S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl [PC]

A slew of developers came out for NVIDIA's Editor's Day this week, including a few guys all the way from the Ukraine who showcased STALKER.: Oblivion Lost. Oleg Yavorsky, the PR Manager at developer GSC Game World, was on-hand to give us a real-time demo of this amazing looking game.

STALKER is set in the near future, shortly after another disaster in Chernobyl. The authorities surround the area with the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Guard, and they begin to hear weird screams and rumblings coming from within. After a while, though, most of them are returned to earlier posts. Curiosity also gets the better of some people, so they sneak into the 30-kilometer area to do some good old-fashioned investigating. These people are called Stalkers, and they report back to the authorities with their findings.

The first thing that will strike you is the graphics engine. Created entirely from scratch and in-house, the X-Ray Engine is nothing short of spectacular. The indoor and outdoor environments are authentic-looking and finely detailed, even though the external maps are outrageously enormous. The development team visited Chernobyl twice, taking thousands of pictures, and approximately 60% of the game is actually a recreation of what they saw, right down to the rusted-over valves and a stadium so abandoned that trees are growing on the playing field. There are approximately eighteen "levels" that cover all 30 square kilometers of the game, and every area we were shown was breathtaking.

Oleg loaded a test level containing "death-test" dummies lined up on the top of a wall that had wooden protrusions sticking out of it like a larger-than-life slot machine. Shoot one person and the dummy goes tumbling down the protrusions in an incredibly realistic fashion. Shoot twenty of them and they crumble, falling on top of each over and bending around objects. We never saw the same thing happen twice. Another test involved rows of people just floating on nothing above you. Whip out a machine gun, take out thirty of them, and watch them crash to the ground, painfully bouncing and bumping on the ground in front of you. But wait, there's more! Now that we've littered the ground with bodies, it's time to hop in a vehicle and run them over to "test" the physics of the SUV. Oleg left the passenger door open so we good see it swinging realistically during turns. Then he ran over some of the bodies and the truck bopped and grinded as it went. The death-test dummies also reacted appropriately. He repeated this with a cement mixer-type truck, with accordingly different results. The heavier weight of the vehicle meant that it didn't bounce as much. It may be a little too soon to say this, but from what we saw, this stuff looked on par with the demos we've seen of Half-Life 2.