Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

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Rising like a hideously mutated phoenix from the ashes of STALKER 2 is Survarium. Although, as is well established in Jim’s interview with the team from earlier this year, the F2P MMO is deliberately a very different game. And now it’s a game for whose alpha you can register.

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Vostok, the Ukrainian devs who once worked on STALKER and now work on Survarium, have released another dev-diary to describe a but more about what they’re up to. Some of it is familiar territory, some not. Key, perhaps, is that this will be multiplayer, which is going to have all kinds of implications for our stalking of Survarium’s haunting ruins. This new diary discusses the black market, as well as things like player-injury. There are a few glimpses of the game world, too. It’s looking good.
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STALKER 2 might be rifling through the belongings of irradiated angels, but now we’ve got Survarium to take its place. Or, well, I suppose it’s actually tearing STALKER’s place to tiny shreds, rearranging what’s left, and sprinkling in all sorts of shiny (read: dingy, dilapidated) new bits of its own – sort of like a collage that seems to be a familiar picture when you’re far away, but reveals its true colors as you get closer. So this is Survarium. At any rate, it continues to both intrigue and worry me – especially now that we have some snippets of actual in-game footage to work with. Take a side in my vicious internal conflict after the break.

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A new developer diary for Survarium, which is not STALKER 1.5, STALKER 2 or STALKER Online, fails to dispel such notions entirely by referring to anomalies and artifacts at the first possible opportunity. A finely edited montage of horrors explains how the world died this time around and creeping botanical nightmares make even the talking head sections quite unnerving. Then there’s explanation of levels, purchases and perks, and the two game modes: team combat and co-op. Then, right at the end, a man with a magnificent beard appears to talk about One More Mode (cue: Daft Punk’s One More Time).

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So Survarium – the pre-apocalpytic project that’s emerged from the ruins of STALKER 2 – is an MMOFPS. In spite of that, Vostok Games told us that it’s the STALKER franchise’s “next evolutionary step.” The results of a recent Twitter Q&A session, however, have me wondering if fans will soon be cursing evolution in much the same way I do every time I remember that I don’t have wings, eagle vision, or every power conferred to honey badgers. Don’t get me wrong: a lot of this stuff sounds incredibly interesting and – at least, in my eyes – goes quite a way toward putting the ghost of STALKER at peace. There are, however, some major structural changes that you might find tough to swallow.

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