STALKER game is still going strong?
The subject of today’s Early Access Checkup is Stay Out, an MMORPG with shooter elements very similar to the STALKER games built by a Russian developer. Who could have seen this coming?
Now the unfortunate side of Steam early access is that the landscape is littered with the bodies of dead MMOs abandoned either by the developers, the community, or both. Fortunately Stay Out doesn’t appear to be one of them and being free to play is probably one of the reasons for that. As of November 27 when this is being published, the game is still pulling in over two thousand players at its peak concurrent hours. If you track the game back to its launch, the numbers are at a stable but somewhat upward trend.
Development seems to be going on as we speak, with the developer (Mobile Technologies LLC) hosting regular streams and talking to the community. Unfortunately according to players it’s kinda hard to keep up on the news if you don’t speak Russian.
Recent reviews of the game stick at around a 69% mixed rating with much of the criticism being centered around a lack of things to do, heavy grind, and too many dogs in the starting zone, as well as bugs. One review that did catch my attention pointed to the developer’s potential involvement in review manipulation, as the website Opquests was giving out free copies of Defence to Death for people who wrote a positive review of Stay Out.
The review was posted on November 17, and if you look at the Steam graph, you’ll see that positive reviews for Stay Out seem to have spiked around that time. It’s very possible that the developer was involved with manipualting reviews, however the page from Opquests is no longer available and none of the current promotions reference giving games a positive review.
Since Stay Out is free, downloading the game to see how it is for yourself costs nothing more than your time. Keep in mind that there’s a possibility of the game’s reviews being artificially inflated however.
After two years in early access, Stay Out appears to still be actively in development. There’s a dude on YouTube who is keeping tracks on the game’s development and putting it out in English, and Stay Out should be getting a big update in the foreseeable future.
Have you played Stay Out?
MMO Fallout 