Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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