Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We normally reserve talk of discounted games for Saturday’s Bargain Bucket post, but this one’s too good to leave for then. STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl is a title that instantly flickers into the forebrain of both myself and Jim whenever the question of the last few years’ best/most important PC games is raised. It is not a perfect game, but it realises a world, a place, an atmosphere, a dream of what games can and should be that pretty much nothing else even tries to come close to. And it’s £3.50 on Steam (not sure of US price – presumably around $5?) until Monday. I find that almost insulting. On the other hand, it means there’s essentially no excuse to not buy the thing if you haven’t already. What else could you spend that £3.50 on? If you do invest in it, I strongly advise you apply the STALKER Complete 2009 mod compilation for maximum post-apocalyptic prettiness.

Crytek last night announced the latest incarnation of their engine, CryENGINE 3 is now available to be licensed. Now that may not affect you or me (unless you’re a games developer of course), but there’s some interesting implications of this latest tech. Of course, it first of all means games are going to be prettier – these are the people who keep bowling us over with each new engine as it creates vivid beaches and jungles. But it’s also looking to streamline development across multiple platforms – letting programmers see how the game will appear in PC, 360 and PS3 on the fly. And rumours abound that it may be the engine of choice for STALKER 2.

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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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?
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Via VG247: a GSC fansite is reporting that there’s a “new” expansion (the first presumably being standalone Clear Sky) as well as a full new game from the company in the works.

In an online conference earlier this week, [GSC president, Sergey] Grigorovitch was asked whether the April 2009 calendar featuring the words ‘Call of Pripyat’ in Russian was an April Fools’ joke.

He replied that this was not a joke and would be the name of the second expansion. He added that this new expansion will be released later this year. Furthermore, a full S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title is also in development, although there’s currently no information on when we will hear more about this.

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.
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