GSC Closed - STALKER 2 Cancelled

Was actually gonna buy this game today since i finally put together my first PC and heard great things about it.
 
Oh noes, this totally sucks.

I love these games and still play them. Hopefully a decent studio picks them up and carries on with it.
 
Bad, bad news!

The original Stalker gave me the biggest element of fear EVER in over 29 years of gaming(old codger alert!) when I first went down the drain....... saw and heard the rusty turning red lamp and then heard the moaning, I'll never forget it!
 
One of my favourite series of games ever.

But I'm philosphic about this: they made an excellent trilogy which will live long via modding. We got a lot and it won't stop giving for a long time.

I always felt like the STALKER series was slightly a fluke - someone, who knows who - came up with the stroke of genius of combining the STALKER mythology with the real world Chernobyl events and created a real world/ fantasy horror hybrid a bit too close to the bone to be comfortable. (especially considering the pre-diasaster power plant was one of the backdrops in the late 70s film)

Then those 6 years in develpment hell produced a compromised game but one with so much content : fertile soil and potential that it grew into something unique.

The next 2 installments I'm so glad they came but only really Call Of Pripyat really properly gathered everything to a working day 1 game.
Throughout, they took their gameplay cues from the modding community & rightly so.

Also, these game represented what I think an RPG should aspire to be (I consider them RPGs and the best example of). No experience points, no levellling up, no abstract stats. Only equipment & the players skill can help your chances of survival.

In a future development, either commerical or indie, I would love to see the environment emphasised much more. I would love to see blowouts alter the geography of an area, as well as anomolies.
I would like to see zones so deadly & requiring specialist equipment such that a player can be able to enter them right from the beginning but unable to survive 10 paces 'till over halfway through.
I'd love someone to go back to look back at the original book & incorporate some of that extreme powerlessness the character has. I'm prepared to crawl through a single building for half an hour in fear of anlomolies, though some scripting/ plotting would be necessary.

Of course, best of luck to all the staff who have lost their jobs, we really appreciate all your efforts, we hope you find work soon & we are grateful for the things you have made already.
 
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Nicely said Quixote, they were truly amazing and unique games and still are in their own right. I've played through SoC three times now and I still think this game has the most rich, immersive and fully realised atmosphere in any game to date. Heck, I used to only play the game at night, with the lights off and spending most the time just walking about, scouting the landscape and taking in the atmosphere, it was that good. In this respect, it was just as good as any of the so called 'true' rpg games out there.

As for this news, I'm really sad to hear it as I think the game had massive potential for development. Really, all they needed to do was just increase the game world size, add more quests and iron out the bugs, most of the ground work was already there.

I do hope STALKER 2 get's picked up again, but hopefully by the same people who designed the orignal or people who were at least fans of the series. It would be pretty easy for a different developer to pick the title, produce a technically superior game, yet completely lose the original feel of STALKER.
 
The thing with the STALKER's is that they are buggy and very unoptimised yet for all their faults the games just suck you in.

I have never seen a computer game have such a dynamic weather and lighting system period.

I have all the latest games such as Crysis 2 and Shogun 2 yet when I got my new graphics cards last month the first game I installed was STALKER COP and I loved every minute of it even though I had previously completed it after it first came out.

How that game makes you sit on the end of your seat is unbelievable. One of the most immersive titles out there. It makes Fallout 3 seem like popping out to the shops for a bag of sugar in comparison.:D

If the STALKER franchise is now dead then it is a sad day for PC gaming.
 
Sad news, was looking forward to Stalker 2. But if I was honest Clear sky and Pripyat were pretty average shooters from what I've played over the years, atmosphere was spot on but Clear Sky was too short and Pripyat I felt like I just running around in circles half the time.

I get the feeling they couldn't get sufficient funding, all they want to is `safe` cod clones that sell well in todays market :o
 
This from the comments section of RPS, original bloggers english translation:
(I have no idea of how close he is to the devs or how 'kosher this can be considered)

Sergey Galyonkin says:

12/09/2011 at 23:43

Hi

I’ve translated my original post to English, so you don’t have to guess through Google Translate :)

http://galyonkin.com/2011/12/09/pro-zakryitie-gsc/

—

As this blog post was picked up by some English-speaking outlets, I thought I should add an English translation, because Google Translate does a really poor job here.

So, I wasn’t going to write about this before I could talk to Grigorovich, but he isn’t picking up phone and there is a lot of rumors around, so I’ve decided to clarify some things. I don’t work at GSC, but I know a lot of people there and here is what I got after talking to them. This is purely unofficial of course.

GSC is no more. Almost everyone is let go, only few people left and still employed. STALKER 2 project is closed.

My friends in GSC believe that the reason for that is failed console publishing deal. GSC couldn’t sign any publisher for STALKER 2 on consoles, and GSC wasn’t strong enough to do it all by itself. STALKER 2 was going to become PC exlcusive, which isn’t a great future for story-driven game.

Some say that Grigorovich demanded a lot from publishers and his terms were unacceptable, some say that publishers didn’t like setting – Eastern European postapocalypse is not that popular outside Europe. I don’t know which is true, but guess it is a bit of both.

Also, some people at GSC say that Grigorovich wasn’t happy with quality of STALKER 2, but others say it was going to be a great game and huge improvement over first one. One guy said that Grigorovich was tired of game development and no longer interested in STALKER at all, but I don’t believe it, knowing Sergey for last ten years. He might be tired, yes, but he loved STALKER.

I’ve read on Ukranews about «goverment agencies trying to take over GSC». None of my friends confirms it. It is just not possible: only thing that valuable in GSC is it’s IP and it is registered outside Ukraine. Also, I’ve heard numerous people saying that Grigorovich talked to them about closing GSC for a year now.

I don’t know what will happen to STALKER next. Grigorovich might sell or lease it to other companies: there was at some point browser-based STALKER game in production. But there is only one studio in Ukraine that can handle this – 4A Games, creators of original STALKER. And they’re not exactly friends with Grigorovich. As for other Eastern European developers (from Poland or Bulgaria) – I don’t believe they can do STALKER 2 justice. Some are just too good to work for IP that is not their own and some don’t have enough experience.

—-

Also, my surname is Galyonkin, not Galenkin :)
 
Stalker was the only game where I was scared enough of the dark to sleep on towers and roofs until the morning to get away from all the creepy crawlies in the night. At least we still have the 3 Stalker games that will keep giving for a while to come yet.
 
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