theyarecomingforyou wrote on Jul 31, 2012, 13:54:
I have no problem with the game going multi-platform. Even Half-Life and Half-Life 2 appeared on consoles. As always, the issue is with the quality of the PC version itself. Skyrim was a great game and much better on PC than consoles, so I have no problem with Bethesda taking over the STALKER franchise.

Let's start with the good news:

Firstly, they'll be ditching the X-Ray engine, which was horribly inefficient and simply wasn't very good. In fact if you look at Call Of Pripyat they ended up ditching most of the graphical effects in Clear Sky because they destroyed performance. Even with my system Clear Sky runs like ass of maximum / very high settings and the game it four years old and my graphics cards are several generations ahead.

Secondly, the game will be made more accessible. The inventory system was unnecessarily convoluted, the bleeding and food systems never worked well, the difficulty was incredibly spiky (encouraging repeated quick-saving), the narrative was literally just massive paragraphs of text that were needlessly rambled on, the landscape was mostly barren with the occasional well designed area, etc.

There are potential issues - like whether they can nail the atmosphere which made the series so popular - but GSC Game World was poorly managed, had poor quality control and offered poor support for their games. Bethesda might fuck it up but it's not like GSC Game World hasn't already done that itself. Still, I'd have rather seen Ubisoft pick them up and implement STALKER using the Dunia (Far Cry 2 /3) engine. Now THAT would be awesome. And before people complain about Ubisoft's DRM you have to remember that STALKER's DRM was actually much worse (it used TAGES limited activations)!