A Look Inside the World of Survarium

[Andy Chalk]

A Look Inside the World of Survarium

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The team behind the STALKER-inspired Survarium show off one of the game's levels and talk a bit about the technical challenges of making an online shooter.

Let's not kid ourselves: Survarium is a free-to-play, online version of STALKER. In development at Vostok Games, a Ukrainian studio formed in the wake of the collapse of GSC Game World, Survarium looks, sounds and very likely plays like STALKER, except that instead of an exclusively single-player experience, it's exclusively multiplayer.

Players will begin the game as a "scavenger," poorly armed and armored and forced to congregate in the relative safety of camps in order to survive. Assuming they survive, they'll acquire better and more powerful equipment and the skills to use them effectively, but since they can't produce that equipment themselves, bartering becomes vital. Into that mix comes the valuable "artifacts" that provide temporary boosts of various sorts. Scavengers excel at finding artifacts, which can help compensate for the fact that they aren't great fighters.

The developers talk about some of the technical aspects of the game, how they'll address issues of cheating and that sort of thing, but the video is interesting mainly for the look it provides at the game's environment. The world on display could very well be from a STALKER game. Makes me a little sad that it isn't.

The PC-exclusive Survarium [http://survarium.com/ru/] is currently expected to come out at the end of 2013.


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[The Rogue Wolf]

Firstly, I'd like to go on record as saying that Alexey Sytyanov has a truly glorious goatee.

Secondly, I'm really looking forward to this. Hopefully they can keep the classic STALKER "the environment and all it contains are against you" feel, and promote teamwork and cooperation a bit better than DayZ has so far.

 

[Saulkar]

If they can pull off an environment that gives me that STALKER feeling while building mechanics encouraging team cooperation (unlike a certain other title) then I think I will be just fine.

CAPTCHA: for sure - You got it captcha generator.

 

[Thedutchjelle]

I loved the STALKER games and I've visited the Exclusion Zone. I hope they can capture the athmosphere of those places as well as they did before, or better!
I wonder how well that athmosphere will stay alive when other players will start inhibiting it though :\

Also really wondering how this will play out. Will it be like DayZ or more like STALKER?

EDIT: The lag thing is rather worrying to me.. a high lag person can kill a low-ping person who is already around a corner..? That sound a rather.. bad?

EDIT2: Thought this game was from the same guys as STALKER, but I guess that's not the case. Misread the opening post wrong.

 

[octafish]

STALKER was always meant to be an MMO they just couldn't get it to work. I see this as returning to their original vision after having a few more years of experience to see other's successes and failures. My only concern is how micro transactions will affect the world. I'd prefer it to be like Guild Wars 2 honestly. Pay for a full priced game and have some minor cosmetic purchases available.

 

[Zagzag]

The way they were describing the levels worried me slightly, since it felt a bit too "team deathmatchy" for my tastes, but I'll have to wait and see what eventually happens before judging them.

 

[CCountZero]

If I understand this correctly, you're limited to specific weapons depending on your faction?

If that's the case, then I'm extremely worried.

 

[Skeleon]

I'm sorry. I love you guys, but I just don't care about "rounds" and "matches". If this were a proper MMORPGFPS (or whatever), I'd be all in favour of it. But like this? Nah, not really interested, unless they somehow create a continuous gameworld consisting of different levels (like STALKER was). But from earlier interviews, it sounds like that's not what they meant. On the other hand? This interview? The guy talking about artifact hunting and containers? I dunno, maybe they decided to change their approach? I would approve. And yet they talk about the "two teams" capturing places as if it were a Domination-type multiplayer map. And the artifacts sound more like temporary pick-ups like Quad damage than what they were in STALKER. I'm confused.

Also, will there finally be some women? In STALKER, none of the characters were women (unless you count the singers on the radio), which was a fault that they wanted to rectify in STALKER 2. which never happened of course. Here it'd be even weirder if no women existed since this is (from what I understand) not just a separate zone of a larger world, like the cordoned-off area around Chernobyl, but actually representing a postapocalyptic world as a whole.

By the way, apparently "scavengers" means "brodjagi". I can read the words, I just don't know them. Which might be a bit of a problem when trying to understand the language.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Don't care about your faces show the damn gameplay, can't even tell what the sodding thing will be.

 

[Andy Chalk]

STALKER was always meant to be an MMO they just couldn't get it to work.

That may be, but I think it ultimately worked better as a single-player game. I have a hard time envisioning the lonely, desolate, desperate experience of STALKER populated by the standard breed of asshat MMO players, and I agree with

"team deathmatchy"

in that I'm not interested in a conventional multiplayer experience. I hope - I mean, I really hope - that they can pull this off, but I'm concerned it'll be just another F2P shooter in a STALKER-style world.