Life system, created using the players’ best-liked elements of the first two games in series.
* Emissions considerably influence the world of the Zone.
* Sleep function added into the game.
* New player’s interface.
* Possibility to continue the game after completion in a freeplay mode.
* The game is developed on X-Ray engine v.1.6
Related Stories:
If you’ve never S.T.A.L.K.E.D. before, which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. should you get? It’s sounding like the first one from this thread.
Jim, they’ve confirmed the NPCs won’t spam grenades as in Clear Sky, and won’t be as accurate with them.
AlmostGold – both. And don’t play CS before SoC, regardless of the chronology.
Definitely the first game first. SOC is great.
@ muzman:
i’m glad someone mentioned the oblivion lost / stalker diasphora. beyond 4A games and deep shadows, i’m sure there’s a few other studios out there stocking a few ex-stalker devs.
check out 4A’s metro 2033 for more semi-post apocalypse set in russia vs. mutants goodness. also, for all their flaws (and there are tons) deep shadows’ xenus / boiling point and xenus 2 / white gold have some very interesting open-world gameplay to be found if you give them a chance.
the crippled little optimist (starving, beaten and chained in a closet in my subconscious) in my mind hopes that clear sky and call of pripyat are both GSC’s attempts to make as much money out of the x-ray engine’s absurdly long development time before rolling up their sleeves, taking all the lessons they’ve learned while working on such absurdly ambitious projects and putting out a proper sequel to SoC, with the bells, whistles and gameplay kitchen sink in and working from day one.
“I remember you suggesting that before and people were jumping on you, but now it seems pretty plausible that THQ’s QA had more than just a subtle influence on how SoC turned out. If CoP turns out to be another broken failure, then it’s almost certain.”
This is utterly and completely false. QA departments are, 99.9999999% of the time, aware of each and every bug and report all of them. The problems inevitably come from:
-Design changes constantly throughout the product, meaning what passed before no-longer do, thus needing to retest the same things over and over.
-Anything that is not a huge, high-priority bug is considered perfectly shippable. I’ve been on projects that ship with thousands of A and B class bugs.
-Knock-on bugs are fucking insane to fix, especially in massive-world games like STALKER (or MMO’s of any type). So while they might fix an error in one place, it could create entire new bugs that previously did not occur. With schedules for games being as “OH SHIT GET THIS IN NOW” as they are, this happens extremely frequently.
-Certain bugs are un-testable by a live team. There are hundreds of examples, and while this doesn’t pertain to STALKER in particular, say you have a ladder for your game, or a massive tournament-style mode. How would you, with live testers, test something like a 200 team ladder with 8 players per team? You’ll never have 1600 people available for this, let alone the 1600 computers/whatever this would require.
So yeah, lay off the poor people working 70 hour weeks finding stuff that isn’t fixed.
-
eh. i agree with the workload requested of QA and how its become harder and harder to test software for the PC, but i’m not sure i’m ready to give up on the idea of developers being, on some level, responsible for selling products that work as intended.
as an outsider to that part of the industry, its my hunch that something needs to drastically change in how QA is looked at and handled, because these guys ARE working 70 hour weeks and a lot of these games still dont work the way customers expect them to.
Erlam – I think you kinda, sorta, like totally, completely missed missed what I was saying. SoC = Shadow of Chernobyl, the good one. I was saying THQ QA might have HELPED it. CS was published by some no-name company and it was broken. If CoP is also broken, then I will be almost certain that the goodness of SoC will be partly because THQ QA demanded more from the game than GSC did from theirselves. I’m saying LACK of QA gave us the mess of CS.
Understand?
Personally, I love CS and SoC. I love creeping around at night in CS I think it’s really atmospheric. If you get attacked by a packed of dogs in pitch black it scares the crap out of me.
What I was saying is that QA has absolutely and utterly no effect on how a game turns out, in terms of their individual skill. QA is required, as a fundamental, but people seem to think that there’s ‘good QA’ and ‘bad QA.’
What my point is, and I’m sure my rant failed to show it, was that the problem is that production doesn’t care what QA finds. Unless it’s a massive TRC or a 100% crash, they don’t care. That’s the problem. So these poor bastards (of which I’ve been one) are working insane hours on things that likely won’t even be fixed.
(Also, I was railing against the implication a new publisher would affect the QA thing negatively. They may even have had the exact same QA via GSC. That said, First Party QA is usually less effective than other QA teams, as they are tied down with massive amounts of red tape, and ludicrously backwards processes for getting anything done.)
