S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky

Format PC

Developer GSC Game World

Publisher

Genre First Person Shooter

37 Comments

Could this be the game GSC always intended to make? We investigate the true nature of the Stalker prequel... (by Jim Rossignol and Tim Edwards)

GSC were founded almost a decade ago. Since then they've created a best-selling strategy game, Cossacks, and launched one of the most ambitious game design projects ever undertaken. Indeed, some people might say that Stalker was too ambitious.

We've followed the development of the apocalyptic survival shooter closely over the years, and we've seen it change radically. The game that we finally played in 2007 was remarkable in many ways, but it was far from the revolutionary freeform vision originally conjured for us by the Kiev team.

Now they're making a game a little closer to that original dream. They're making another Stalker. A prequel named Clear Sky. And we have every reason to be excited, because our second journey into the Chernobyl exclusion zone promises great things.

Future Past
When the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear facility took place on April 26, 1986, GSC's project lead, Anton Bolshakov, was still a child. Thanks to the immensity of the event, and the myth of Chernobyl as a place of danger and unnatural forces, the Chernobyl Zone has been a constant presence in his life, as it has been in the lives of all Ukrainians.

In the course of finding out more about Clear Sky, we've been discussing Bolshakov's past and early memories of the events of 1986, with translation help from another GSC team member, Oleg Yavorsky.

"It was still the Soviet Union. There was a holiday that week, so they were all going out on the street with red flags and so on with the intention of hailing the working people. No one was aware of the accident because there was no official information. It was only later when people discovered what happened."

When the horrifying truth emerged, many local children were evacuated. Anton, along with many others from the nearby Ukrainian towns, had an unexpected holiday in the countryside.

But the Zone didn't just fade away. It loomed large. "For years the Chernobyl reactor was on TV and in the newspapers," recalls Bolshakov. "The media created a very strong image of the place, which associated it with danger, radiation. The fact that it was so popular with the media made it natural for something to be developed around it. It was so close, so heavily described, that the idea was inevitable for us as developers in the Ukraine."

Anton and the other GSC developers had a first-hand sense of what the world might be like after some kind of apocalypse. The communist era had left its wreckage all across the Eastern Bloc, of which Chernobyl was simply the most iconic example.

"After the Soviet Union collapsed there was revealed to be many similar places to Chernobyl, redundant military and industrial bases. Not necessarily radioactive, but similar, abandoned. When you're making a game like this you collect imagery, so we went out and took photographs and memories. Chernobyl was one such site, but there are more."

The idea grew. If GSC were going to make a game, then it should be one based on concepts and imagery that they were intimately familiar with. It would at once be a fiction, and a report on the real world of the early 21st century.

"It was a fresh idea for a game," says Bolshakov. "There's a lot of World War II or fantasy, but no realistic apocalyptic worlds. The exclusion zone actually represents the real Soviet Union, a remnant."

But the Stalker project was about more than artistic inspiration. Like all videogames it required a technology to realise its ambitions. It was in part the X-Ray engine that allowed GSC to turn their imagery into a digital world. "Prior to Stalker there was no such technology for us to render this kind of environment... as technology progressed we have had ways to create the detail and atmosphere of the ruins of an Empire."

The sheer visual intensity of the game was enough to impress western publishers, too. "The initial reaction was very positive, because of the image on screen. No one
else was showing this kind of image. Engines before used to be built on BSP technology, so you were facing indoor areas, squarish spaces, but with Stalker we were handling outdoor areas with up to one million polygons on screen. We knew it would work. It was the first introduction of such realistic detail."

But this outdoor tech had another significance for the team: it would change how the game should be played. Originally Stalker was little more than another linear shooter, but GSC knew that they had the opportunity, perhaps even the necessity, to do some unique.

"Initially we had the idea of a 15-level linear shooter and in 2001 we already had two levels ready," Bolshakov says. "However, we felt at that moment that this kind of concept would be trite, and the concept had no chance to stand out. We realised to make it a successful shooter it needed good technology, with impressive images on screen to create strong first impressions.

