WMG / S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The next S.T.A.L.K.E.R game will have Strider from Call of Pripyat as the Player Character

With Strelok now having left the Zone his story has been pretty much wrapped up, but the ending monologue for COP implies that Strider and his fellow Ex monolith fighters still have a mission of their own, the next game will have you playing as Strider, exploring more of the ruined city to reveal Monoliths real purpose.

• Jossed. There's no "next game".
  • Un-jossed. The trailer for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has landed.
• He does appear in Southern Comfort, though.

Aliens may be responsible for the Zone after all

Ok so the end of Shadow of Chernobyl tells us that C-Consciousness were the ones responsible for the anomalies and the 2nd incident, and that the alien interference is just a cover for this. But in Call of Pripyat there are a few hints that C-Consciousness may not have been in total control as was previously thought, for example:

• The Zone is still active despite the fact that Strelok kills them all, in fact, it seems to become more unstable afterwards.
  • Except after the creation of the Zone, C-Consciousness switched over to trying to contain the Zone.
• Monolith seem to be getting orders from somebody through their receivers, but their original masters are all dead. More intriguing is the fact that they manage to give the military a run for its money, organising the initial ambush at the hospital and later during the evacuation, whoever is giving them orders seems well versed in military strategy, or can see more than others.
  • It is possible but some members of the original project are alive, or further that their consciousness is now within the noosphere and uses the antennas to communicate. As for the Monolith forces being being such a problem for the military: It is the Ukrainian military which is not known for being up to date or well equipped. The soldiers they are attacking are primarily pilots of helicopters, they have very basic combat training with only a couple of soldiers for possible escort. Any sort of ambush is a dangerous situation regardless of the composition of the enemy, add in that the enemy in that case had superior gear and numbers of course lead to them being curb stomped.
  • At least a few C-Consciousness members had to have survived. During one of the endings of Shadow of Chernobyl, You can choose to join the group and fight the zone, upon which Strelok is placed in one of the stasis tubes and someone attaches several sensors to his head. So at least a few of the original scientists remain.
• The rumours of the UFO over Yanov, this gets mentioned a few times and may have been the UAV but it's never really resolved.
  • Actually, north of the Ash Heap anomaly are the crashed remains of a UAV that starts a quest chain for some Strelok based story and gaining some decent gear.
  • There are WMGs in some Russian forums claiming that the UAV is NATO-made or Russia-made. So imagine an open war inside the Zone.
• As for who the aliens are...
  • The Combine.
    • Gordon Freeman's dead, so we're screwed.
    • Not necessarily. I mean, we've got Strelok, and the rest of the veterans.
    • And Noah!
    • Not to mention Degtyarev. And all of Duty. And Freedom And the Bandits.
• Read the books to find out.
  • The game takes inspiration from the books but is not based on them. It is found out in the game that The Zone is man made.
    • The game takes inspiration from one book, "Roadside Picnic", but there are lots of books which are based on the game... But all of them are non-canon, I think.
    • Semi-cannon at best, since a lot of the books in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series were based of earlier versions of the game's script. And the Roadside Picnic doesn't actually answer the question "Was it aliens". The only "proof" of zone alien origin is the Pillman's radiant, which only identifies a direction in the sky from where whatever created zones came from, which while pointing at extraterrestrial origin of them, doesn't preclude it from being an unknown natural phenomenon.

The bandits at the factory/lab are blind due to the radiation in the area

Seriously, there has to be an explanation for why the ones there are noticeably stupider than every other NPC in the game.

The game takes place in the Half-Life universe

The SEVA Suit shares a voice with the HEV suit and "Gordon Freeman" appears. This Gordon appears to be older, and the Half Life PC should be in stasis in 2012, so I conclude that this "Gordon Freeman" is in-fact Gordon Freeman Senior. The Combine invasion will happen latter.

• Alternately, it's already happening, and the Zone is just the first manifestation - the resonance cascade at Black Mesa may have somehow affected the C-Consciousness's experiments at Chernobyl.

The guy who rescues Marked One at the start of So C will appear in Stalker 2.

• Jossed, with Stalker 2 being cancelled.
  • and un-jossed again with new trailer.

The mercenaries have been hired to retrieve the data and material from the C-Consciousness's experiments into the noosphere.

They spend most of Call of Pripyat watching the scientists or preparing for their expedition into the center of the Zone, and when they do mount the expedition, they really go all-out - without player intervention they'll even outnumber the surviving Monolith forces by the end of the game, and the mercs will effectively take over the city for themselves. Although there's a significant number of anomalies there, and the lack of looters means that there's still some useful stuff to be scavenged from the buildings, neither one of those things is really a good reason to mount a full-scale invasion. The data, on the other hand, might be just what their mysterious benefactor is looking for.

• This actually makes a lot of sense. In Shadow of Chernobyl, their sole organized effort is trying to get Kruglov's data on the nature of the Zone. Looks like they just moved farther in when Strelok took down the barriers...

Nitro from Call of Pripyat actually is Vladimir Putin.

STALKER takes place in an alternate timeline from our own, we already know. Nitro doesn't merely look like Putin, he actually is him due to different life choices he'd made in that universe. The Point of Divergence between the STALKER universe and ours seems to be sometime after the 1986 disaster, when a group of scientists moved into the Zone in order to undertake dangerous experiments in psychic powers in secret. In our reality, Putin left the KGB to enter politics in 1991, plenty of time for his mind to be changed. In the game, Nitro is one of the few technicians who knows how to open the blackbox of a UAV, possibly hinting at a background in military intelligence. And frankly, they're visually identical to one another.

• Except Nitro is seen smiling. Putin? Not so much.
  • You haven't seen Putin snugging his dog◊
  • Unless you regularly see Putin outside of official setting, you wouldn't know, a polititian smiling in official setting would be considered frivolous in Russia