The Kickstarter for the Stalker "spiritual successor" Areal looked like a sure-fire train wreck after it launched, as serious questions about its legitimacy and the bona fides of the team behind it seemed almost certain to bring it down. Yet it continues to persevere, and today the former lead designer of Vostok Games' Survarium, who also worked as a designer on the original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, posted a video message confirming that he's joined the West Games development team.

Alexey Sytyanov actually hooked up with West Games as a consultant last week, but today the studio announced that he's now joined up full time as a producer. In a Kickstarter update, Sytyanov compared the negativity surrounding Areal to the early days of Stalker, when GSC Game World faced criticism for its lack of experience. "What happened was that we pushed through that and made an awesome cult hit video game series," he wrote.

Sytyanov hasn't been involved in the Survarium project for about a year, according to Vostok Games, which said he and the studio parted ways over creative differences. But his presence nonetheless brings some much-needed credibility to Areal and West Games, whose claims of being composed of the "core people" behind Stalker were called into question by Vostok and others. West Games hasn't responded to requests for comment and the whole thing still looks a little bit dicey, but it's also seems increasingly possible that much of the furor over Areal was simply the result of extremely poor communication.

Sadly, Sytyanov's video message doesn't show us anything new; it's just him talking for a few minutes and then a few shots of concept art we've already seen. Meanwhile, the Areal Kickstarter continues to slowly grind toward success: With 15 days left on the clock, it stands at just shy of $35,000 on a $50,000 goal.

The team behind the Stalker-inspired Areal said in a recent Kickstarter update that it has worked things out with Vostok Games and cleared up all the complaints against it. But a Vostok representative says that's not really what happened at all, and that it's been forced to let the matter drop because it can't actually do anything about it.

I was excited for Areal when the Kickstarter went live a couple days ago, especially since the Kickstarter claims the game is being developed by "the core people that developed the Stalker series" and that most of the West Games team is in fact "composed of former senior GSC Game World staff members." But it didn't take long for that excitement to turn to suspicion.

Vostok Games, which emerged from the ruins of GSC Game World following the cancellation of Stalker 2 and has spent the last couple of years working on Survarium, very quickly spoke out against those claims. It suggested that West Games employees had only been peripherally involved in Stalker, and also complained that the Areal Kickstarter makes extensive use of Stalker assets and video without permission or even acknowledgement. The pitch video, for instance, is full of gameplay action lifted directly from the Stalker games, but the narrator strongly implies that it's taken from Areal.



It attracted enough negative attention that West Games posted an "Addressing Vostok Games" Kickstarter update yesterday. "We have contacted Vostok Games about their supposed claim that we are fraudulent," it says. "They say that they have no relation to that claim and have since deleted the forum topic wherein a moderator accused us of being fake." In a "mini-update" posted today, it repeated the claim that the complaints are coming from "a former Stalker modder and current creator of a similar post-apocalyptic Kickstarter" who is bent on causing grief for Areal.

But Vostok Games PR Manager Joe Mullin tells PC Gamer that while Vostok has spoken to West Games, it was to protest its claim of being "core developers of Stalker" and deceptive use of promotional materials from the game. The matter has been "sorted out," he explained, but only because there's nothing else Vostok can do.

"As Vostok Games does not own the Stalker IP we can't (ourselves) take any kind of legal action. That is up to the owner of the rights, GSC," Mullin told us. "Apart from that, if Eugene Kim from West Games decides to carry on with his false claims, that is his choice. But we feel we have made it clear that the public should think twice before donating any money."

It does look very dodgy. The Kickstarter makes big promises but comes to the table with nothing but some concept art and a pile of old Stalker assets, and the $50,000 goal is suspiciously low, especially for a multi-platform next-gen release. (West Games says Areal is being developed for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U along with the PC.) And finally, there's the question of lead game designer Peter Dushynskyi, whose photo on the Kickstarter page is actually a Shutterstock image of "a young man standing on a dark background." Yet for all that, it's also enjoying some success, having raised nearly $32,000 of its goal at the time of writing.

We've reached out to West Games for further information.

