On the occasion of the return of Stalker, scheduled for this year, we review everything we know about the new installment and remember why we love the saga so much.
The other day, when reviewing all the shooters coming out in 2021, the outlook seemed so promising that it reminded us of the golden age of FPS, back in 2007. That year marked a before and after in the genre. Halo 3, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, BioShock, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Portal, and a list that goes on and on. It was a time of big names … and big changes. The goodbye of the medicine cabinet, the arrival of modern warfare, the polarization of the genre (sandbox or corridors), its new political and cinematographic dimension, and so on. It also coincided with an unprecedented technical push and with the confrontation between two online philosophies: that of our childhood (Quake, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament) and that of Call of Duty, whose design and progression system would eventually prevail. It was, in short, the emergence of the 21st century. A whirlwind of releases that devoured you as soon as you got away from perfection. There was so much and so good to choose from that either you were up to the task, or you didn’t exist. There were no delays here, no second chances. The ribbon had been raised several inches and the same was true with the measuring stick. It may sound a bit exaggerated, but that’s the way it was. Such were the ruthless days of legend in which Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl flourished. You can imagine how good the fuck had to be so that, being a new IP and coming from a practically unknown developer, it managed to survive 2007 by sneaking into the hearts of many players above the masterpieces of Valve, Nintendo or Infinity Ward.
Getting to Know Stalker 2 … Through the Original
Today at FreeGameTips we do not remember 2007, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R., like this, with capital letters, and we do it on the occasion of Stalker 2, scheduled for this year. We wanted to review how much we know about the game so far, but its development is as opaque and mysterious as the original. It has left very few crumbs along the way and we have decided that, before remembering its news, the very few news announced so far, there is no better way to explain what STALKER is than by remembering that first installment. Because to tell the truth, its creators did enjoy a certain fame prior to its launch, although not too good. Within the RTS genre, the name of GSC Game World (Ukraine, 1995) was associated with the Cossacks saga (2001), which, although not bad, was overshadowed by many larger titles (Age of Mithology, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Europa Universalis, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Medieval: Total War, Pikmin, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, etc.). For its part, at the beginning of the century the name Stalker was synonymous with smoke. The game had been announced in 2001, it was only delayed and the promises around it were increasingly embarrassing. “The ultimate game of all time.” “The artificial intelligence will be so good that even an NPC can complete the game before you.” A string of lies that sought to attract distributors and investors. THQ ended up biting and a couple of years ago our colleagues at Eurogamer gave us a hilarious article about what THQ herself found when she traveled to Ukraine to find out the true status of the project. Has no loss: The Californian sent to save Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl from development hell. You can imagine. It was necessary to cut corners from all sides to make it possible that, after more than six years of delays and vaporware, the title would end up on sale in 2007. It had many bugs, suffered a good number of technical problems and among the press it did not even reach the outstanding, but it was an immediate, resounding success, with more than two million copies sold in its first twelve months of life.
Stalker 2 proposes us to revisit the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone, a cold, dark and radioactive setting, more typical of a survival horror than a shooter.
Why? What was it about Stalker that allowed him to compete face to face with anyone? How is it that neither the hype nor the consequences of that controversial development prevented it from becoming a cult game? The truth is that there is no single answer, because as with all great games, there were many reasons for its success. If we had to define it for console users who did not test it at the time, we would say that Stalker was what the Metro saga always aspired to and also the path by which the Fallout should have evolved. The title was set in the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone (“the Zone”, for friends), a post-apocalyptic scene that was located next to the city of Pripyat and that ended up creating an overwhelming framework. The Zone was a cold, dark and radioactive place, more like a survival horror than a shooter. It was full of dangers and creatures that had us in constant tension and halfway between heart attack and nervous breakdown. Everything around us threatened to kill us and that was the main objective of the title: to survive.
Stalker was an oasis in the middle of a desert of casual and easy proposals.
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was a realistic, difficult and brilliant survival game; one where you should eat, drink and sleep, but also deal with your wounds. If you were fighting another hungry survivor for a piece of meat and ended up with a gunshot wound to the torso, you had better know how to heal (and have the resources). Otherwise you were starting to bleed out and you were a dead man. As is usual within the genre, in Stalker you couldn’t carry everything you found and you had to choose what to keep, but in it, on top of that, there was no fast travel option. We were always pacing from one place to another and be very careful about running past. In the same way, it was not the same to explore during the day as at night, nor to do it under a clear sky or in the middle of a storm. Its dynamic climate affected the behavior and wear of our weapons, among many other things. And it was around these that most of the RPG component was built, which was not based on experience, leveling up, and unlocking brand-new abilities (or at least, not as we understand it today. ). Here the fun was discovering how to make weapons and how to improve them. Who says weapons says tools, because there were dozens of objects that we could learn to use. Is anyone thinking about the mask, the lighter, the map and the Geiger counter from the Metro saga? It is normal. On the one hand, because its creators (4A Games) participated in the development of Stalker and drink directly from it. On the other hand, because many of the mechanics that we have described, although at first they seem like an ordeal, they were a real joy and they soon became popular and became the daily bread among survivals. Stalker was an oasis in the middle of a desert of casual and easy proposals. It was different, there was nothing like it. Not to mention things that we have left in the inkwell, such as its plot and narrative, its reputation system or its factions. In the days of the script and the arcade, the three pillars that founded his project were simulation, artificial intelligence and a physics system that even had its own ballistics. Love at first sight.
