S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Trailer Takes a Tour

Hm, I remember how I was pissed when I bought Clear Sky. They didn't learn from SoC so why would they now?

This game seems stuck in 2007, i really cant see any difference between this and the first game.

I couldn't help but think the music they used is completely the wrong sort.

Can't wait for the next STALKER - not only xRay Engine is truly one of the most capable engines out there (take that Cramack and your shitty idTech!) but it's also the most original story and gameplay as well.

uggy releases? Sure - but less and less and while it took literally almost a *year* to get SoC bug-free CS was a lot less buggy at release and it only took couple of months to iron out everything that's left.

Based on a farily recent interview - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/05/25/interview-gsc-on-call-of-pripyat/ - it seems they are pretty much done with the engine, they were able to focus n the gameplay now so we can finally hope for a largely bug-free release this time...

I hope they keep the weapon upgrade system from Clear Sky. Thats one thing I really missed when I went back and played SoC. I also prefer the way you harvested artifacts in Clear Sky as well.

I picked up the original on Steam a while back for 5 bucks and just played it last night for the first time. The graphics, at first, seemed aged but still solid, and the flashlight effects are some of the best, if not the best I've seen. I randomly went into the Fallout 3-esque wilderness and camped out on an overpass, looking at the vast field below with pockets of radiation a few hundred yards out all over the entrance to some woods.

I was looking down with binocs at a Stalker corpse below when a pack of 4 or 5 dogs went up to the body and started eating it. Suddenly, three huge mutated warthog looking things came galloping out of the woods at full clip, and an epic battle ensued over the dead body. The dogs broke off and routed the warthogs, while one of them hung back and dragged the corpse by the arm underneath the overpass to hide it. Now that is some impressive AI.

In case anyone cares, first scene what he says is:

"Alright men, it's time to go."

Around the campfire:

"Sigh, weather, weather.... how are you so twisted?"

As the guy is is lying down:

"Eh, wish I could fall over right now and sleep."

Then they get attacked.

I wonder if we'll get to see some familiar faces (or lack thereof)?

Namely Kruglov and Sakharov!

The phrase "under used" potential gets thrown around alot in PC gaming, but I dont think that there is one game that deserves it more than stalker. I hate to be the bad apple here, but, for me, stalker was very underwhelming. I realize that a key part of the game's atmosphere was to provide a creepy void of human activity.. Problem is that there was also a void of anything to keep you interested or engaged. Wandering around Stalker's roads for hours on end got boring pretty quickly.. Their portrayal of life in the zone wasn't very compelling either. I didn't see any beds at those camps.. Where did they sleep? Where did they store their extra ammo? Also, they were completely exposed to the Zone's harsh conditions. After so many years, you would have thought that the zone's inhabitants would have been able to build some sort of makeshift structures to protect them from other people as well as those anomalies.

Then there was the dialogue. Instead of spoken dialogue, the game used huge, obtrusive (and static) I might add menus to convey the dialogue.. In text form.. Come on.. What is this.. the early 90s? If the game was going to throw a huge dialogue box over our field of view.. Why not at least make it visually interesting..? Make it animated and give it a cold war era industrial look.

On top of that, the combat wasn't all too impressive.. The AI was.. well almost nonexistent (I really hate to sound like such a pessimist, but there is no other word to describe it) and the enemies didn't react very interestingly to being hit... It looked alot like they were robots.. The game did give you a huge selection fo weapons and items though.


To me the game's biggest strengths would be it's premised and the graphics (which were marvelous.)

I vaguely remember that 2 people, including one of the leads, go sacked. So I hope that makes for a better quality game this time around.

There was some fiasco with them outsourcing the testing to some company, which turned to shit and that's why Clear Sky was so buggy as hell, with game breaking scripting issues until several patches later.

But either way:

Clear Sky didn't build much on the story from the first one at all, original had much better storytelling, they really should go back to the first one for ideas. The atmosphere suffered in Clear Sky as well, not to mention the massive amount of bugs they had to fix.

I really like the STALKER games, but I'm going to wait until enough people say this one isn't broken before buying.

It's a shame because STALKER is one of the easiest games to mod, lots of the action runs in Lua (if I recall right) scripting files, which you can edit yourself whenever you want, so a lot of stuff can be changed by just a few lines of code. It's neat.

Also hope they work on optimising the engine more and stop adding features to it, just use what you have and add more content/gameplay.

I can't wait for Half Life 3: Call of Black Mesa. Or Bioshock 3: Call of Rapture.

Seriously though, adding "Call of" to your name is a very cheap way of trying to pull fans from the Call of Duty series..

Please don't make it linear. And please polish the engine's performance before releasing.

The original Stalker had the best atmosphere I've ever seen on an FPS, but after chugging extension after extension, it reaches a point where you have to work on the other areas too.

I really had to force my way through Clear Sky. The original and CS had some neat aspects, but the overall game needs an overhaul.

Looking forward to this, hope they get it right this time, the last 2 installements had lots of potential, but fell short in so many areas (stability being just one of them).

That trailer felt a bit weird though... Kind of like an amateurish piece of machinima more than a trailer.

I really enjoyed Shadow of Chernobil and Clear Sky, and I'm gonna enjoy this one too. It may not be perfect but the atmosphere is awesome. From time to time I replay the original with various mods and it's even better then.

The atmospheric lighting in this game engine is second to none. I always loved taking screenshots during a thunder-storm, and the early morning sunrises.

I had a huge photo album tour of SoC with the Oblivion Lost mod. It had over a hundred cool pics. I wanted to cry / puke when my HDD crashed and lost all my shit.

Can't wait for this.

Wow hadn't known this was in the works. Hope they keep most of the same with just a nice layer of polish

looking forward to this, hopefuly it has more features in the game, like sleeping etc from AMK mod.

Ok this came out of nowhere for me.

I hope it's the same as SOC, just a LOT more polished.