14 DAY TRIAL // With the STALKER series no longer under development, some of the team having worked on the post-apocalyptic shooter has turned to the multiplayer, free-to-play model to create their next game, Survarium, but the decision was not an easy one.
Ruslan Didenko, who is the project manager at Vostok Games working on Survarium, has told Gamasutra that, “It was a tough decision to make. After the shutdown of GSC, our team had a choice: whether to scatter around other companies or stick together and try to attract funding to keep the development going.”
He added, “Those games take a long time, cost a lot, and leave a lot of revenue in the pockets of publishers. What we realized is that while we had been preoccupied with delivering single-player titles one by one, the world changed, and we have to change too. Therefore, we decided to take a dramatic step and switch to online.”
The decisions that shaped the current form of Survarium were made while the team at Vostok Games was looking for funding and realized that they would not be able to secure the resources needed to create something on the scale of STALKER.
Survarium will use the same core concepts and will allow players to explore a world that was affected by an unspecified cataclysm, getting the resources they need to survive and then thrive.
Gamers will be able to choose from a range of classes and the developers suggest that much of the role-playing elements seen in STALKER will be ported over.
Survarium is seen as a spiritual success, which means that the development team will take a number of liberties when it comes to the actual mechanics of the game, making it easier for new players to get in and creating the elements required to support microtransactions.
The game is currently set to arrive on the PC during 2013.