Team LURK is moving onto a bigger and better project - but we're not going too far!

Posted by Panzerdraco on Sep 28th, 2014

Firstly, allow us to get this out of the way: L.U.R.K. mod is no longer in active development, and we're launching a new project on Unreal Engine 4.

For a long time now, a lot of you have been asking about L.U.R.K. 2.0. Truth be told, we were enthusiastic about the future of the mod, and all the recent developments in the STALKER modding community were extremely promising. Within the past few months, we've seen the release of the much-awaited Lost Alpha mod, as well as the source code leaks for both SoC and CoP.

We were spoiled for choice, and took a step back to reassess the direction of the mod, now we had so much more to work with. Despite all these new and exciting developments, we kept having to face the grim reality: no matter what, we'd still be working with half-broken tools, shoddy SDKs, and messy code just to make it all work.

Relatively recently, Epic Games launched their new Unreal Engine 4 on a new subscription model, making it accessible to many indie developers putting their foot in the door of the games industry. Some of us who already hold game dev jobs were already working with UE4 and enjoying its power and usability immensely, which made going back to STALKER development all the more frustrating. So in the end, we made the decision: we're going to march into the future, and carve out something from scratch. A new game that serves as a spiritual successor, but without all the shortcomings and buggy workarounds inherent to working with STALKER's engines.

This decision was based on a lot of factors - with the amount of assets we've made for LURK, we can painlessly move them over to UE4 to have a solid foundation to work with. We'd also be gaining a lot of relevant experience working with UE4, so even if we fail, we'd still walk away with something we can take into potential future careers.

However, it's still sad to say goodbye to the project that first inspired us to become developers, and I hope that you all understand that we don't make this decision lightly. L.U.R.K. has been my baby for over three years now, but now is as good of a time as any to move on to bigger and better things.

Keep on lurking, fellow LURKers. We have great confidence in the STALKER modding community still, and we know that you'll all find enjoyable mods still being released into the future for this great game series. Expect to hear from us again about our new project sometime soon!

- Panzerdraco

Team LURK Lead Manager