S.T.A.L.K.E.R. | |
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Genre(s) | |
Developer(s) | GSC Game World |
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Platform(s) | |
First release | Shadow of Chernobyl 20 March 2007 |
Latest release | Call of Pripyat 2 October 2009 |
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a first-person-shooter survival horror video game franchise developed by Ukrainian game developer GSC Game World. The series is set in an alternate version of the present-day Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, where, according to the series' backstory, a mysterious second Chernobyl disaster took place in 2006. As a result, the physical, chemical, and biological processes in the area were altered, spawning numerous nature-defying anomalies, artifacts, and mutants. The player takes the role of a "stalker" - a name given to trespassers and adventurers who have come to explore the exclusion zone and its strange phenomena.
The series is based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and influenced by the 1979 movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky which was itself adapted from "Roadside Picnic". [1] The name "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." is a backronym for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers.
2007 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl |
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2008 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky |
2009 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat |
2010 | |
2011 | |
2012 | |
2013 | |
2014 | |
2015 | |
2016 | |
2017 | |
2018 | |
2019 | |
2020 | |
2021 | |
2022 | |
2023 | |
2024 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl |
The franchise takes place in an alternate Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (or simply "the Zone"), where a number of classified laboratories were established following the nuclear disaster of 1986. Due to the experiments conducted in these laboratories, a second catastrophe occurred in 2006, which caused physical and meteorological phenomena all over the exclusion zone and mutation of local plant and animal life. [2] After the second disaster, the Zone grew rich with anomalies — inexplicable phenomena that don't obey the laws of physics or common sense (such as pillars of fire, lightning scatter, whirlwinds that tear everything that falls into them, etc). [3]
The anomalies are causing artifacts to appear, which are items with unique and extraordinary properties such as anti-gravity or radioactivity absorption. [4] People who have come to explore the Zone in search of personal enrichment such as artifacts are known as "stalkers". Many of them are working on their own, though there are also several organized factions present. The Duty are a paramilitary organization that believes the Zone is a threat to humanity that must be destroyed. Conversely, members of the Freedom faction believe the Zone is a gift that should be freely accessible to all people. Bandits are wanted criminals and outlaws that have come to the Zone to hide from authorities, while the Clear Sky seek to understand the origins of the Zone.
To protect the Zone from intruders, a military checkpoint known as the Cordon was established by the Ukrainian Military Forces. The military have an uneasy relationship with stalkers – while official orders are to shoot any trespassers on sight, military personnel are often bribed to look the other way. Additionally, military squads carry out operations in the Zone, such as elimination missions or securing strategic points. The most dangerous of the Zone dwellers are other stalkers, particularly a fanatical sect called the Monolith that protects the center of the Zone, and mutants, some of which possess psionic powers.
The protagonists in the series have different goals and allegiances, but often must work together. Typically, every game's primary goal is to reach the center of the Zone, with a number of adventures, dangers, and challenges on the way.
In the first game of the series, the player takes on the role of an amnesiac stalker referred to as the "Marked One", tasked with killing another stalker named Strelok. During the game, the protagonist uncovers clues to his past and true identity while helping other stalkers and encountering dangerous mutants. He also learns about the nature and origins of the Zone by exploring mysterious underground laboratories in the area. Shadow of Chernobyl features seven endings which are dependent on multiple factors such as money earned during the game, supporting certain factions, or how much of the protagonist's memory was pieced together.
Clear Sky, the second game released in the series, is a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl. The player assumes the role of Scar, a veteran mercenary and the lone survivor of a huge energy emission he was caught in while escorting a group of scientists through the Zone. He is rescued by and ends up working for a group calling themselves the "Clear Sky", who are dedicated to researching and understanding the nature of the Zone. Throughout the game, the player can choose to have Scar side with or against certain factions in the area to help achieve Clear Sky's goal.
