Their reputation centered around their art direction and innovation in shooter design, not the endless development cycle of STALKER’s first installment. Development on Call of Pripyat, the third title in the STALKER franchise, was underway it would ship on schedule. No one – least of all its employees – would have suspected it was already on a collision course with oblivion.
Welcome back, to a place you’ve never quite been.īy 2009, GSC Game World was doing well. And throughout it all rumors persisted, about the STALKER that they’d intended. Released after six years of troubled development, it was a heavily redacted copy of the original vision – more than 50% of the game was cut – but even in its mangled state it was a landmark in the “future of shooters is RPGs” concept. To this day nothing has quite replicated the feel of your first time. That was the year THQ and GSC Game World finally released the absurdly ambitious open-world shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It surprised us by being phenomenal.