14 DAY TRIAL // A number of former developers from GSG Game World have announced that they are working on a new game called Survarium and that work on STALKER 2 is now frozen because the team lacks the required resources.
Survarium is being developed by a newly formed studio called Vostok Games, which is based in Kiev, and will use the free-to-play structure.
The MMO first-person shooter is set in the near future and puts players in the middle of various areas of Earth that have been affected by a large scale ecological catastrophe, although the team is not talking about its exact causes.
Civilization is gone, with supplies of electricity and gas cut off, and towns are isolated from each other by vegetation and a number of strange new animals and plants attacking human settlements.
Many of the core features of the STALKER series will be present in Survarium, including a focus on customization and a survival approach to most situations.
Ruslan Didenko, who is the project leader working on Survarium, stated, “The concept of Survarium is a next evolution step for the idea of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. we’ve been working on for the last ten years. Survarium will go way further forcing mankind to fight for survival not only within the closed area of Chernobyl zone, but also far beyond.”
He added, “Technology versus nature, rational versus mystical. Such a confrontation enables us to take a new look at the current happenings in our world,” said Aleksey Sytianov, lead game designer of the project. “Survarium will offer players an atmospheric world of civilization crash, filled with factions and loners, stalkers and hunters surviving in a wild anomalous environment.”
Survarium (and I do hope that this is only a development codename) is using a completely new graphics engine, called Vostok, and will be launched on the PC before the end of 2013.