by theygamesNo Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and perhaps, by the looks of it Dying Light 2 and Payday 3, are among the greatest comeback stories in recent gaming history. The nature of modern games – live service, always online, patches, updates – means the initial release is often only the beginning of the story. A good game might go underappreciated and underplayed for years until finally bursting into life. Such is the case with Stalcraft, an MMORPG with distinct traces of Fallout and Stalker. You might not have played or even heard of it, but in the era of redemption arcs, two years after it was first released, this online survival shooter is suddenly exploding into life on Steam.
So, what is Stalcraft? Created by Exbo, it’s an MMORPG set within a nuclear exclusion zone (hence the Stalker connection) wherein you need to scrounge resources, craft and upgrade your gear, keep yourself alive, and complete quests (and that’s the Fallout part). There are PvP and PvE modes, you play it for free, and the combat is designed after faster-paced FPS games like CoD and Counter-Strike, as opposed to the slower tempo of stat-based RPGs.
Until recently, with the exception of a few spikes, Stalcraft regularly pulled in a modest but committed Steam player base of around 9,000 per day. But now that’s all changed. On Wednesday July 10, Exbo released the transformative ‘Stalcraft X’ update, which essentially soft relaunches the entire game. There are new locations, new faction storylines, new mechanics, an advanced movement system, changes to the in-game economy, improved sound effects, and a complete overhaul of the visuals.
“For more than a year, we have been preparing a major update for this memorable date, which will be a bright transitional point in the history of the project and will allow us to avoid a midlife crisis,” Exbo writes. “For the last few years, everything we’ve been working on has been done with an eye on future development – any skeleton needs a muscle brace after release. So don’t even think like we’re going to relax.”
The renamed Stalcraft X has already attracted a new record number of concurrent players on Steam, 25,307 on the day of the update’s release. In the last 24 hours, 21,000 users have logged into Stalcraft X on Steam at the same time, more than doubling the survival game’s typical playerbase. At present, Stalcraft X’s Steam rating, based on user responses posted in the last 30 days, is ‘mostly positive.’ If you want to try it out for yourself, head here.
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