S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel set for Steam

By Tom Bramwell Published 25 January, 2008

Same time as retail, later this year.

GSC Game World and Valve have announced that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky will be digitally distributed exclusively through Steam when the game comes out "later this year".

That doesn't mean that there won't be a boxed version, though, because there will, but GSC has yet to announce who will be publishing it. THQ, which handled the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., seems to have run home crying.

GSC CEO Sergiy Grygorovych said the devs "chose to deliver the digital version of the game exclusively on Steam because of its proven success not only as the leading global digital distribution platform for games, but because it allows us to directly reach its integrated and active community of gamers".

Gabe Newell called GSC a "forward-thinking game maker". Our friends at Rock, Paper, Shotgun remarked that they "like to imagine people quoted in press releases winking chummily to each other when they say things like that", which is certainly more romantic than swapping emails with huge CC lists while everyone changes the wording and then 'ticks' it and someone makes a PDF.

Anyway, Clear Sky takes place one year prior to the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - a group of stalkers has reached the heart of the Zone with catastrophic results, and you have to shoot people in a very free-form manner to sort things out.

For more on why that's an exciting prospect, check in with our S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl review.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (17) Latest comment 4 years ago

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

  • Gallilee #1 4 years ago

    Any news if STALKER or Clear sky is coming to any console?

  • space_ace #2 4 years ago

    what i wanted to ask :)

  • Triggerhappytel #3 4 years ago

    ^^ thirded.

  • Nithron #4 4 years ago

    Oh fuck no!
    After paying for the entire Orange Box and not being able to play it because of the way my university's network works - and the fact that Valve just can't be arsed to add network settings to their damn program - there's no way i'm paying for it this time round

  • hiddenranbir #5 4 years ago

    Nithron I remember when I bought HL2 and I was at uni.

    My HL2 was retail, however, but still needed to unlock. Steam was blocked from the uni, of course.

    I used a proxy bypass. It's not Valve's fault. It's yours for trying to play games on a uni network. :)

  • Tomo #6 4 years ago

    Want. Summer please. In time for my nice long holiday.

  • Nithron #7 4 years ago

    Hmm... No, no, i don't think so. If i was trying to play Team Fortress 2 and it didn't work, fine, as it's an online game. But I wasn't, I was trying to play HL2, and Portal, quite conspicuously offline games, which i had paid for, but i couldn't because Valve have some paranoiac copy protection scheme that arbitrary requires me to connect to the net every time i play their games i legally acquired, just in case i stole them.

    To make matters worse it didn't even give me an error, they just got stuck at 0% updating and refused to play.

  • skillian #8 4 years ago

    Valve have some paranoiac copy protection scheme that arbitrary requires me to connect to the net every time i play their games i legally acquired, just in case i stole them.

    You don't need to connect to the net every time you play them, just once. Take your computer to a mate's/internet cafe/wherever, validate and update the games and then you can play whenever you like in offline mode.

  • lambtron #9 4 years ago

    "Any news if STALKER or Clear sky is coming to any console?"

    Supposed to be coming to 360 as they've just been made a licensed 360 dev.

  • lambtron #10 4 years ago

    I don't understand - are there actually people who don't always have their PCs connected to the web whenever they're turned on?

    How quaint. :)

  • Meho #11 4 years ago

    Anyway, the title should say 'prequel' rather than 'sequel', surely?

  • UncleLou #12 4 years ago

    Well, not really. The game itself is a sequel, the content is a prequel. It's a prequel-sequel, or a sequel-prequel. Or something. :)

  • Snooz #13 4 years ago

    I've just started playing STALKER, I'm about 10+ into the game and it's some of the best atmospheric games I've ever played.

  • mkreku #14 4 years ago

    This is one game that's a must buy for me. STALKER was easily the best shooter I've played in years. I just wish it had more of RPG features in it. It would have been so cool if you'd been able to upgrade your character and weapons more. Oh, and a little more freedom to move about wouldn't have hurt either, but that's expected from this sequel instead :)

  • ph101 #15 4 years ago

    ^ agreed. Look forward to this. But the way it isn't available exclusively on steam if it is also avail boxed, not by my definition of the word.

  • stoopidgreg #16 4 years ago

    i still haven't finished stalker, only an hour from the end i think but i have a crap suit and just keep dying from radiation :(

    can't wait for clear sky, the screenshots look lovely. new animations, models, locations, mutants, weapons...

  • Avenger1324 #17 4 years ago

    I'm cautious of GSC after STALKER as it seemed that a lot of stuff was held back to make this sequel/prequel.

    I hope this one is truly open world, as we thought Stalker would have been.