STALKER: shadow of chernobyl, apart from being one of the most delayed games of recent memory, was the reason behind some of the most haunting press trips of last year. Journalists were taken to Chernobyl, Ukraine, to witness the desolate ghost town, the deserted playgrounds, the slow decay and the living history.
All these things found their way into STALKER, making it a hugely atmospheric and memorable shooter. Over the long development process, the team gave some candid interviews - and when we caught up with project leader Anton Bolshakov, he was typically frank about what went right and wrong in Chernobyl...
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Check Out My Guns From the very outset we were keen on realism - realistic graphics, environments, stalkers, physics, gameplay - we had long arguments with the publisher as to what extent of realism should be preserved in the game, and had to fight for every inch. Our goal with the guns was to achieve 100 per cent realism with bullet trajectory, adjusting material-piercing qualities and so on.
We couldn't do everything ourselves, though - some source material, photos and technical info on certain guns were contributed by the community. That stuff was used as reference when we created our weapon prototypes.
Nuclear Effects From the photos and documentaries filmed at the time of the Chernobyl accident, we knew that the strong radiation could affect photos and videotape. It left a grainy kind of noise effect on it. So we started by creating the radiation filter effect on screen - when the player would enter a radiation hotbed, we copied this, making the screen greyish and noisy.
In a similar fashion, our art designers tried to imagine what the gravitational, electric, acid and all other types of anomalies could possibly look like, so that the player, after stepping inside, would realise something's wrong. The anomalies needed to be inconspicuous and alarming to the incautious player. After pestering programmers for some time, we worked out a number of cool-looking and original anomaly effects ready to enrich our spooky Zone.
Living The A-Life I really enjoy observing the non-scripted combats driven by A-life - things that just take place here and there. You can see a pack of blind dogs get in the way of a military patrol. They start fighting, and you're just passing by, an involuntary witness.
You can watch the scene, or you can sneakily take advantage, and use the distraction to get closer to the military while they are killing the dogs. Attack them from cover, and get some easy loot. When you realise that the game actually creates these situations without any preliminary planning of the designers, it really blows your mind off. Our A-life system is unique for shooters, and we see lots of potential here. All this is just the beginning.
Favourite BITs My personal favourites are Escape and Pripyat. Escape is very cool to immerse the player into the Zone and the stalker community - the first fights against bandits and bribing the military are simply unforgettable. I love Pripyat for the fact that it turned out pretty realistic-looking.
It reminds me of the trips made into the exclusion zone - all the rubble, the Ferris wheel, derelict buildings, ruined facilities, barren streets overgrown with trees and bushes - it's a striking image to remember.
The CUTTING-Room Floor Largely all the monsters and anomalies got in. We had to do a bit of cutting with what either didn't fit well or was too complex to implement. For example, Burer got cut due to a problem of colliding with certain geometry; in the underground where he 'lives', the geometry is pretty complex, and he didn't pass all the areas very well. Also, marketing suggested that we take our rat monsters out - it seems rats are not very well liked in the US.
One interesting item we have in our original design document is called 'gravi-glove' - when equipped, it was supposed to drag physical objects around to your hand and let you throw them at targets. However, after Half-Life 2 was the first to announce a similar weapon, we decided to cut that to avoid possible similarities. One of the anomalies cut out is dubbed 'deadly flying spikes' - accumulated in one place, they would instantly whiz to pierce the victim. There were a few bits and pieces left out, but nothing really major.
Making A Racket Most of the time when you play against NPCs, you can still see from the way they react that it's not a human player you're fighting. Occasionally, though, the AI in our game made our jaws drop, when the character acted so like a human that it was both eerie and awe-inspiring. It would be in the heat of a fight between two rival factions - one side is taking the upper hand, and there's just one enemy left alive.
Some NPC would rush forward, shouting, 'Let me get him!' He'd fire point-blank at the enemy, see how the body is falling down, put another bullet into him to be on the safe side, then walk away saying something like, 'That's what you deserve, rascal.' We laughed so much, and wondered how the hell the AI programmer makes them do that kind of thing. They can feel like real people playing the game.
Lost Zones In terms of levels, Dead City got cut out, Generators was ultimately combined with Station 2 and we got rid of a driving level. From the outset, STALKER was built in a pretty non-standard way - geometry was modelled first, then the gameplay designers would consider what to place around it. As a result, some locations looked great, but at the gameplay-creation stage we had to sacrifice them.
Obviously that's not the most efficient method of game-building, and we do things rather differently now. First off, we create the geometry primitives and fiddle around with those, then we think up the gameplay, and only after we've done that is the complex geometry produced. There's nothing innovative about this, really; it's just the right way to do things - it comes with experience.
Inspirations The cinema gave us a big push. We all love science-fiction, mystic stuff. The very concept of the game is to make an alternative history, but set in the near future - a man-made calamity, the future. Without stepping back from reality, we tried to envisage a 'what if' scenario. We imagined real people, animals, what kind of abilities could they adopt. Afterwards, it was the very world and characters which defined the scenes.
Multiple Endings This idea is related to the fact that a role-playing game is not necessarily about going up levels - we provide the possibility of playing a certain role, which is a more classic understanding of what a role-playing game is. The game is realistic, so if the player couldn't jump at the start of the game, he won't be jumping on top of skyscrapers at the end. The role-playing-game aspect of STALKER is all about the world providing choice and the player making decisions.
Having a number of possible endings reflects the fact that the world reacts to your decisions. Again, this is just the first step. It's all about a living and breathing world, and this is the direction we consider the most promising and interesting to evolve into.
The fact that the endings were cryptic was driven by the fact that we didn't want the Zone story to end in the first game. So we decided not to reveal what the actions of the player would ultimately lead to.
