4P: How do you tell the story of STALKER? Will there be In-Game-videos, dialogues with NPCs or render-videos?
Andrey: The game will consist of a massive number of various events that will either become known to you through personal exploration or through communication with stalkers, scientists and other NPCs. There will possibly be in-game engine videos for the most crucial parts, but most of the information will come out from the communication. Every time you find out something important it will be automatically registered in the diary that you can always refer to as a refresher.
4P: What influences from RPG can you find in the game? Will there be an inventory system similar to RPGs or experience-based character-growth?
Andrey: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an action/role-playing game, where we do not provide for growing experience of your character by changing characteristics or levels. We do this pursuing the only goal - the player should work out his personal mastery and skills, rather than those of his character. We believe that changing characteristics, levels and character experience are detrimental to realism we create in the game. As far as the rest is concerned, you have it as virtually in any normal RPG - you travel the Zone, collect artefacts, weapons, reveal spots of anomalous energy, communicate and trade with characters etc. By earning money, buying new equipment and weapons the player can reveal new parts of the Zone previously inaccessible to him. I.e. those, which you won´t initially reach with a pistol and simple detector.
Speaking about characteristics, we compare the player with a soldier on a mission. Prior to the mission, he is trained for it, but once on it, he cannot improve his skills drastically as he´s preoccupied with mission accomplishment. Additionally, we believe that classic system of skills can be justified in third-person-view games, when nothing depends on the player´s actions, like in Diablo, for instance. The player can only click on opponent - then dice are cast and, basing on skills, mathematical calculations are done. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. this is the player´s mastery which grows, and not abstract skills of a model on the screen. If the player has mastered weapon peculiarities, knows weak spots of the enemies, knows equipment and Zone anomalies, has an excellent reaction and accuracy etc - he gets an appropriate result. So everything will be really dependent on the player himself here.
4P: What kind of missions must the player solve in the campaign?
Andrey: Most of the events will be initiated by the NPCs, some of the events may only occur at a certain coincidence. One of the unique things of the storyline is about the characters from the stories sent for the contest. We will transfer them to the game and preserve their tempers and attitudes. When several of them come together, things that were in the stories may happen. The player will not be able to see everything in one go. The dynamic world of the Zone is about every stalker living a life of its own. Some of the major game events or locations will remain static. The player may get involved in the events when they´re started, or in the progress or at the completion stage. Every time the picture will be different. Running through the game once will not be enough to solve a colossal number of various riddles. So, I can´t say the player gets the fullest picture even after he played it through 10 times, but that should make the game more appealing and mysterious, it seems.
