Video Interview

Get the latest details on the game and its development in this exclusive interview.
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While it might not have had a development period on the scale of Prey or Duke Nukem Forever, GSC Game World has certainly taken its time to deliver S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. The press trip to see the game in Kiev has happened so many times that it's almost a tradition for journalists, but with the game now looking close to complete, THQ is adamant about an early 2007 release. Here, then, is what will hopefully be our final hands-on preview before we can jump into the finished game early next year.

The site of the world's worst nuclear accident becomes the setting of this ambitious first-person action survival game.

For the uninitiated, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. puts the player within the exclusion zone of the world's worst nuclear disaster. It doesn't model the actual area brick for brick, nor does it follow the real-life events that took place, but GSC Game World has chosen to take advantage of the mythology surrounding Chernobyl and apply a sci-fi storyline to it. Taking place in the future, the game's plot adds in a second nuclear explosion that took place in April 2006, which produced strange new energy forms at the center of the zone. With the area becoming increasingly unstable, scientists decide to investigate. But when no one returns, the exclusion zone is extended and the army comes in to patrol.

Everything seems to be under control by 2008 until mutant creatures begin to appear at the borders and security measures have to be tightened again. While Chernobyl has now become one of the most dangerous places on earth, public interest is growing and a number of people sneak past the borders to find out the truth. Those that dare to venture inside find that it was worth the risk, as the instability in the zone has produced a number of precious artefacts that prove to be valuable in the outside world. With corporations and scientific groups eager to snap up these strange relics, this group of scavengers risk their lives inside the zone to make money and soon become known as the stalkers.

As you should be able to guess by now, your role in the game is to play one of these stalkers, with most of your time spent inside the exclusion zone itself. The introduction to the game shows you, the main character, being rescued from a near-death encounter within the zone and extracted to safety in a nearby location. Waking up on a table in a fevered state, it's clear that you've recovered from a traumatic experience with no knowledge of who you are or where you are. From here, the story of the game is set up for you to explore this free-roaming environment to fulfil the role of a stalker, while also finding out who you are.

You play as a stalker, a heavily armed scavenger looking for valuable salvage in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

To explain just what it will be like to inhabit this world, project lead Anton Bolshakov walked us through a live demonstration. Using admin tools to show off the A-Life simulation system, Bolshakov set up a level close to the border and populated it with a group of stalkers. In the short term, they seemed interested in finding artefacts to sell, but in the long term, these characters displayed real-life human needs. Non-playable characters automatically communicated with each other, rested, ate food, and showed basic survival needs by killing nearby enemies. In this case, enemies are the monsters that have mutated thanks to the second explosion, but stalkers also have to contend with the army that patrols the area. Somewhere in the middle are the groups of traders and bandits, who have little interest in fighting but exist to control the movement of artefacts and their value.

In total, the ambitious A-Life engine controls more than 1,000 stalkers and monsters at any one time. Inevitably, placing that number of enemies together results in frequent combat between the two sides. Humans can be seen unloading clips into the mutants and heading for cover when they run out of ammunition, while monsters will feast on the bodies of those that don't quite manage to find safe cover. Once the numbers in either camp start to dwindle, then the A-Life engine will begin to migrate characters from other areas to restore the balance. As you'd expect, such an ambitious system is one of the reasons that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has taken so long to get to market, but if GSC is able to deliver the realism promised by the demonstration then its hard work will have paid off.

As well as implementing brand-new technology in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the developers have had time to implement a branching storyline that has seven different endings. The team talks about five of these being "false," while two of them are "true." Predictably, you'll have to put in the work to see one of the better endings, as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s open-ended, do-anything structure lets you choose how involved you want to be in the game. If you decide to take part in the secondary goals and help those in need, you'll earn one of the better finales, which the makers claim will take 40 to 60 hours to achieve. Other considerations, such as how much you trade and who you decide to kill, will also affect the game's conclusion. While you won't be able to continue the game after completion, the team expects that you will want to go back through a number of times.

While the prospect of a game set in Chernobyl is appealing enough for fans of the macabre, THQ hammered the point home by taking us on a tour of the current exclusion zone. The tour covered the deserted town of Pripryat, a look at the military installations within the exclusion zone, and a nauseating stop only 200 metres away from the exploded reactor itself. The possibility of long-term radioactive damage was apparently minimal, but the need to dodge wild boars as well as sign forms clearing THQ from any cause of death certainly didn't make us feel any safer.

You're armed mainly with weapons that you scavenge from the bodies of your enemies.

There was a purpose to this grisly form of disaster tourism, though--to see how the designers have modelled Chernobyl and turned it into a game. It hasn't been modelled exactly, but key features from Pripryat such as the eerie Ferris wheel and abandoned town hall have been used to re-create the atmosphere of the zone. While the tour guide was at pains to point out that the freaks or mutants of the game don't really inhabit the zone, it turns out that the seed of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was planted by the developer's own experiences of living in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the disaster, members of the team saw men in white coats taking Geiger-counter readings around their homes.