STALKER: Clear Sky new screens and preview
STALKER was remarkable in many ways, but it was far from the revolutionary freeform vision originally conjured for us. Now developer GSC is making a game a little closer to that original dream. Our second journey into the Chernobyl exclusion zone promises great things.
As a prequel, Clear Sky will include a storyline which explains a little more about Strelok’s past, and how he ended up in the back of that truck with a gaping hole in his memory. This time, however, you are in a somewhat different world. Blowouts from the reactor keep the Zone in flux, as project lead Anton Bolshakov explains: “The blowout in the story changed certain areas of the Zone, so the anomalous activity in certain areas faded, and increased in other areas. Paths to the known locations have disappeared, while others have opened up. Part of the old areas will be preserved, while there will also be new ones too. Right now Pripyat will not be part of Clear Sky, but we’ll see how things go.” While the exclusion of the abandoned city might be a disappointment for the STALKER hardcore who wanted to see it made explorable, the allure of new tracts of Zone and new weird dereliction to explore are powerful. The open-ended possibilities for poking about in old ruins was one of the most appealing aspects of STALKER, and Clear Sky will provide plenty more of that.
Indeed, as those who followed the STALKER story will recall, the game was always touted as being a little more freeform than the final release proved to be. Clear Sky, it seems, will be returning to the more open-ended inspirations. “Most of the features in Clear Sky were from the original concept that we were working on but were not included in STALKER,” says Bolshakov. “We picked some and we’re now integrating them into this new game. What we’re making is more complete and polished.”
Central to that is what GSC are doing with the various factions that inhabit the zone. While there were a large number of factions in the original game (Freedom, Duty, the military, the mercenaries, the scientists, the neutral STALKERs and the servants of the monolith) you were only really able to follow three paths: Neutrality, Freedom, or Duty. In Clear Sky you’ll be able to join up with seven different factions, work with them, fight them, and ultimately lead your chosen side to victory.
“It’s a global war of factions within the zone,” says Bolshakov. “Now each faction has a fully fledged main camp with a number of key characters in there, like a trader, a mechanic, a leader, a barman, and all of those perform specific roles.” Where the original game only had a couple of traders and mission-hub characters, you’ll now be able to pick up tasks all over the map, and work far more closely with the other STALKERs in the zone to perform them. “You’ll see STALKERs from a faction going on specific tasks, so you have an understanding of what is going on with a faction. Each faction has a specific rival and they fight for artifacts, territory, resources and so on. You can see the conflict develop in front of you. A faction in need of certain resources will go on missions for them. Factions go to grab artifacts if there is a rare one somewhere around. You can join a faction and lead them and they can benefit for your help. As opposed to the original, where NPCs were just moving around, the factions now have specific goals to accomplish. STALKERs within a faction go on smaller missions and you can join up and help them accomplish them.”
All this expands on one of the most significant elements of STALKER: A-Life, the system that enables dynamic events to take place within the Zone. Artificial intelligence routines govern the appearance and movement of groups of STALKERs, packs of dogs, mutants, and the various faction gangs. In A-Life governed areas, you’ll be seeing battles between the various factions, as well as random events taking place. A fight you have in one run through of the game might be completely different a second time because of the appearance of bandits, or because friendly STALKERs are passing through the area and were able to help out. Anyone who has played STALKER has saved, or been saved by, an AI character in the game world. This dynamic complexity will only become more varied and accomplished in Clear Sky.
“There’s more diverse behaviour with STALKERs in the game,” explained Bolshakov. “We’re expanding the concept of searching for artifacts and anomalies, just to name a few things.” Whereas in the original game the artifacts were little more than a saleable power-up system, they’re going to be providing motivation for your actions in Clear Sky. The concept of the Zone as an alien, anomalous place is coming to the forefront. As a result your interest in the artifacts, and the areas of weirdness that generate them, will be hugely increased.
The interest of other Zone parties in the artifacts will be increased too: they will be after the artifacts and will fight to keep them. In Clear Sky you’ll be facing a world with far more going on than ever before. With each of the seven factions vying for power you’ll find yourself caught up in the opposing missions of faction STALKERs, and helping to manipulate a game world which will never be the same from one moment to the next, from one gamer’s session to another. This could be a major step on the road towards an ideal of open-ended game world.
Of all the reasons to be excited about Clear Sky, one of the most significant is that, to a great extent, GSC are going it alone. While they have signed up Koch to publish the game upon its planned release this spring, and it’ll be sold via Steam online, it’s a far cry from THQ’s integral involvement in the original game’s completion. With this bold move, GSC could rapidly become one of the most important PC-focused studios in the world.
Whether these shiny, new gameplay elements make it into a STALKER sequel or not is hardly relevant. What matters is that an independent developer based in the former Soviet Union, with an office in a converted munitions factory and with a team whose childhoods were overshadowed by nuclear disaster, is one of the most imaginative and creatively ambitious video game developers in the world today. If GSC accomplish half of what they have dreamed, then their work will become legendary.
