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[Wanoah]

It looks like developers GSC are closing. This is terrible news, quite frankly, as these are people that represented those brave few that have actually innovated in the games industry. Like many people, I'd hoped that the loss of people like Looking Glass back in the day wouldn't matter too much: the IP still exists right? Those talented people still exist? In practice, though, the IP is buried by the greedy self-serving whores that are allowed to dominate in every corner of the business world; and the good people are swallowed by the behemoths of the gaming world that wouldn't know innovation if it walked up to them and kicked them in their syphilis-riddled testes.

GSC took three goes to get S.T.A.L.K.E.R. right, and really nailed it in Call of Pripyat as far as I'm concerned, but even the buggy original was an atmospheric marvel. They'd tripped over their own ambition, perhaps, but what resulted was a flawed masterpiece. I was looking forward to seeing what Stalker 2 would bring, but I guess, more importantly, I was looking forward to seeing what else they would do after that.

Few videogames, it seems, have been able to learn the lessons of Stalker. We might never actually see its progeny. Like EVE in the world of MMOs, it might remain an outlier experience, essentially unrepeatable in the future history of games.

I'll leave it to Jim to sum up: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/12/10/on-the-importance-of-s-t-a-l-k-e-r/

[BloodBird]

Hopefull scenario - CCP hire them and put them to work helping to make DUST a shining success story.

Guess it's horribly unlikely though.

[Ulphus]

I'm sad GSC are shutting down.

Stalker was the game I played  before I met EVE. I remember the first time I encountered ghosts in the game and I literally jumped out of my chair. Matariki laughed at me, and then complained that all my twitching during gameplay was shaking the shared computer desk. I finished the game (one of the real endings), and then went back and finished it again trying to find the false endings.

It was so goddam pretty. I remember sitting staring at the mist rising over the valleys as the sun came up, until a dog pack ran up and killed me.

Then I modded it, Modded it to heck. I made it so that a center of mass shot from a rifle would take most people down in one shot. I stole from mods liberally. I set one version up so that all the bandits had AK47s instead of MP5s - that lead to an exciting first few fights, until I recovered an AK47 myself that wasn't rusted all to shit.

My favourite mod was probably the AMK 1.4 mod, put out by a bunch of russians - it added in Blowouts again, and anomalies moved during blowouts, and you didn't start with an anomaly detector.

Then I discovered things that were in the original, but masked by their anomaly detector. When you get close to most anomalies, there is a bass hum that puts the hair on the back of my neck on end. Walking through that landscape (familiar after quite a few play-throughs) and knowing the anomalies had moved, and then getting that visceral feeling of dread just before walking into a trap was like playing the game anew. Every time the wind came past and blew the grass around made me check to see if it was an anomaly, or just the wind. Fantastic.

It was buggy. They patched it a lot. But the atmosphere was the best/creepiest in any game I'd played before or since.

Stalker 2 (Clearskies) had a much better set of mechanics, but the atmosphere just wasn't the same. I don't know if that was the game, or me.

Stalker 3 (COP), which I had to import privately (because they didn't apply to get a rating here, which meant it couldn't be imported for sale) had slightly better atmosphere than Clearskies, but the world was slightly less dense, and they tried to put a bit more scripting and quests into it, which lost some of the specialness of the first one for me.