First S.T.A.L.K.E.R. hamstrung by over-ambition

By Robert Purchese Published 16 June, 2008

That and inexperience, says Oleg Yavorsky.

GSC Game World has tried to explain why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. took so long to make, admitting that inexperience and over-ambition were to blame.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. took six years, and GSC's Oleg Yavorsky sees the funny side of this. "Children are born and start going to school within that period," he told Eurogamer in today's interview. "Our big problem was we were developing our technology and the game simultaneously, which for us was a lot of headaches.

"When we wanted to try out a gameplay element, it wouldn't work because there would be some problem with the engine, which was still not finished. Then there was just this ambitious concept: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was to be the ultimate game, with a mix of pretty much everything - shooter, RPG, survival horror, driving.

"We were inexperienced and took on too much," added Yavorsky. Obviously there's a bit more experience floating around now though, because prequel Clear Sky has only taken a year and a half and will be out on 29th August.

But GSC may not be out of the trenches just yet, with console development providing the next hurdle. "We've just started to figure things out with the consoles," admitted Yavorsky. "The technology's pretty much new to us. We'd love to port Clear Sky onto consoles, but currently there are a lot of technical questions.

"We'll see if our technology runs on consoles and go from there."

Head to our preview of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. prequel Clear Sky to see how it's shaping up.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (26) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Laika #1 4 years ago

    It was also hamstrung by being a buggy mess.

  • ChthonicEcho #2 4 years ago

    Incoherent story, bugs, clunky combat, zero memorable characters... It had the potential, though. I might give Clear Sky a try.

    Btw, I've noticed EG always reposts what is said in an interview as a news post(s). Is that really unnecessary? Those that have ADHD and can't read the interview should be taken care of by natural selection.

  • Eraysor #3 4 years ago

    EG, stop posting interview content in their own news articles. For a regular reader like myself it is really irritating. Recently you have spun one interview into about five news articles which is pretty pointless.

  • kcorb #4 4 years ago

    Incoherent story, bugs, clunky combat, zero memorable characters
    Did you even play the game? The story is great, the combat is so far from clunky and the characters are the driving force to the whole beginning of the game up until the end.

  • djed #5 4 years ago

    Did you even play the game? The story is great, the combat is so far from clunky and the characters are the driving force to the whole beginning of the game up until the end.

    Did you even play the game? The story is so-so, the combat is pretty average and the characters, while interesting, are ultimately a bit shallow.

  • magicpanda #6 4 years ago

    One of the best games I've ever played, had its faults but the atmosphere it creates is absolutely second to none.

  • AtomicBanana #7 4 years ago

    So buggy, I found the whole thing comical and broken, nothing more. I'm sure that's not the case with a fully patched version these days, but it left a bad taste and I've just got no interest in going back and trying it again. Saying that, it was always obviously far too ambitious - far too much talk of high concept rather than how it was actually going to play. Then on release they obviously just threw all this stuff together in an attempt to get something that was playable, and nothing like the original concept.
    Edited by 1 at 16/06/08 @ 16:45

  • kangarootoo #8 4 years ago

    I rather like it when people have an honest and humble approach to this sort of thing. "We kind of got a few things wrong, but we learned a lot". Nice to hear devs saying that from time to time.

    I thought Stalker was great, yes it was buggy and yes it has a few flaws, but I think it realised enough of its ambition to really draw players in. You can't please everyone, but for the gamers who were likely the target audience, I think the majority of us were pretty pleased with the end product.


    ...and at the risk of diverting this thread still further (and feeling bad for telling my grandmother to suck eggs), I would also like to add my 2p to the growing pile that represents those of us who object to article referencing tiny snippets of other existing and equally current articles. If someone has such a short attention span that they need directing to the INDIVIDUAL SENTENCES within a paragraph, they are probably a little too young to be using a PC unsupervised and so should ask their parent or guardian for guidance. I also recall that interview last week that ended up spawning 3 more "Same bloke also said this" type news 'articles', and it was just silly.

  • monkie_king #9 4 years ago

    Gives them the opportunity for more linkage though. Much more likely to get onto Digg with an article headlined "Kojima says MGS4 would be better on 360" rather than "Kojima talks to EG about MGS and the future".