The third game in the series, Call of Pripyat, takes place shortly after the events of Shadow of Chernobyl. Having discovered the open path to the center of the Zone, the government decides to establish control of the situation through "Operation Fairway". This includes sending a number of reconnaissance helicopters into the Zone before dispatching the main military force thoroughly. Despite these preparations, the military operation fails, with all helicopters mysteriously crashing. As a result, the Security Service of Ukraine deploys former stalker turned military operative Major Alexander Degtyarev into the Zone to investigate.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was announced in August 2010, with an initial release date scheduled for 2012. [5] Sergiy Grygorovych, CEO of GSC Game World, specified that the video game featured a completely new multi-platform engine, written by GSC itself. [6] On 23 December 2011, GSC Game World announced they would be continuing development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, despite an earlier announcement pointing to its cancellation. [7] However, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was cancelled yet again by GSC Game World through a Twitter post on 25 April 2012. [8]
Development of a new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was announced on 15 May 2018 with a post on the Cossacks 3 Facebook page. [9] The post links to a site [10] that displays the text "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 — 2.0.2.1.", implying a planned release year of 2021 powered by the Unreal Engine 4. [11] In May 2018, Sergey Galyonkin, the creator of Steam Spy, tweeted that GSC Game World would create a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, using Unreal Engine 4. [12] Shortly the GSC website mentioned that the company was working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and a teaser website appeared mentioning the release date of 2021. [13] It was suggested that the game was still in the design phase, and was announced just before E3 2018 so it could find a publisher. [14]
On 23 March 2020, GSC Game World published a screenshot of the game in development, promising they would share new information about the game in the coming months. [15]
On 23 July 2020, it was announced that the game will be released in 2021 for Microsoft Windows and Xbox Series X/S, which will be the first time the series will be on consoles. [16]
On 30 December 2020, an in-engine teaser of the game was released. [17]
On 13 June 2021, the release date was confirmed for 28 April 2022 through a gameplay trailer at the E3 2021 Microsoft/Bethesda press conference. It also revealed it would be on Xbox Game Pass at launch. [18] On 12 January 2022, the release date was delayed until 8 December 2022. [19]
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was announced that development had been put on an indefinite hold; however, after moving their development studio to the Czech Republic, the developers announced a 2023 release date via their official Discord server.
On 23 August 2023, the release date was pushed further to Q1 2024. On 16 January 2024, the release date was pushed back again, being announced as 5 September 2024, but was then delayed to 20 November 2024.
Game | Metacritic |
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl | (PC) 82 [20] |
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky | (PC) 75 [21] |
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat | (PC) 80 [22] |
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series has positive reviews from popular gaming sites and was well received by critics. The series is scored between 75 and 82 on Metacritic.
By August 2010, the franchise had sold over 4 million copies. [23] In August 2021, GSC and Koch Media is claiming over 15 million total sales for the franchise. [24]
A board game is being developed by Awaken Realms. [25]
In 2010 the first game of the Metro game series was released. Metro is another franchise of Ukrainian first-person shooter games based on the Metro 2033 literature series, which was created by some ex-members of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. development team who left to form 4A Games in 2006 before the release of Shadow of Chernobyl.
The former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 team opened a new studio, Vostok Games, in 2012. In 2015, they released a free-to-play massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game titled Survarium in the spirit of the franchise, using ideas they created for the cancelled sequel. [26] Their new project is a battle royale game set in Chernobyl, titled Fear the Wolves .
In 2014, West-Games, which claimed to be composed of former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. core developers (according to both GSC Game World [27] and Vostok Games, [28] falsely) launched a Kickstarter campaign for a spiritual successor to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. first called Areal [29] and then STALKER Apocalypse. While it managed to reach its goal of $50,000, multiple concerns were raised throughout the campaign about the project being a possible scam, and Kickstarter eventually suspended the campaign two days before its deadline, for undisclosed reasons. [30] [31]
In 2019, Alexey Sityanov, former game designer and story writer of Shadow of Chernobyl, Survarium and Sketch Tales, teamed up with The Farm 51 to work on their Kickstarter project, Chernobylite. The game features similar gameplay and themes to S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and the environment is based on the real Chernobyl exclusion zone, done by utilizing photogrammetry measurements. [32] [33] A stalker is introduced in the game as an antagonist, known as Black Stalker. Chernobylite released the first early access version of the game on 16 October 2019, on Steam. [34]
Pripyat, also known as Prypiat, is a virtually abandoned city in northern Ukraine, located near the border with Belarus. Named after the nearby river, Pripyat, it was founded on 4 February 1970 as the ninth atomgrad to serve the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which is located in the adjacent abandoned Chernobyl. Pripyat was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 and had grown to a population of 49,360 by the time it was evacuated on the afternoon of 27 April 1986, one day after the Chernobyl disaster.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is an officially designated exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster. It is also commonly known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the 30-Kilometre Zone, or simply The Zone.
Roadside Picnic is a philosophical science fiction novel by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971 and published in 1972. It is the brothers' most popular and most widely translated novel outside the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky counted 55 publications of Roadside Picnic in 22 countries.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by GSC Game World and published by THQ in 2007 following a long development. The game is set in an alternative reality, where a second disaster of mysterious origin occurred at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, causing strange changes in the area around it. The game features a non-linear storyline and includes role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and two-way communication with non-player characters.
