S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 announced

It's been rumoured at for a while, but the news just became official now that GSC has announced a follow-up game to the only recently released S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, which we shall now only refer to as Stalker: The annoyingly punctuated.

The game will be titled Stalker: Clear Sky and is planned to be a prequel to the original game, set just as the first stalkers enter the zone and begin investigating the area.

It'll definitely be interesting to see if the developers can learn from the mistakes of the previous game - which mainly revolved around poor translation and dodgy game endings. Some members of the bit-tech staff still refuse to go near the original, based purely on the frustrating ending of the first game.

However, since the press release mentions that;

"A group of stalkers has for the first time reached the very heart of the Zone – Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and brings about a cataclysm on the brink of a catastrophe. An immense blowout of anomalous energy changes the Zone. There are no more reliable and relatively safe roads. The entire levels vanish in the outbursts of anomalies."

We wouldn't exactly count on a perfectly translated game.

There also remains the problem of how the game levels will change considering that the game must take place in the exact same locations as were previously explored in Stalker.

GSC has obviously spent some time tweaking the graphics engine a little and making the game look better than ever, as proved by the screenshots below.

Played Stalker recently, or are you a n00b to The Zone? What ending did you get in the original game? Let us know in our discussion forum.