10 years to play s.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of chernobyl! Nostalgia post

S.T.A.L.K Eclipse Casino.E.R. I have never been just a game. He has always been considered a phenomenon since the birth of a concept. Not many games earned such frantic popularity in the post -Soviet space. Like such sincere love. But, which came out exactly on this day, albeit a decade earlier, she could also boast of complete unfortunate ups and downs of biography.

At the beginning of the two thousandth young studio GSC Game World Yaro was eager to leave her mark in the industry. Yes, they had successful "Cossacks" And ambiguous "Heroes of destroyed empires", But they will not be remembered by them. The game was to become a real embodiment of this desire Oblivion Lost.

The first screenshots of Oblivion Lost.

The main idea of ​​the project around which the studio's dream was rotated was a living world. Alive without any “but” – he had to exist, in no way depends on the player’s actions, by itself. According to the employees who have found those times, the development team is simply tired of the routine and the predictability of corridor shooters. The same locations, the same tricks, monsters, jumping out of the corner once again ..

Therefore, GSC decided to surprise the player at every step. Oblivion Lost was supposed to become a shooter about everything in the world: lost worlds, aliens, cosmic adventures and battle contractions. And all this in a changing, dynamic world – the world that never showed all the cards at once, leaving the player the joy of discovery and a sense of mystery. Alas, the game became the hostage of the Napoleonic ambitions of the developer – the project of such scale was beyond the power of a modest studio.

Literary heritage

Not by the Games of one glorious series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. A huge library left by the project into inheritance turns the game world into a whole multi-senior, and grabbing some kind of novel from it is quite difficult.

First-collections of stories. Each of them was dedicated to the release of games and was called appropriately: "Shadow of Chernobyl" , "Clear Sky" , "Call of Pripyat". They were notable not so much the content as the authors. They became simple fans. People from the street, participating in the selection and sending their work on equal terms. Partly precisely this directness of relations with the audience s.T.A.L.K.E.R. I earned my reputation.

The works themselves cannot be called remarkable. Most of them were fan fiction, they felt the hand of the amateur. However, the emotions of the writer themselves are valuable here. Agree, it is worth a lot to attach your hand to the creation of your beloved universe, and few will provide such a chance.

The most remembered by us the author in the series was the Russian science fiction writer Alexei Kalugin. Specifically – his novel "House in the swamp" : the story of a reckless stalker of the pin and the legendary swamp doctor who is familiar with the shooter himself. This is one of the few books where the author does not move away from the game, but seriously examines and works out the game character, revealing him more fully and wider.

In this regard, the mood and idea of ​​the game have changed dramatically, and the excursion to Chernobyl set the project a new course. Exotic planets were transformed into the alienation zone, bandits and mutants took the place of militant aliens, and only bolts remained from spacecraft. Oblivion Lost turned first into S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost , And a little later – to the familiar to us S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of chernobyl.

We found our archival story about the game. 2004 video!

A more mundane and understandable setting facilitated the work on the project, but did not at all extent the ambitions of the developers. The idea of ​​a living world still haunted them. Initially, the player threw into the zone for the only purpose – to find seven tips that allow you to guess how to get alive through an ominous "burner" in the heart of the zone and get to the most rare hubar. No one held the player by the handle, did not give him concessions – only the hero, his mission and opponents: monsters, bandits, competing stalkers. The game was supposed to forget about the rails, focus on the variety of fauna, the scale of locations, the behavior of AI and a bunch of other chips.

The team of developers s.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl catches "inspiration".

It sounded great on paper and in press releases, but GSC had new problems. The open world without divine intervention of the scripts turned out to be too unpredictable: the testers often found themselves in situations, nothing happened somewhat, or it was frankly not clear where to go, so that something would happen after all the beginning. Well, the technology did not stand still, and the game had to be rebuilt under a new engine. Also Half-Life 2 got to the release, and s.T.A.L.K.E.R. It is unlikely that I would be able to compete with such a mastodont. Therefore, the release was transferred.

The game changed the concept again. And then the publisher could not stand it. Now rested ThQ Pressed on GSC due to too frequent transfers of the release date, and s.T.A.L.K.E.R. went through the last round of the right. Many ideas went under the knife: the living world was tilted with scripts, the locations were noticeably reduced, only developments and prototypes (later recreated by models) remained from some elements).

Fan creativity

The Stalker series, or rather, the release build of any Stalker, is almost synonymous to the word “bug”. From the “shadow of Chernobyl” to the “call of Pripyat” – all the games of the franchise are teeming with shortcomings of varying degrees of fatality: from a small irritant to disappearing preservations and non -working scripts. And it is not surprising: GSC is a small studio, they did not have a powerful support for the project powerful support.

Naturally, there were many those who reconciled with all misses and played, no matter what. For the sake of the atmosphere and adventure, everything can be endured. Another thing is interesting – there were many those who did not just close their eyes to bugs, but began to actively correct them and even supplement the game with self -propelled content. And this is in the absence of official support of mods!