This was the first official image of the game, shown in summer 2020, more than a decade after its announcement …
What to expect from Stalker 2
Perhaps this last thing we mentioned is the first thing we can expect from the sequel. A game that does not enter for the graphics, but for what is behind them, for the technical. Stalker 2 wants to captivate us again with an artificial intelligence and a physics system without equal. And the graphics remains to be seen, since GSC Game World has confirmed that it will have a 120 fps mode and 4K resolution, that it will make use of ray tracing and that it will pull the new SSDs to avoid loading times. This is also important as the original title was always a somewhat tricky open world. His map was actually divided into 18 different sections, and going from one to another was the equivalent of going through their corresponding loading screens. It is also worth mentioning that the team has given up its graphics engine, the X-Ray Engine, and this time it will use Unreal Engine 4. The X-Ray, while it had some frankly surprising visual effects, caused too many headaches for the developer. It was the cause of many of the technical problems that plagued Stalker. On paper, using the Unreal Engine should serve to offer a less personal experience, but much smoother and more stable. Among the reasons given for this change, one of the most important seems to have been support for the community. In GSC’s words, “The Unreal Engine 4 fits well with our goal of making mod creation easier and more accessible. User mods have kept the Zone alive as we work on the sequel and we couldn’t be more grateful for it”. In other releases the mods theme may have been anecdotal, but not in Stalker. This will be the second numbered installment of the saga, but it’s actually the fourth (in between there were two spin offs: Stalker: Clear Sky and Stalker: Call of Pripyat), and the number could be even higher if we counted some of their mods and updates, so important as to have been independent games (this is the case of, for example, Stalker: Oblivion Lost). In 2014, more than 7 years after its departure, users continued to research and release content for the game. Definitely, the Stalker community is one of its greatest virtues, not only for the mods, but for its illustrations, stories, cosplays … Anything that is rowing in its favor is good news.
Most of what is known about the game is technical data. It will run at 4K and 120 fps, it will have ray tracing, but no load times, it will be released on PC and Xbox Series X | S and will feature a new AI thanks to the A-Life 2.0 system.
A world more alive than ever
But let’s get back to the subject of AI and physics, which we deviate. Unsurprisingly, the first Stalker did not keep his word and never had characters who were smart enough to overcome the story on their own and before us (is such a thing possible?). However, he did patent a fascinating technology known as A-Life. It was an artificial intelligence system that gave life to the more than a thousand inhabitants that were in the Area and endowed them with unique routines and behaviors even though we were on the other side of the map. That is to say that the fact that we were not close did not prevent them from moving and doing their own missions. Nor did it take away the need to eat, sleep, and fight for their survival, or the evolution of their conflicts with anomalies and features. The aim was to avoid the predefined situations, the dreaded scripts. GSC Game World wanted everything to happen randomly, just as it does in the real world. Each game had to be different from the previous one and completely different from those that our friends could play with their copy of the game. Monsters and different NPCs even migrated across the map, changing the environment as they went. There were hordes of creatures that, if nobody stopped them, devastated entire camps before we reached them and caused that in certain games we could never meet their respective members. Or, to cite another example, if we had created an enemy for ourselves, he could travel against people from other areas when we visited them. It was a wonderful, organic world of almost infinite missions. ALMOST.
Enemies lacked options (give orders in combat, heal …) and things that happened in Chernobyl were less than expected due to the technical limitations of the time. The secondary missions that were generated in a pseudo-procedural way were where this was most noticeable, becoming very repetitive with the passing of the hours. Stalker 2 will try to correct these shortcomings and take the system to a new level with the premiere of A-Life 2.0, the evolved version of its AI. Its creators once again aspire to the moon and have advanced “the most immersive world of the saga” and “the definitive experience that was promised in its day.” This is how they explained its virtues: “A-Life 2.0 will control the state of the world and the behavior of its characters and mutants, making the Zone constantly change and feel alive. Countless events and encounters will occur at every moment even if we are not around to experience them with our own eyes. The decisions we make will not only affect short-term events, but also the future of the entire world ”. According to GSC, current technology allows them to “reach the bar of their ambitions”, including Xbox Series X | S, the only consoles that will go on sale, as confirmed at the Xbox Games Showcase last July.
To tell the truth, we don’t know much more about Stalker 2. The latest update to the study introduced us to its new protagonist, Skif, whom it showed us escaping from an anomaly through the corridors of a ruined school on the outskirts of Pripyat, but now . Skif is once again a stalker, a kind of mercenary who travels the Zone accepting orders and making a living as he can, always in the company of his PDA, menu like the phones in GTA or the Pip Boy in Fallout. We assume that the story will play a crucial role, as in the previous ones, and it has been dropped that it will also have several endings (Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl had seven endings). The same is true of anomalies, lethal radiation-induced phenomena ranging from fields of static electricity to eddies and vortices of darkness. The new trailer, although it lasts seconds, allows you to see some of them, as well as several scenarios that will bring memories to the most veteran (underground tunnels, prisons, forests under a leaden sky …).
It is not much information, true, but GSC Game World maintains that development “progresses without problems”, both in the version of components and its adaptation to Microsoft consoles. The situation invites us to be optimistic and more so after those years in which there was no hope of having the sequel. Recall that Stalker 2 was announced in 2010, it was canceled in 2012 due to lack of funds and we did not know of its resurrection until 2018, when it just dropped by the news section to say that it was still running. We are not mistaken, times have changed. The survival genre now has great exponents under its belt. The studio is different too, with many new names and many of its original members scattered around developers like 4A Games. We accumulate more than a decade of delay and the information shared is little (by when will a real gameplay? What is this sequel capable of contributing to the formula?). Even the goal of 2021 seems complicated, but what would the STALKER saga be without such crazy and complex developments. If after what happened to the first, things went well, we surrendered to the religion of the children of the atom and we put our faith in its longed-for sequel. We have already dusted the anti-radiation suit, what about you?
