S.T.A.L.K.E.R – MMO Fallout

S.T.A.L.K.E.R is back! Well, actually STALKER is back, and that is an important distinction to make. Earlier this year we saw a Kickstarter pop up for a spiritual sequel to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R franchise called Areal, by a company made up of former developers of said franchise. It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to figure out that the trailer for the game was shot in Unity, using nearly 100% stock assets from the Unity store, and that several screenshots and pieces of concept art were taken directly from Shadows of Chernobyl.

The whole controversy just got strange from then on. Rather than address the claims, West Games began blaming their criticism on everything from western bias, the information war between Ukraine and Russia, and Forbes being sold to the Chinese. They attacked news websites covering the game, and even attempted to dox trolls. Then someone at West Games thought it would be a good idea to post a letter of congratulations and support from Vladimir Putin, and not as a joke. The campaign was suspended by Kickstarter for suspicious activities, and West Games has since disappeared off the radar.

Now the game is back as STALKER Apocalypse on World Wide Funder, a crowdfunding website that seemingly popped up out of nowhere and is currently home to a library of funding efforts, all but a small handful of which are currently sitting at 0% funding. The funding website was just registered in September of this year, and incidentally has been registered anonymously through domainsbyproxy.com.

While the funding campaign goes to great lengths to differentiate between STALKER and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, likely for legal reasons, there are repeated uses of STALKER with objects that conveniently look like periods to make the logo look like an acronym.

(Source: WWF)

Survarium is not S.T.A.L.K.E.R, let’s get that straight. It is, however, being developed by Vostok Games, a team made up of ex-S.T.A.L.K.E.R creators. Survarium is an upcoming free to play MMO shooter set in a world that has been taken over by flora. In an effort to combat the growing forest, a powerful herbicide is deployed and, you guessed it, kills the vast majority of the world’s population. As in S.T.A.L.K.E.R the world has become filled with anomalies, and players will find themselves taking on missions for one of several factions, shooting it out in this session-based multiplayer game.

So the game is closer to Crimecraft than it is Planetside, but the developers at Vostok want to make this as unique as possible. Team combat is not what you’d expect: rival teams work against one another to scavenge parts and build a device to protect themselves from a massive storm, and both teams can fail at this objective. Cooperative missions delve into the world’s artifacts. Finally, of the three modes revealed recently, free play drops players in a massive map with 30 other players to move and do as they please.

You can view the entirety of the latest developer diary below. Survarium does not yet have a release date.