Pleasepleaseplease, let them combine the updated engine of Clear Sky with the gameplay of Shadow of Chernobyl. I have such high hopes with this announcement.
Being a massive fan of the previous STALKER I must admit to holding off buying Clear Sky until very recently, when I heard that recent patches had had really cleaned up the game, and i must admit that it’s actually very solid, tho not a patch on the original. I mean, I’m only at the Cordon/Garbage areas and it’s neither as atmospheric or as “What the hell is that!!?!?” scary as the original but it does have a certain charm. The back and forth turf wars really worked for me; it gives a purpose to the random gun fight you inevitably get into in the series and gives the impression that you are just one more Stalker in the grand scheme of things, which fits the games vaguely nihilist outlook.
However, the new method of finding artifacts can fuck right off (rooting around for an invisible object, in what is basically a supernatural mine-field is not in anyway fun or interesting) and the enemies seem much too alert, ruining any attempt at covert sniping/sneaking tactics, as they are universally able to pin-point your position even if it is quite far away. At night. While using a silenced gun.
Edit: Also, has anyone else noticed that no matter what armour you’re wearing the character model in Clear Sky never changes from the horrid beige hooded thing.
If Shadow of Chernobyl never existed, would we all be so negative about Clear Sky? I don’t think so. It’s a decent game, and it was fun to play. It wasn’t Shadow of Chernobyl, but then again, nothing else is like it either.
Seriously, what everyone wants here is a roguelike. New areas to explore, food and rest management, monster encounters that you can’t plan and can’t always survive. I always used to think that Diablo was the modern interpretation of Moria or Angband, but it’s really Stalker. Unique weapons == roguelike artifacts, Stalker artifacts == roguelike rings, amulets, etc. Armor == armor, obv. Traders == stores, and so on.
If you could turn the Zone in Stalker into an endless series of randomly-generated-but-still-interesting maps with the 3D equivalents of treasure rooms or monster pits, I’d play the crap out of it. I don’t know how you’d accomplish that and still keep the maps as fun as Agoroprom or Pripyat, but hey! I can always wish.
Yay! I just completed CS so I’m excited for this (although a bit worried too – despite being a very enjoyable game on the whole, some of the terrible design decisions made for CS blew my mind… grenades with a 100% chance of landing directly at your feet anyone?).
This in particular caught my eye:
Excellent! One of the things which annoyed me in CS was how, just when I was feeling pleased with my hard-earned inventory of weapons and supplies, I was funnelled into the linear ending sequences, making it all seem a bit futile. Having an open world to continue playing in should alleviate that somewhat.
This is promising news. There are a few things I’d like to have confirmed before being totally sold but still.
I’m hoping for larger maps and more portals connecting them to each other.
Really what needs to happen is Stalker gameplay and world in more of a seamless Fallout 3 type engine. Make us walk long paths or cross mutant infested forests to get from place to place.
Hot shit! Now, if they can somehow learn the best and hardest lessons of Clear Sky and combine it with what made Shadow of Chernobyl the best game I’ve played since Fallout… well… for every tragedy like Troika’s demise I just might get to see outfits like GSC keep doing their thing.
“… created using the players’ best-liked elements of the first two games in series.”
That’s also really nice to hear.
Considering they fired the guy who let the previous 2 games be released in such a bug-riddled state, i’m optimistic that this one will be much better.
And the fact they’re listening to the community and adding all the stuff we’ve been screaming at them to add is nothing short of wonderful.
I have only played SOC through once with only accuracy and repair mods and I loved it (apart from that highly annoying Pripyat map crashing bug). I’m now playing it through again with OL version 2.2. The game is now as I think it should have been from initial release, save from that Pripyat map bug still.
I would really like to see the developers fix the original game properly and simply release expansion packs for it, much like Opposing Force was/is to Half Life.
I really don’t see the need to keep releasing entirely new games with ultra realistic graphics and features if it is at the cost of great gameplay and reliability. SOC (with the OL mod or equivalent) is so close to being one of the best games of all time, if only the developers would persist with it.
I have a vista and when i bought clear sky i got many chrashes and bugs. I overlooked it for a while but then i got pissed and had to quit the game for a long time. I hope they fix this so i can play it without the game chrashing every 10 minutes. (But i will buy it of course it is an awesome game.)