Log in member
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl turns one year old exactly tomorrow and with that in mind we caught up with Yegor in Lisbon to learn all about what went into designing the different navigation features to explore The Zone in first person.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is day one at the DevGAMM in Lisbon and I'm here joined by Yegor, who tomorrow has a very interesting panel about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and you're going to be talking about navigating the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and I think it's a very interesting topic because you're going to be talking about the tools you guys use, so we can do this as a rehearsal of your panel."
"So which would you say, before we get deep into the smaller topics, which would you say will be the main message you're going to convey to the developers gathered in front of you on stage?
Well, I think that the main idea is to show the tools that we use and why did we use them, and for people and for developers to understand if this is something they need themselves, and if they do, how they can use them effectively."
"You said something very interesting, if the tools you used are usable or can be applied to other games, because you know the Zone is a very special world, it's a very interesting and different sort of map, so would you say that the things you, the concept, the ideas you applied to navigation can be exported to other games or even genres?
Yeah, of course, the tools I'm talking about are very common things like compass and map, so this is very common to any open world game, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is very open world, and I think that more and more games are trying to be bigger ones or open world ones, so they are very transferable."
"Of course, we have some specific things that are usable in our context more, but otherwise I think it's very reusable everywhere.
And I'm also interested in the evolution, I think you mentioned in the description of your panel that you're gonna be talking about the changes to some of those tools, so can you give me a couple of examples of things that you, perhaps with the feedback by players or by playtesting yourselves, you decided to tweak and how you took them?
Well, I actually explored what was the navigational tools before, because there is like 15 years gap between previous S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, so we couldn't do the same thing because it didn't make much sense, we needed to up our game and be like, see at best practices from the games that have been successful recently, and to do similar things, but with a twist, so it makes sense for us."
"And a specific tool that you changed, and if you can tell me some of those changes, for example with the compass, we did that in order to click with the audience?
So, basically what we had in the previous S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games is the minimap, which was always present on the screen, and it has many other little things that were incorporated, like sometimes it's a noise or a visual meter that determines if someone sees you, or how much noise you make when you move, so if you want to go stealth, then this is something to look at, and some of these things we have reused and implemented in compass, some things we have avoided because they made no sense, for example, in previous games you couldn't fit all the map in minimap, you have just a little sector, and if your current goal was located outside of this sector, then a little arrow appeared, just like in old GTA games, and it wasn't required anymore in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, so what we did, we just didn't do that, we used something that you could see in Skyrim or Oblivion, I would say that's more in Oblivion, like you have the horizontal compass, and you have specific markers that mean main quests, or maybe some NPC you're following, so you have that and you don't need these helpers anymore, and we also have threat indicator, which lights up when the fight starts, and in minimap in previous games we had a similar thing, so we just evaluated what makes sense in the compass, and what we want to keep, sometimes it was a little bit of a legacy, and not super required, but we felt that this is a bridge between the old and new, so the players who played the original games would feel the connection, so these kind of things."
"And of all the navigation features that you just mentioned, which would you say you are the most proud of, or something that you think that you guys did differently or especially that we cannot find in other games?
I'm mostly proud about the map, it's a very big and complex feature, and I will tell more within the talk, and one of the things that I really liked is there are different zoom levels in the map, so you can have different amount of details, and we have locations which are called hubs, it's where basically factions reside, they belong to factions, and there you can have some services, like medic, technician, whatever, you can sleep there, you can have your stash there, and basically map has a lot of markers that mark locations, stashes, what not, and if everything would be present at the same time, it would really clutter the map, and hubs specifically, they work in a way that depending on the zoom level, you either see all the contents within the hub, or you don't, but there is a way to preview what's there, so on the zoom level, when you see most of the map, you can just hover over the hub, and you can see a tooltip, and the tooltip will have all the extra details, like what's the faction there, what is their attitude to you, are they friendly or not, what are the NPCs you can find there, so you can have all this information right away, and if you zoom in, you will see those markers present on the specific spots where the NPCs are, so this seems like a really interesting thing to have, and declutter the map in a way."
"Yeah, it's very complex and very thorough, right?
So, now on the contrary, looking back at the game that released, If Anchor Red is about to turn one year old, is there anything that you would have changed after playing the final game, or that based on players' feedback in this full year, you guys thought, well, this could have been tweaked or differently when we released?
This is actually interesting, because the other day we had an argument regarding a specific thing, and I wouldn't say which one, but the thing was that the argument to not do anything with it was that players already got used to it, and if we will make it as we intended, it may cause chaos, and we may have negative feedback based on these changes, even though we intended to do this in other ways, and the other aspect is some of the features that we didn't have enough time to implement, and one of those is, for example, I was just talking about decluttering the map, and there is a very basic feature when you can filter the markers on the map based on their type, like you see those things in many games, and we just didn't have enough time to do that, so it's really helpful, it's kind of simple in its design, but it still requires time, so I'm really hopeful that eventually we will be able to do that."
"Yeah, perhaps you can save those for Stalker 3, if that ever comes out, but let me ask you about your background, because of course you worked as a world builder and game designer and navigation designer, we could say, for this game, but before that you went from indie to AAA to publishing as well, so how do you feel about this background, how it shaped you becoming what you are right now?
So I started in IT with being a content manager, then I worked in PR manager, and then suddenly I started having opportunities in the video game industry, thankfully I had a fan site dedicated to Fallout for years, and this opened a few doors for me, so this is how I got involved in more, like, I was led into the studio environment, I would say, I was closer to making games than talking about games, so after that I have been a community manager for a while, and then at some point I had an option to either switch to game design or being a producer, and suddenly I realized that game design is something that is very close to what I would like to do, so I just switched to that, and this brought me through mobile sector, outsource, and finally AAA, somewhere where I always wanted to be."
"And you are there right now.
Alright, I think that's enough, thank you so much for your time, Yegor, good luck with your panel tomorrow.
Thank you for having me."