    Don't begrudge them the hits, it's easy enough to avoid these interview-extract stories. It also allows the comment threads to focus on individual areas of interest that spring from the interview, like this one.

  • stoopidgreg #10 4 years ago

    "EG, stop posting interview content in their own news articles."

    my sentiments exactly

  • Wyrm #11 4 years ago

    And in other news, the sky is blue...

  • Sneerk #12 4 years ago

    Wyrm:
    [Strelok]No.. it is Clear.[/Strelok]

  • Wyrm #13 4 years ago

    Yep, it's clear because I had to turn all the effects right down to get a decent framerate on an 8800GT, 2Gb Ram and Core 2 Duo 6600.

  • mkreku #14 4 years ago

    And I'm running it with everything on max (including dynamic shadows but only 1280x1024 res) on the exact same setup except for a X1950XTX instead of the 8800GT.. What's your point?

  • Wyrm #15 4 years ago

    To be fair, it's hard for me to comment on how the game runs on other peoples PCs.

    I'm on Vista 64 if that makes any difference, but then I can run Mass Effect and Assassins Creed with everything on full and AA so why should Stalker make such as fuss? I wish I could get it to run properly as the idea of the game excites me.
    Edited by 1 at 16/06/08 @ 23:57

  • Nithron #16 4 years ago

    @Wyrm: Try the float32 mod, which apparently replaces the lighting engine with something a lot more optimized, giving you better performance.

    I've not tried it myself, because it runs fine for me, but give it a go

  • RazorObsession #17 4 years ago

    if it translates to consoles, then consider me interested.

  • spongebob #18 4 years ago

    EG, stop posting interview content in their own news articles. For a regular reader like myself it is really irritating. Recently you have spun one interview into about five news articles which is pretty pointless.

    I find these news posts working great. I don't always have the time or interest to read whole interviews so a concise news text suits me fine. Don't stop posting these news, EG.

  • Laika #19 4 years ago

    Re: Earlier post about ADHD, spongebob.

  • spongebob #20 4 years ago

    Yeah, people have ADHD, so what? :)

  • kangarootoo #21 4 years ago

    @spongebob

    Maybe EG should start including pictures too, eh?...... oh

  • Laika #22 4 years ago

    ADHD is an obvious exaggeration, spongebob, no-ones actually implying...

    You get the point.

  • des #23 4 years ago

    future
    Edited by 1 at 17/06/08 @ 11:14

  • FooAtari #24 4 years ago

    I should you really install this again and play it.

    I have a huge pile of PC games to play. I seem to have little time to play games these days so I've just sold the 360 and am about to shift the Wii too. I'm only keeping the PS3 as it makes a pretty good media device. Hopefully now I can get through the games I have sitting here for the PC.

  • Ryuken #25 4 years ago

    "Incoherent story, bugs, clunky combat, zero memorable characters... "

    To each his own but... I was more interested in Strelok's adventures than anything HLČ has ever offered me in its prefabricated, cookie-cutter passive 'interactive' cutscene ways, haven't seen any gamebreaking bugs in 1.004 yet (that's when I started playing it) but there are some odd things with some endlessly respawning quests/enemies idd. The combat was more than decent, period. The only thing you can blame the AI for is not being able to throw 'nades back (will be fixed in Clear Sky apparently) but they were fine and nasty for the rest. I'd even say STALKER had the best weaponfeel of the whole 2007 shooter galore, and that is a great achievement with so many weapons in the game. And if you can't bring up the same camaraderie as the other STALKERs in the game then you should be asking yourself how you were playing it, as another linear "let's get to the end asap" fps or as a game where you can loose yourself in very easily.

    It's flawed genius, with emphasis on 'genius' though.

  • Salt_The_Fries #26 4 years ago

    "It was also hamstrung by being a buggy mess."

    ^ I totally agree, I got stuck in some moments, because i.e. a character was blocking the doors from the other side, and there was no way of getting in to that particular location anymore. I had also some bugs in quests, even when I completed some objective, the game didn't think so. Plus you couldn't have joined any faction, but they fixed that with later patches, but you had to start the game from the beginning to do so.