Text/Yiguang Flow

For most practitioners, the conundrum is nothing more than a few key points of creativity, money and time, but for the Ukrainian GSC Game World studio, the topic is much heavier.

Their new work "Stalker 2" has experienced problems such as company dissolution, project restructuring, and multiple postponements, among which the most difficult is the experience of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict forcing the project team to flee the Russian-Ukrainian border with their families, and even a senior planner stayed in the war forever.

On November 20th, the 14-year-old "Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl" was finally released worldwide, and thankfully, the game performed very well after its launch, gaining 110,000 concurrent online users on Steam on the second day of its launch, and selling more than 1 million copies on the third day.

Not long ago, this game also took advantage of the trend to appear on Steam's global best-selling list, ranking first in the buyout game category and fourth in the whole category.

At the same time, the game also exposes worrisome problems, such as poor optimization, many bugs, weak feel, and backward parts of the system...... This has also attracted a lot of negative comments from players, with old players complaining and advising new players to "don't buy", and more players who have already purchased give the conclusion of "half-finished". As a result, the game's praise rate on Steam stayed at the level of 78%.

In Grape's view, this is a very contradictory "new work": it uses the UE5 engine to make it, but the design concept is very retro; It has a lot of production issues, but it's part of its own old series tradition; Players who don't know it can complain about the completion of the game without pressure, but veteran players and those who know it deeply will be reluctant.

01

The heir to the originator of hardcore FPS

As one of the representatives of the Russian game, the early entries of the Stalker series were groundbreaking. It has strong Slavic characteristics, such as a passion for military subjects, a pursuit of realism and detail, and the cultural background of Slavic regions such as Russia and Ukraine. In addition, Stalker also introduced the concept of "open-world survival shooting" to players early on.

When it comes to the background of the Stalker's story, many people will directly associate it with the Chernobyl incident, but in fact, what makes players talk about the game is its deeper proposition. It was inspired by Roadside Picnic, one of the pinnacles of Soviet science fiction, and the film Stalker by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, based on Roadside Picnic.

The Stalker movie

"Roadside Picnic" fictionalizes an alien civilization that passes by the earth and leaves a pile of garbage and "toys", and presents a novel science fiction world by describing human beings who treat these garbage and toys as miracles. "Stalker" uses an extremely obscure way to depict three people who enter the quarantine zone in search of the universal wishing machine, and leaves the audience with a thought-provoking story around the greed and desire of human nature.

The Stalker series was influenced by these two titles, and also tried to construct a heavy and oppressive Chernobyl quarantine. Therefore, in the actual game, many of the settings seem overly realistic and suffering, such as harsh loads, easily damaged weapons, physical strength that can be out of breath after running two steps, a design without a beginner's tutorial, and a life system that rushes every day for medical treatment and water.

Stalker: Clear Skies

Despite the fact that the early Stalker looked torturous, buggy, and half-finished overall, it was still unique enough: an attractive quarantine zone, a desolate and corrupt environment, an eerie and supernatural element, a curious and twisted atmosphere.

Coupled with the variety of mods and optimization patches in the community, Stalker has left an indelible mark on the hearts of veteran players after all. The third game in the series, "Stalker: Call of Pripyat", released in 2010, still maintains a 95% positive rating on Steam (22000+ reviews), which shows that players love it.

Stalker: Call of Pripyat

In addition, the Stalker series also influenced many later wasteland-themed and post-apocalyptic FPS games, as well as hardcore gameplay. For example, "Metro", "DayZ", "Escape from Tarkov" and "Atomic Heart", which was popular at the beginning of last year, etc., some of them are from the story background, some from the hardcore system, and some from the plot core, more or less magnifying a highlight of the stalker.

Atomic Heart

As the orthodox sequel to the Stalker series and the successor to the originator of hardcore FPS after 14 years, "Stalker 2" can be said to be a success, but as a game to be released at the end of 2024, it is undoubtedly a failure.

To put it simply, "Stalker 2" is a little too serious in "continuing the style of the previous game". It is still based on Chernobyl, but by adding the setting of the "second nuclear reactor explosion in 2006", the game fictionalizes an unrecognizable, chaotic world of brutal mutated creatures, deadly anomalies, and a multi-factional quarantine circle.

