Stalkerish: Survarium adds first PvE mission
A long way to go yet
The most exciting part of Survarium [official site] has always been the dream that it might one day become essentially an unofficial S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. Survarium studio Vostok Games was founded by folks who formerly worked on the celebrated open-world FPS-RPG series, Survarium is set in a very similar irradiated world of artifact hunters, and Vostok have gabbed about wanting a peristent world to stalk. Survarium is still primarily a small-scale competitive PvP multiplayer shooter but it has recently taken its first teensy tiny step into PvE with the addition of a tutorial story mission.
Survarium, to refresh your memory, is a free-to-play first-person shooter about folks who hunt for 'anomalies' containing powerful artifacts. You know, like in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It goes down in contaminated zones where nature has taken over and things aren't right, like in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. But unlike S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it's a competitive multiplayer game without all the wonderful loneliness, quiet, tension, and screaming terror.
The lone PvE mission arrived in update 0.47 earlier this month. It is just a tutorial but hey, how hungry are you for more Stalking?
When Marsh Davies Prematurely Evaluated Survarium in 2015, he didn't dig the PvP but did have hopes for the world.
"If this article has been rather glum about the game as it's played currently, then I must again emphasise the wonder of the world in which it's set. Those places call me back, even if I have to experience them amid the chaotic thrash of team multiplayer. They deserve better than that endless cascade of death, though. Such vivid and mysterious spaces demand to be lived within, if only for a time."
That's now possible, for a very short time. As for co-op and the long-promised Freeplay mode, which would have loads of players roaming a persistent world while questing and maybe shooting each other, we're still waiting. We probably will be for quite some time.
It sounds like Vostok are planning to create cooperative story missions first. They mentioned those in an update over Christmas and an e-mail they sent us today said "We expect to please players with the forthcoming CO-OP story missions in the foreseeable future."
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. studio GSC Game World did return to life after several years in torpor. So far they've only released Cossacks 3, a remake of an RTS they released in 2001.