So, the stalker finally did get out of here…
It’s a very sad day indeed, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is one of my favourite games of all time. The game was awesome when I played it for the first time, killing bandits and blind dogs in Cordon. Searching for artifacts and stashes while avoiding falling into a vortex or whirligig, their presence only announced by a rippling of the air around them and the beep of the anomaly detector when you got way too close. Then there was the first time you go into the bowels of the Agroprom research institute, your meagre flashlight and the occasional spinning warning light the only sources of light. Then you hear the heavy breathing and you aim your shit AK74 into the dark. You think you saw something, but you aren’t quite sure. What you do know is that the heavy breathing has become laboured, ragged panting. Something in the room is very agitated. You squint your eyes, but you see nothing, nothing but two eyes coming at you fast! And then it’s too late, the bloodsucker is already munching on poor Marked One’s corpse while you yourself are curled up in the fetal position on the floor. After a change of pants, load your quicksave and this time, take out your sawed-off shotty. C’mon you invisible, tentacled bastard, I’ve got a whiff of the old brimstone for ya right here! You finally kill the damn thing and go on your merry way, shooting your way through a group of soldiers, find Strelok’s stash and look for the exit. You think you found it, the corridor looks right for the job. Wait. Why is there a dude without a shirt… oh shit. You are now face-to-face, which is exactly where you don’t want to be, with a Controller and it is between you and the exit. Have fun.
“What have you got?”
“A body, it came from the death truck. It’s got… the mark.”
“Well, you know the drill, leave him…”
“This is a live one.”
“Bullshit! You’re lying!”
“Let the Zone take me if I am.”
STALKER dropped you into a very hostile area, filled to the brim with stuff that’ll kill you in seconds. You began the game as a nobody armed only with a knife, a Makarov pistol, binocs and an unlimited supply of structural bolts. Everything and everyone else had the leg up on you. The bandits had sawed-off shotguns and the rare MP5 and there were more of them, usually 5 or 7. You traverse the Zone and you’ve got the radiation trefoil on your screen. There was a reason those bandits hauled bottles of delicious vodka with them. The gist: you were the underdog and you had to fight your way to the top. In no other game that I can think of were you left to really fend for yourself. No handholding, no pick-me-ups, just you, your gun and dangerous mutants, anarchists and bandits, but none of them will stop you on your triumphant march toward, well, loot and more loot. You take on a job to kill a pack of pseudodogs, only to have the last few scurry away, never to found again. You just ballsed the whole mission, you ain’t ever going to find them now. Better return to Sidorovich and tell him the bad news.
The point: you were left to your own devices. Unlike, say, in Skyrim where you stumble upon something, like the thief you runs up to you and gives you a random item; that event is scripted. The thief was spawned out of sight and he ran up to you because you triggered the encounter. In Stalker, you hear gunfire over the next hill and you see a group of stalkers fighting boars and fleshes or you might hear the roar of assault rifle fire dying just before you go over the crest and see the stalkers or the mutants dead. Sometimes you see some absentminded fool walk right into an anomaly. The wild territory is a prime example. Many times have I entered only to find a four-way war going on. Duty vs. bandits vs. mercenaries. vs. mutants. What other game does that? In what other game can you just sit back and wait for the fight to be over before sweeping in, shooting the survivors and looting them all? And it would be totally random? Let me tell you what other game: none. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is truly one of a kind.
Sure, the game had its faults, there were bugs, sometimes nigh-game killing bugs at that. The first time through I never got the mission to take the psi measurements around Yantar, depriving me of the psi protection helmet. I had to go into the lab with nothing but around 100 medkits. Let me tell you; the final chamber, well, I used up all of the medkits to get through the section and that was just thanks to the psi emissions. I used all my bandages as well to heal bullet damage.
But it didn’t stop me from playing.
All the little quirks of the game, the weird items GSC forgot into the Zone, like “bread” and that one bottle of vodka that crashes your game and corrupts your save at the military camp under the railway bridge. The game had a homey feel to it. It truly felt like people had crafted the game, not a machine that plops out the next Call of Duty along the production line. It was an absolutely brilliant experience.
If those quirks irk you, get Call of Pripyat. It’s a much more stable game with even more gameplay mechanics and even more randomness thrown in. One time, around 20 stalkers left Skadovsk and I thought nothing of it and went about my business. Then a massive battle erupts not far from the ship. I get out and run to get to the corpses, and their stuff, before their friends do. There wasn’t any danger of that, however. A fight between the 20 stalkers, some bandits and a chimera had ended with almost everyone dead or dying. Or what about having to slowly slog into a cave under the weight of your 12 AKs and/or RPG-7s you were supposed to haul to the shop thanks to a randomly occurring emission that will kill you if you don’t find cover?
What can really be said? A great company and a great series of games is dead, yet those more deserving of this fate just plod on.
The folks at GSC were reformed into Vostok Games and now they are working on a free-to-play FPS MMO. Two things: free-to-play is never free and MMOs will fail. Still, I hope for the best for those guys.
Know Thy Games 