It can be seen that "Stalker 2" wants to continue to present the depressing atmosphere of the isolation circle, the difficulty of survival, and the pursuit of destiny and other levels of series characteristics. For example, through the rendering of dim scenes and the lens language of horror games, the atmosphere of the environment is expressed; The pressure of survival is reflected through the retro garbage picking system and the weapon system that is as head-wrenching as ever.

It's just that the retro is too much, it's really rough. Some of the settings that should be hardcore also have a negative chemical effect when they are thrown to the player.

Take the weapon system as an example, the original design of the game was to allow players to experience hundreds of weapon combinations through dozens of weapons and accessory systems. But in the actual game, the early weapons feel very poor, and the damage values are more extreme, and the headshot only has obvious damage, and the rest of the place is scraping, which is easy to accumulate pressure.

In addition, the design of weapon durability and repair costs is also unreasonable, such as the "good gun" given by the task, the durability is lower than the one picked up, and the price of repairing a gun is prohibitive, it is better to go out and grab the enemy's gun, so under the superposition of various factors, the player has neither good shooting feedback nor a powerful combination in the later stage in the first few hours, and has to use a limited load to pick up the enemy's firearms to earn gun repair fees (the economic system here is also unreasonable, basically only the gun is expensive) 。

It's not just the weapon system, but in many details, "Stalker 2" is not reasonable and passable. Not to mention some disgusting bugs that affect the advancement of the game, just poor optimization, frame drops and other problems, it is enough for FPS players to suffer, fortunately, it has been a few days since the game was put on the shelves, and there have been many technical players in the community who have released optimized mods, which can solve some problems before the official patch is released.

But even if there is a MOD boss to support the scene, it can't hide the problem that "Stalker 2" is a "half-finished". Previously, some netizens unpacked and found that the number of faces of the body part of an NPC character in the game is 110,000 faces, and 8 NPCs are equivalent to the total number of faces in a river bay tower crane scene in the previous work. A few more enemies, if you don't get a card, you have to get a card.

These dissuasionary questions, coupled with a series of hardcore designs made for retro, it is clear that Stalker 2 is difficult to satisfy the appetite of those "modern gamers who are used to fast-paced FPS". Therefore, the achievements of "Stalker 2" now, in addition to the daily purchase of masterpieces by players who are short of games, still rely more on the feelings of old stalkers to support.

It can also be seen from this that the trend of "realistic and hardcore" design in the past two years is also constantly wrestling with "fast food" design.

02

When the game's war comes to life

In 2024, using a semi-finished product to consume the feelings of old game fans is undoubtedly accompanied by huge risks. After all, there are many cases in front of us, and the public opinion environment in the game circle is becoming sinister year by year.

But for Stalker 2, it's hard for me to have the idea of scolding, because the birth of this game has gone through too many ups and downs.

The early trilogy of the Stalker series was a smooth ride for GSC Game World, with the release of Stalker: Call of Pripyat in 2010 and the release of Stalker 2 in the same year, which is scheduled to be released in 2012. The news also made many players extremely excited at the time.

It backfired, and a year later, GSC Game World was shut down due to the publisher, which led to a series of chain reactions, a large number of employees leaving the studio, and the development of "Stalker 2" had to be suspended.

Fortunately, the founders, Sergiy Grygorovych and Evgeniy Grygorovych, reorganized the GSC Game World studio in 2014, rebuilt the family in 2015 with another new game, Cossack 3, and finally announced the relaunch of the "Stalker 2" project in 2018.

It's just that the "Stalker 2" promotional video released at E3 this year is still in the concept stage, and the official later admitted that the game has just begun to develop. It wasn't until 2020 that Stalker 2 made its debut at the Xbox Games Showcase, and by this time the game had a more pronounced feature: a vibe, story, characters, and quarantine look that remained true to the trilogy.

At the same time, in order to keep the game hot, lead producer Slava Lukyanenka also revealed that the studio will also focus on modding and community building. So in 2021, "Stalker 2" came up with an official trailer and announced that it would be released at the end of April 2022.

Then unfortunately, the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out in February 2022, and it was from this moment that the lives of all the members of the GSC Game World studio began to shift towards the games they made. In an interview with Evgeniy Grygorovych, the game director of "Stalker 2", many details were recorded.

