S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete 2009

Definitely sad news. I wonder if this will open the door for an indie to come in and provide a STALKER-esque game: open world, RPG-lite, "independent" AI. I don't need shiny if the gameplay is there. Heck, I don't need story, either, if the AI can help me create narratives on the fly. Arma 2 (and its editor) is wonderful for this type of thing. I'd like to see an indie try.

The problem with trying to make a game like STALKER on a lower budget is that it needs to exist in a large world, and to make a large world with the amount of clutter and detail to get the right feel for the zone has to be reasonably expensive in terms of time and money.

Scratched wrote:

Apparently Croteam would have liked to help:

forkparker[/url]]Dang, wish @gscstalker had given me and the boys at @DevolverDigital a ring before closing up shop...

Reminds me there was that conversion being done in the Crysis 2 engine.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'm sorry for everything I said about you GSC! Come back! Just... come back....

Man, I started this thread 2 1/2 years ago and I still haven't gotten more than a couple hours into this game.

Time to change that.

This is a good article: RPS - On The Importance Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

They touch a raw nerve when noting that games never learn lessons from other games, and that STALKER will likely never be be succeeded by anything.

Funnily enough, i think that The Elder Scrolls games come closest in all of gamedom to what was encapsulated in Stalker. It's why i play them and why i like them. Sure, in TES you become the centre of attention really quickly but the world moves on around you and you can choose not to become the centre of attention if you want...

Yeah, The Bethesda TES/Fallout games are kind of close. Something I think would be interesting to see (and will likely never happen) is if a developer could loosen their grasp on making a game experience exactly to their vision and nothing else, and have some flexibility in what the game is, to make it modular.

For example you could have one wasteland and "plug in" a range of different packages that would make distinct games. Different stories (one where the nuke plant is the source of a "the zone", one where you're trying to restore the wasteland, etc) different factions, different arsenals of weaponry, different tone of interaction and audio, rulesets, and so on. So Fallout would be one collection, STALKER another, Borderlands another, and that's just within the general 'ruined/post apocalypse world' scenario.

It's probably trying to aim for a "one engine to rule them all" which would never work in reality, one company would hate how the system worked, or how the gun handling felt in the engine and split off to make their own game fully under their control. I guess a situation where it might happen is when there's confined resources, outside of where a budget of tens of millions can be found and it's a necessity to get anything done. I'm thinking mod makers and indies.

Scratched wrote:

Yeah, The Bethesda TES/Fallout games are kind of close. Something I think would be interesting to see (and will likely never happen) is if a developer could loosen their grasp on making a game experience exactly to their vision and nothing else, and have some flexibility in what the game is, to make it modular.

For example you could have one wasteland and "plug in" a range of different packages that would make distinct games. Different stories (one where the nuke plant is the source of a "the zone", one where you're trying to restore the wasteland, etc) different factions, different arsenals of weaponry, different tone of interaction and audio, rulesets, and so on. So Fallout would be one collection, STALKER another, Borderlands another, and that's just within the general 'ruined/post apocalypse world' scenario.

I have been suggesting something along these lines for a very long time. Had a podcast episode with thoughts about it with Tboon/Nightmare and even spoke to one of the RPS crew via email about the idea after he posted something similar.

My thought was that if games were becoming so expensive to make then it was only obvious (to me) that if you created an open world for which people would be able to make "new" games within, thus expanding your revenue through licenses and such.... A bolt-on package (for example RDR:Undead Nightmare) might stop second-hand sales of your product because your disc would be needed to play the next few games from other major development houses through DLC. This way would also reduce overhead for any developer taking advantage of the offer as a lot of game art/mechanics would already be finished.

The main games i thought would most benefit from this idea were open world: Red Dead Redemption, GTA, Saints Row, Fuel, Crackdown etc. You could literally take any one of those games and make a new experience right out of the box, so to speak. More specific worlds, like TES, Stalker and Fallout i wasn't so sure would be attractive due to their distinct settings.

gscstalker[/url]]We will do our best to continue. However, at this moment, nothing is certain.

*Legion* wrote:

Man, I started this thread 2 1/2 years ago and I still haven't gotten more than a couple hours into this game.

Time to change that.

And now, almost 3 years after starting this thread, I finally sat down and played through STALKER with Complete installed.

Enjoyed the heck out of it.

The STALKER mod scene is still very active. Between L.U.R.K. and Oblivion Lost, and some others, I feel like I need to play the game a few more times.

STALKER Complete was a champ, though. Looked at some screenshots of vanilla STALKER and it looked like some ugly washed-out mess compared to Complete.

Now, I've got two more STALKER games with Complete mods waiting for them...

*Legion* wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

Man, I started this thread 2 1/2 years ago and I still haven't gotten more than a couple hours into this game.

Time to change that.

And now, almost 3 years after starting this thread, I finally sat down and played through STALKER with Complete installed.

What kind of rig do you have for playing it? I am (and have been) planning a gaming PC in the not-as-near-as-I'd-like future and would love to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

muraii wrote:

What kind of rig do you have for playing it? I am (and have been) planning a gaming PC in the not-as-near-as-I'd-like future and would love to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Anything mildly up to date will be well beyond what you need to run STALKER, even with the graphical refresh mods.

Any "gaming"-level video card you buy today is going to be way beyond what you need.

Co-author (with his brother Arkady), but thanks for the news. He was a man of strong convictions, right up to the end.

(Very selfishly, I wonder if this means we've got a better chance of seeing the bulk of their novels appear in English translation. As I understand it, one the major barrier to publications in English is that Boris insisted on keeping the Russian texts of their books freely available online, which potential publishers of translations didn't like.)

Arise, thread.

STALKER 2 Is Back, Now Aiming For A 2021 Release

Nothing more than that, really. STALKER is one of the two games I have kept installed for years because, even though I am actually terrible at it, it just feels so good to play. Hopefully this isn't just hype again.

"Good hunting, Stalker!"

I wouldn't get too hyped. The original team is AFAIK all long gone. My expectations for this will be super low until I see a reason to think otherwise.

Yeah, I get it. The team went to Survivarium (I think). Still.. maybe?

2021! The hubris!