What is it anyway?

I''m pretty damned excited about this one too. It''s amazing how far games have come- it''s so easy to become totally immersed to the extent that it feels like you''re really wandering around a foreign landscape, keeping your head low to avoid having it shot off... the explorer/samurai that lives inside me is just jumping up and down to get a piece of this one.

Most (the poster) mentioned ages ago that the story is inspired by Boris and Arcady Strugatski''s ""Roadside Picnic"", although the developers never clearly said in what way. However, I recommend not looking up the book or a summary of it if you don''t want to know anything at all about the story of STALKER. Could spoil a significant plot part of the game. (That''s just a guess, but one might think one can picture the story premise after reading about the book.)

From what they have said and showed, it seems that ""Roadside Picnic"" has only inspired the atmosphere, illegal artefact smugglers concept and the sureal concept of the Zone itself. Which is probably a good thing, because i dont think the book would serve well as a basis for a game, it`s very personal, philosophical and has little action Tarkovsky made an art-house cinema crowd pleaser out of it.
Its very good in its own league, but it seems that GDC were smart enough to take only base points to build a massive universe of their own on it.

(just a note: in Russian Zone (""zona"") means also ""prison"" in criminal slang. So Stalkers are not only treasure hunters, they are also kind of slaves of the Zone, not being able to change their lifestyle and speaking of Zone as a person - woman.)

I''m drooling over STALKER for ages it seems. Since I caught a glimpse of it the first time, I just couldn''t get it out of my head. If they make it right, it will probably be the most atmospheric game ever. Even the screenshots give me creeps, I can only begin to imagine what would it be like to stumble through deserted streets, decaying factories and apartment buildings during night and with storm raging outside...

Those guys are really doing fantastic job so far, I just hope they deliver.

I''m easily looking forward to STALKER more than to any other shooters. First of all it offers an open approach instead of forcing you onto rails. Secondly, the graphics are simply amazing. Great texturing, the DX9-optmized version should look even a bit better. Also, it incorporates elements from RPGs like Gothic, which means you can join a STALKER guild, get quests, earn money, buy better equipment at some trader. And like Gothic it communicates the impression of a living environment with other monsters and STALKERS acting independently from you. All of them occasionally needing sleep and food. Last but not least: coop. This is one of the features I was always afraid they''d drop at some point during the development ""because it would have been impossible/too time-consuming to implement it"". However, coop still seems to be on track.

I'm still keeping my eye on this game, but it's been neutered so much from the original design and been in development for so long I find it hard to really get excited about it anymore. It's very close to reaching DNF status, but I actually believe them when they say we'll be seeing this game next spring.

Just shortly after the first couple of trailers, many eons ago, I predicted that STALKER would choke on its feature list and become the next Duke Nukem Forever. Exactly that happened... they're running into various problems with their promised features and dropping them out until all they will have left is another generic shooter with Chernobyl setting, which was really done better in spirit by Half-Life 2 anyway.

It would indeed be a pity if don't read the book out of fear of spoilers. The novel is a gem, a small masterpiece, drenched in atmosphere. Heartily recommended.

Nice creepy trailer to get some attention. Although I very much feat that this game isn't going to be anywhere near what it set out to be, which will probably leave a pretty medium game.

Edge magazine has a developer interview on Stalker in this month's issue. The game's very near completion at this point. Yes, they have made changes, but I don't get the impression that the game's been completely gutted. The most notable change was the choice to get rid of vehicles.

Stalker's E3 2003/2004 showings were probably the most conceptually impressive game presentations I've ever seen, and I had my doubts about whether the type of game the developers described could actually be made. It was an incredibly ambitious project, one that ultimately sucked up way too much time and money, and that THQ decided they had to reign in if the game was ever to be finished. This is a game that will be released after some pretty aggressive producer whip-cracking. It won't measure up to earlier expectations, but given the feature set that was originally promised I think even a trimmed-down release could still be impressive.

Gamespot's recent preview has some promising things to say about the game.

THQ says that the ship date has been fixed, definitively, for Q1 2007.

New trailer/gameplay video: http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?type=wmv&id=15714

Duke 4ever is totally going to kick its ass anyways...

Holy thread resurrection.

2 years and 37 weeks later and still waiting. It does sound like they really had to pull in the reigns on this one, and it may be that some of the concepts that made this sound so good have been abandoned. In the older previews there was a lot of discussion about RPG elements, factions and a very sophisticated AI system for the NPCs and creatures in the zone. There is not as much talk about that now.

Graphically speaking it has aged quite a bit (in comparison to current releases) but it still looks good.

Hopefully there is still a good shooter there.

Vapor-... what is it again?