In the early hours of February 24, when the army crossed the border and shelled the city, buildings less than a mile from the GSC collapsed under fire. Fortunately, a week ago, more than 200 GSC employees and their families were moved to Ukraine's border towns.

As the founder, Evgeniy Grygorovych at the time didn't expect it to be so tough, but his instincts kept telling him that he had to flee quickly, so one day a large meeting was held at the GSC Game World studio and all employees and families were advised to flee to the border: "At that time, we didn't care about the business, we didn't care about the progress of the game, we just didn't want the team to take risks. ”

Evgeniy Grygorovych felt that the reality was as depicted in their own game Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, where the war was so close to themselves that the day before the army landed, the GSC Game World studio transferred about 700 employees and dependents, but still 170 too late to transfer.

"With only one suitcase per family and only three hours to move the data, we barely had time to think about it, as one HR member of the team was about to give birth and was already praying for the friends, family and colleagues who were left behind. We didn't expect it to be so hard. ”

After arriving at a temporary shelter in Budapest, GSC employees settled in Prague in March 2022. Enduring pain has become a part of many people's lives, and GSC Studios has become another "refuge". Evgeniy Grygorovych recalls the new studio: "People play music, play guitar and read books in the studio, and the mocap area on the first floor becomes a playfield for children. ”

The reason for this is simple, because continuing to develop Stalker 2 at this point is no longer just about making games. "You're not working or creating, you're just pasting videos of the war on social networks into the game...... It's painful. "In Evgeniy Grygorovych's opinion, only in those eight or nine hours can everyone return to life and forget about the war for a while.

In the days that followed, while some developers swapped keyboards for guns and went to the front, others stayed behind to continue working on Stalker 2, including at GSC's Kyiv office and employees working remotely from all over Ukraine. Of course, there are also employees who remain in the fighting forever, including veteran designer Volodymyr Yezhov, who was killed in a battle near Bakhmut on December 22, 2022, who was one of the fastest to get to the front.

But Evgeniy Grygorovych felt more and more that the world was forgetting the war, and that GSC employees could only briefly distract from the gloom of the war with an event similar to the Cologne. At the end of the interview, Evgeniy Grygorovych broke down in tears: "We don't want war, we want to think more about what we can do on the weekend, than how to answer the question of a three-year-old child, 'Daddy, when will we fly back to Kyiv'." ”

Perhaps for many players, "Stalker 2" is just a half-finished game that has been skipping tickets for 14 years, has many bugs in optimization, and consumes fans' feelings. For GSC employees, this game has been their motivation to persevere in the gap between war and survival, and a hard-won answer.

03

epilogue

Knowing these experiences, and looking back at Stalker 2 itself, I still feel that the flaws are not hidden.

In this FPS game, it's not just about victory and defeat, struggle, plunder, and life and death. There are actually a lot of side plots in the game, and there are some intriguing and even thought-provoking details.

For example, in the Poppy Fields quest series, you can see a backpack of anti-vertigo drinks and notes left around the field in order to prevent the Stalker from being killed by the mysterious power of the poppy field. If you dig deeper into it, you can also find NPCs who live on the edge of the flower field and survive by touching corpses, as well as fragments of memories left by people who died in the flower field.

There is also an in-depth interpretation of the UP master, and guesses the possibility of the truth behind it: it is not the mysterious power of the flower field that kills the stalker, but the person who wants to go deep into the flower field again will die because of greed, on the contrary, the person who went out of the flower field directly because of fear of escaping, or in order to help others, all survived.

The design of these details, as well as the player's own choice of how to survive in the quarantine circle, may be the core that Stalker 2 hopes to present to players. Just like the part of the Stalker series that players have always been interested in: how will people unleash their nature and how will they re-establish order after the war has caused the order of civilization to collapse.

Like the members of GSC Studios, some choose to put down their keyboards and pick up guns, while others choose to continue developing games as a driving force. Stalker 2 may just be a framework for a post-nuclear wasteland horror world, and the real fun has to be found and defined by the players themselves.

It is foreseeable that after this game is optimized and updated, and more mods emerge in the community, "Stalker 2" will go to a new level.

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