Over the last few months, many gamers have been eagerly
awaiting the days of November 2009 when a few of the first DirectX 11 titles
could be expected to go on sale. This weekend, Ukrainian developer GSC Game World
released its third game in its survival-based FPS series. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call
of Pripyat has now been introduced to a significant portion of Europe’s gaming
audience, making its way into Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Unfortunately,
the rest of Europe and the United States will have to wait until sometime in early
Q1 2010 to get their hands on it.
Call of Pripyat is the sequel to last year’s
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
Shadow of Chernobyl and was developed on the X-Ray 1.6 engine with inherent
support for preliminary DirectX 11 API features, including hardware tessellation
and contact hardened shadows.
The events of Call of
Pripyat take place in 2012 and unfold shortly after the end of Shadow of
Chernobyl, when the government decides to hold a large-scale military
"Fairway" operation aimed to take the CNPP under control after having
discovered the open path to the Zone center. The interesting new aspect of gameplay
in Call of Pripyat lies in the fact it will feature a photorealistic exclusion
Zone. Pripyat town, Yanov railway station, Jupiter factory, Kopachi village and
a few other locations have all been recreated by their true-to-life prototypes.
The X-Ray 1.6 engine by Ukrainian
developer GSC Game World offers a satisfying variety of Screen Space Ambient
Occlusion (SSAO)
modes to choose from including High Definition AO and Horizon Based AO,
both with Motion Blur. At the same time, the Deferred Lighting effects
like Bloom, God Rays and Adaptive Tone mapping give the game a unique sense of
photorealism when compared to its predecessor and display an added depth to the
atmosphere of indoor levels in particular.
Over the past few weeks, there have already been several
benchmark
reports of the game running on DirectX 11 hardware from AMD. Today, our
friends over at PC Games Hardware have released 20 new high-resolution
screenshots of DirectX 11 gameplay. According to the site, they were all taken
at 1920x1200 with 4x MSAA and 16x AF on maximum settings with DirectX 11
enabled.
The full screenshot gallery can be found
here.