Areal is a post-apocalyptic, open-world shooter that claims to be the "definitive spiritual successor to the cult hit S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series". Another claim: that its creators, West Games, are a team mostly "composed of former senior GSC Game World staff members". It's currently on Kickstarter, and it's looking for $50,000.

That's the basic starting point, but things get a lot more complicated. Vostok Games a band of former GSC Game World staff and creators of the STALKER-inspired MMO Survarium have taken umbrage to these statements, saying that West Games are fraudulently promoting themselves as core STALKER developers.



"We have contacted GSC s lawyers regarding this fraudulent claim of being the developers of Stalker and Metro Last Light," wrote Vostok's Joe Mullin on a now-deleted forum thread. "Please do all you can do ensure people know these claims are false."

Vostok marketing manager Oleg Yavorsky further expanded on their objections in a statement made to VG247.

"So that you understand, over the years of development of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and then Metro series, there have been literally hundreds of people involved in working on various bits and pieces, starting from beta-testers up to modellers responsible for certain weapon models.

"Many people came to the studio to work for a few months just for the sake of adding 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R. development' to their portfolio. Frequently they claimed afterwards to be the core developers behind the game (you wouldn t know anyway, right?).

"Yet, my biggest concern is that West Games are using the footage and assets of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and representing them as their own, which is not only illegal, but simply just not right. I guess it s all made for the sake of getting extra publicity (which unfortunately works), but guys on Kickstarter should probably pay attention."

West Games have published their own statement. In a Kickstarter update, founder Eugene Kim says:

"As most of you know, a studio called GSC game world existed until 2011 and they were responsible for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. After GSC dissolved, 2 new studios formed that consisted of former S.T.AL.K.E.R. employees: Vostok Games and 4A games. In 2013, a new company formed called West games, which consists of many former senior staff members from the now dissolved GSC Game World.

"Since then we've expanded (check out the Our Core Team section) and have been working on a project that you all know as Areal. Areal is based on a book of the same name written by Tarmashev (tarmashev.com). And now we're at present day and handling the launch of our Kickstarter (Ievgeniia and our PR guys have been a big help with that)."

"Now that our mini history lesson is out of the way, we can move on to other things! Regarding in-game footage, we have worked on various engines to thoroughly examine as well as learn about how different technologies and resources work. This development process is what we tried to convey in our trailer. Doing this allows us to maximize frame-rate and graphical fidelity in our game."

It's a complicated issue. Some of the concept art on the Kickstarter page appears to be from members of the West Games team, but was created specifically for STALKER. That makes it tricky to discern what the legal ramifications of their use might be.

More than that though, West Games aren't exactly clear about the footage shown in their Kickstarter video. Footage from STALKER is shown, but isn't clearly labelled as such. And much of what the team show is now suggested to be past work on "various engines". While it's not unusual for developers to turn to Kickstarter in the concept stage, it's in their interest to be honest with the people who plan to support them.

Like a lot of you (I'm guessing), I've never even tried the multiplayer modes in the terrific Stalker series, but it's good to know that I'll be able to if I ever get the itch. GSC Gameworld's post-apocalyptic horror shooter games are the latest to be rescued from GameSpy oblivion, via automagical Steam patches, or if you don't own the games on Steam, one equally magical manual multi-patch for all three games. This will switch the multiplayer servers over from GameSpy to GSC Gameworld's own, slightly less risky ones (it's not entirely clear who's running them, as GSC was dissolved in 2011).

If you've accrued an impressive set of statistics in Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky or Call of Pripyat, those won't be saved, but if the post-apocalypse (and more destructively, the decline of GameSpy) has taught us anything, it's that nothing lasts forever, not even your kill-death ratio.

Previously on GameSpyWatch: Dawn of War, Battlefield 2/1942, Halo: Combat Evolved, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and various Civs and Borderlandses' multiplayer modes have all been saved. Crysis and Crysis 2's multiplayer shenanigans have not.

Have a read of Ian Birnbaum's recent GameSpy article to see the full scale of the problem, and to meet the players fighting to keep the games alive.

The GameSpy servers were shut down yesterday.

Ta, PCGamesN.