"This was very important for us as a start-up company. We wanted to stand out. But also we needed some original gameplay, so the concept of a linear shooter just didn't work. It was putting together all those elements, of the setting, gameplay ideas and technology that changed things. Once they were ready we scrapped the old concept and only the technology remained."

The sheer fact that GSC had created such an impressive original concept, both in game design and visual presence, meant that they were largely able to choose their own terms for development when the deal was finally made with THQ. "We had so much interest that we were able to choose the publisher and choose our own terms" says Bolshakov.

"We kept the IP rights to the game, which is practically impossible for a start-up company." Nevertheless, the seven year length of the project was difficult for any publishing company to stomach.

"There was a mutual understanding. From the beginning they trusted us. However, after a few delays their reactions changed a little. It became a question not of what should be changed, but what needed to be done to get the project finished. We scaled down some features to do this."

Was it really the case that the game's ideas were too big for the game's reality? "At the start we wanted to create the game of our dreams, and the design document filled out the details of our dream game. But then we also took into account the reaction of the fans. After we announced our intentions for the game the reaction was extremely excited, and what this did to us was urge us to make the game bigger and bigger.

"At the time we were sure this was the right way to do our game, but perhaps we should have been more restrained. There's no one to be blamed, of course, but the euphoria of the fans made us escalate non-stop with the things we wanted to add. We should have done it a little differently."

One such feature was the spectacular nuclear storm called the 'Blowout', a thundering anomaly that drove the wildlife of the zone before it and forced Stalkers to take cover. We were being awed by it in preview sessions a couple of years before the original game was released. We asked Bolshakov about its omission.

"It was really painful to take out a bunch of features. Especially because we'd spent so much time designing and implementing a feature. You live with it and learn to love it, and that's a very difficult thing. However, in our situations where there had been a number of delays, everyone on the team had an understanding that we risked the project simply being closed down. It was done thoughtfully, so there was no real crying about it."

Fortunately for us, much of the work on these features has already been done. And that means that the Chernobyl zone of Clear Sky is more impressive than ever before.

Present Tension
Indeed, GSC will get to go a whole lot further with this new game. It's a pattern that we see regularly: a proficient development team has a crack at something for the second time and does far more than they managed in the original game.

After seven years GSC are pretty damned good at making Stalker, so why should they make anything else? They've got the finished version of Stalker to base the project on, and some cash from the success of the game, and free rein: THQ are no longer involved in overseeing GSC's games. All this means that things that were expunged through lack of time and money can now be resurrected.

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 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 artefacts, 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 artefacts 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.

Travelling through the A-Life governed areas means seeing battles between the various factions, as well as random events taking place. A fight you have in one run through 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 artefacts and anomalies, just to name a few things."

Whereas in the original game the artefacts 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 artefacts, and the areas of weirdness that generate them, will be hugely increased.

The interest of other Zone parties in the artefacts will be increased too: they will be after the artefacts 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.

New Horizon
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.

While the original Stalker was an astonishing achievement brought to fruition with THQ's hands tight on the reins, Clear Sky is the work of a company that is fully in control of its own destiny. GSC could rapidly become one of the most important PC-focused studios in the world.

On a final whimsical note, we feel we should deliver an anecdote from Stalker's development history. Our Tim, on an early press trip to the Ukraine, was fortunate enough to get paralytically drunk with the GSC developers (all that vodka has to go somewhere, after all).

In that extended bout of boozing the GSC chaps talked excitedly and openly about their dreams for the Stalker project. They talked about a 'gravity glove' that could manipulate objects in a way seen in Half-Life 2 and Crysis; they talked about the vehicles (which remain half-finished and embedded in the original Stalker code) and they even talked about a pilotable UFO... The game Stalker might have been is a weird one indeed.

Whether these things 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 videogame developers in the world today.

If GSC accomplish half of what they have dreamed, then their work will become legendary.

PC Gamer