Duga was an over-the-horizon radar (OTH) system used in the Soviet Union as part of its early-warning radar network for missile defense. It operated from July 1976 to December 1989. Two operational duga radars were deployed, with one near Chernobyl and Liubech in the Ukrainian SSR, and the other in eastern Siberia.
GSC Game World is a Ukrainian video game developer temporarily based in Prague. Founded in Kyiv in 1995 by Sergiy Grygorovych, it is best known for the Cossacks and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games. GSC Game World was the first company in Ukraine to localize PC games to the Russian language. In 2002, it became a publishing house, GSC World Publishing.
The Chernobyl disaster is the world's worst nuclear accident to date.
The Red Forest is the ten-square-kilometre (4 sq mi) area surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant within the Exclusion Zone, located in Polesia. The name "Red Forest" comes from the ginger-brown colour of the pine trees after they died following the absorption of high levels of ionizing radiation as a consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on 26 April 1986. The site remains one of the most contaminated areas in the world today.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a 2008 first-person shooter survival horror video game with role-playing elements. It was developed by GSC Game World and published by Deep Silver as a prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.
The Pripyat amusement park is an abandoned amusement park located in Pripyat, Ukraine. It was to have its grand opening on 1 May 1986, in time for the May Day celebrations, but these plans were cancelled on 26 April, when the Chernobyl disaster occurred a few kilometers away. Several sources report that the park was opened for a short time on 27 April before the announcement to evacuate the city was made. These reports claim that the park was hurriedly opened to distract Pripyat residents from the unfolding disaster nearby. However, these claims remain largely unsubstantiated and unsupported. Pripyat residents have not been able to recall for sure if the park was opened following the disaster, but considering the lack of panic at the time of the disaster and subsequent evacuation, there would seem to be no need to distract people. In any case, the park—and its ferris wheel in particular—have become a symbol of the Chernobyl disaster.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by GSC Game World for Microsoft Windows. It is the third game released in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games, following S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, with the game's narrative and events following the former. It was published in the CIS territories by GSC World Publishing in October 2009, before being released by Deep Silver and bitComposer Games in North America and the PAL region in February 2010.
Metro 2033 is a 2010 first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by 4A Games and published by THQ. The story is based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel of the same name, where survivors of a nuclear war have taken refuge in the Metro tunnels of Moscow. Players control Artyom, a man who must save his home station from the dangers lurking within the Metro. In the game, players encounter human and mutant enemies, who can be killed with a variety of firearms. Players must also wear a gas mask to explore areas covered in fallout radiation, both underground and on the surface.
4A Games Limited is a Ukrainian-Maltese video game developer based in Sliema, Malta. The company was founded in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2006 by three developers who departed from GSC Game World. In 2014, 4A Games moved its headquarters to Sliema, wherein the Kyiv office was retained as a sub-studio. The company is best known for developing the Metro video game series.
The 4A Engine is a graphics middleware engine developed by 4A Games for use in its video games Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, Metro Exodus, and Arktika.1. It supports Direct3D APIs 9 through 12, OpenGL 3.2, Nvidia PhysX, and Nvidia 3D Vision.
Video gaming in Ukraine began to emerge in the 1990s and is slowly growing. Subsequently, in the 2000s, several major video game series would start to appear.
Survarium was a free-to-play online first-person shooter with role-playing and survival elements developed by Vostok Games through a venture capital following the purported cancellation of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and closure of GSC Game World in December 2011. Although Survarium is external to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, the developers intend to include comparable features, notably the anomalies and artifacts that reference the Russian science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic, and the 'ecological catastrophe' that renders much of the environment uninhabitable for humans.
VG Entertainment Ltd is a Ukrainian video game developer based in Kyiv. The company was founded in March 2012 by former employees of GSC Game World, including Oleg Yavorsky, after GSC had been shut down. The company developed the battle royale game Fear the Wolves (2019) and is working on Survarium, a free-to-play shooter game in early access since 2015.
Chernobylite is a 2021 first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by Polish game developer The Farm 51 and published by All in! Games. The game is set in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where the player's objective is to explore, as Ukrainian physicist Igor Khymynuk, and find his fiancée in the radioactive wasteland. It was released for Windows in July 2021, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in September 2021, and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in April 2022. It received generally positive reviews from critics.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is an upcoming first-person shooter survival horror video game developed and published by Ukrainian game developer GSC Game World. It will be the fourth game released in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series as well as the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game in 15 years since the release of Call of Pripyat in 2009.
the game is currently in the design doc phase, and developers GSC GameWorld are hoping to secure a publisher at E3.(...)Galyonkin, however, suggests that that date could be wishful thinking, as the game doesn't actually have a publisher at this point.