So the people have done. From corrected scripts and improved graphics to weapons, fractions, mechanic and independent story campaigns – the fans of the series tirelessly tried to make their favorite games better. The majority, of course, dwelled on small patch and new textures. Dyuzhins of different fixes and mini-films were often fused into a single package-the same “folk hodgepodge” that once downloaded from the Internet and was transferred to classmates on flash drives or disks.

However, the units, the most devoted teams of the modders, invested incredible work in fashion so huge that they may well go for independent projects "based on".

Stalker: Lost Alpha

GSC was probably insulting that many creative finds had to be put under a knife due to the cruelty of capitalism. The fans were also offended, and they did not put up with injustice. So the “lost alpha” appeared – the version of the “shadow of Chernobyl”, closest to the original vision of the developers. A small window into the past and the most true chance to look at what the first game was supposed to be.

Lost Alpha is restored much of what has not been included in the game. Transport? Eat. Truly huge, processed and filled locations? Eat. "Free" AI without rail? Where without him. The need to eat and added the light, and already aggressive mutants at night began to rage in full. Add to this an excellent graphics with DX10 support, and you get a real gift for the series fan. Interesting both as a game and as a museum exhibit – the idea of ​​GSC, which has become immortal.

Misery

If someone lacks hardcore and real, to a toothy rattle, the process of survival in the alienation zone, it is worth paying attention to Misery-a total conversion for the “Zavov Pripyat”.

The name of the fashion is very eloquently reflects its essence. Suffering. Solid suffering everywhere and always. Misery twists the hero’s mortality and realism to the limit. There are few weapons, and often it is in poor condition or broken. It is not easy to get provisions and ammunition. The enemies here are even more deadly, anomalies are more dangerous, and even artifacts are now harmful if they do not wear them in a shielded container. The game is nightmarely unfriendly to beginners, and even the developer himself recommends the mod only to experienced stalkers. Say, that's so complicated.

Misery is such a "strategy Paradox Interactive »From the world of shooters. Amazingly entertaining, but for a very narrow circle of people. For Monsieur, understanding a lot about sorties behind Khabar.

Call of Chernobyl

Not everyone, however, is dealing with a frighteningly realistic gameplay or the initial ideas of GSC. Someone may just like to wander around the zone, inhale in full chest infected air and absorb the atmosphere. Enjoy the views. Sometimes shoot a snork or two.

Just for such gentlemen, there is Call of Chernobyl, a giant mod that won the Mod Modb award at Moddb.com last year. What he does? Trifles – connects locations from all three parts of the “stalker” into one huge zone, adjusted for a buried schedule, corrected geometry and own developments of the modders team. Ambitious, in the spirit of GSC, beautifully and damn high quality. This is not to mention the many small additions implemented in the mod: from creating your own character to system corrections and the implementation of different weather conditions in different levels.

It seems that the first GSC ideas were not so fantastic.

Six years of development after, March 23, 2007 , GSC finally released S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of chernobyl. However, she was far from the game that many were waiting. But even in a trimmed and full of bugs, the game community accepted the project very warmly. The commercial success of the first part had its fruits, and already in 2008 the prequel came out S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. According to the developers, this time they wished to show life in the zone on behalf of a member of a whole group of stalkers, and not a loner, into one muzzle that has been cutting out with entire battalions.

Hence the main innovation of the gameplay, cut out from the original at one time: the war of the fractions. The undertaking with a dynamically changing world was perfect for this. The player could join one of the groups, defend her interests, fight for key objects on locations.

The idea of ​​an anomalies detector, and the redesigned system for searching for artifacts, which became a much more dangerous occupation, returned. Introduced in -depth customization of the weapon, embellished the graphics, added a convolution to artificial intelligence. The studio even equipped another expedition to Chernobyl to re -gain inspiration. In a word, the developers tried step by step to return to the game forced ideas to bring it closer to their original vision.

By the way, we also went to Chernobyl.

And in the next 2009, the year GSC Game World put an end to the implementation of the previous undertaking by the last part of the series- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. True, then we still did not know anything about any "points". The addon was a large -scale work on the mistakes of the original and the prequel.

New weapons, new opportunities, dangers and adventures. A heap of small locations was replaced by three vast territories with their own ecosystems, tedious and monotonous secondary quests found their own small plots, and mutants, with new properties and mechanics, became even more deadly. Call of Pripyat praises with attention to details. Everything that worked, earned more than the same and had many fans to their liking.

Substituted screenshots

Despite the termination of development S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, interest in the game does not subside. By the degree of accompanying paranoia, of course, to the mythological Half-Life 3 does not reach, but any news still causes a storm of emotions.

So, at the end of August 2016, the user Reddit , Under the nickname EEZZZZ , For the first time, he published screenshots of the canceled project, which he found in the portfolio of former GSC Game World employees Nikolai Gatilov and Sergey Ivanchenko.

This did not say anything about the return of the series to life, so there were no reasons for special joy, but for many pictures came out to be an occasion to separate the fate of the game once again.

However, even with two work on mistakes, having gone the path of ten years, the series is still endlessly far from what developers saw it initially. In fact, we will never know what the perfect GSC game would look like. Maybe.

And therefore we love her as she is. With a decade, s.T.A.L.K.E.R.!