Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl isn't the mind-bending prospect it once was, but that’s only because we have it so good
Oct. 18, 2024The emergent has become the everyday, and shooters are all the better for it
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No record exists of the Stalker preview I first read in a copy of PC Gamer magazine over 20 years ago. So I’ll tell it to you like a tall tale from the exclusion zone, shared over a bottle of vodka. They say there’s a shooter where no mission plays the same way twice. Where, on the first try, you might battle a gang of bandits in an old factory for ownership of an artifact. And on the second, you might arrive to find those same bandits already dead, mauled to death by a pack of mutated dogs.
It’s hard to overstate how anomalous and glowing an artifact Stalker was at that time. The open-world FPS simply did not exist - although the wide outdoor levels of Crytek’s South Pacific sandbox, Far Cry, made clear it was coming. The way designers would navigate that new scale was still to be determined, and Stalker suggested the genre would become newly dynamic. The shooters of the ’90s had made us the heroes of largely predetermined adventures. But in the Zone, we were just another body that was just a little too warm for the corpse-truck. And if we didn’t seize the opportunities awaiting in Chornobyl’s deep and dangerous heart, somebody else would.
Stalker 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl – The Big PreviewIn the run-up to Stalker’s return, GamesRadar+ is answering your every question about The Zone. For hands-on impressions, interviews, and everything in between, check out ourStalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl Big Preview hub.
Finders keepers
It’s been 17 years since Shadow of Chornobyl launched, so check out ourStalker 2 hands-on previewto see how The Zone is faring today
Stalker, meanwhile, had entered development hell. GSC’s grand plans were butting up against the hard reality of implementation. The game’s publisher, THQ, sent a Californian fixer named Dean Sharpe to wrangle Stalker towards release. The team scrapped vehicles, ditched zombies, and simplified the AI it had been publicly showing off for years. For his efforts, Sharpe received death threats from the game’s nascent community – but evidently wasn’t put off Ukraine for good. Today, he’s CEO of Metro developer 4A Games.
It’s testament to how far Stalker was ahead of its time that, even after four years of delay and heavy compromise, it still played a little like the future. “Despite the epic wait and despite the amount of scissoring that’s obviously gone on,”Will Porter wrote in GamesRadar+’s review, “we’ve still ended up with an excellent shooter.”
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“It was at its best when you made a plan, and your plan went horribly wrong,” said Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson in the cover feature of this month’s Edge. “You would be throwing a molotov at an enemy and accidentally hit a bear instead, and then a burning bear would kill your friend.” It’s a philosophy he’s now applying to his new game, Revenge of the Savage Planet. “The joy of the game is making a plan, the plan failing, but you not dying and getting through. It’s gonna be funny and chaotic.”
“The first four or so hours of the game were a baffling thrillride,” she wrote. “It seemed no matter what I did every mission descended into an all-out brawl, with stealth attempts scuppered by mongoose attacks, enemy tank patrols popping up with alarming regularity, and in a weird bit of emergent narrative, I saw more NPC horses and dogs hit by cars than I care to remember.”
In retrospect, one of the defining traits of Stalker is its friction. Now that Ubisoft has long since smoothed out the jamming guns and malaria outbreaks that characterized early Far Cry, there’s plenty of room for a genremate that grates and punishes in just the right ways. If Fallout can keep selling us Americana, andAtomfalltaps into British folk horror, then the world ought to get to play in the Ukrainian post-apocalypse too. Even if those mutated dogs are no longer quite as disruptive as they once sounded.
Jeremy is a freelance editor and writer with a decade’s experience across publications like GamesRadar, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and Edge. He specialises in features and interviews, and gets a special kick out of meeting the word count exactly. He missed the golden age of magazines, so is making up for lost time while maintaining a healthy modern guilt over the paper waste. Jeremy was once told off by the director of Dishonored 2 for not having played Dishonored 2, an error he has since corrected.
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