Developer Vostok Games today announced their Battle Royale game Fear the Wolves is going to launch this month on July 18th on Steam Early Access. The game made headlines as a spiritual spin-off to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series and is made by former developers of that series. Check out the latest E3 trailer and head on to the game’s Steam page.
The team behind Fear the Wolves is Ukrainian-based studio Vostok Games. What really stood out when the studio was established back in 2012, is that a lot of talent from then recently defunct GSC Game World founded Vostok Games. GSC Game World was the legendary team behind the cult open-world S.T.A.L.K.E.R series of first-person shooter games from a decade ago.
Fear the Wolves was first announced in February this year and set its eyes for a PC release in 2018 with console versions planned to follow in 2019. As either part of a squad or a lone wolf, players will find themselves in radiated and destroyed Chernobyl where they will have to survive aggressive mutants and packs of wild wolves on top of other human players. Set in a gigantic map of 25km², the gorgeous visuals are definitely one of the things which make Fear the Wolves stand out in the realm of Battle Royale games.
While the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games were ambitious for even today’s standards, they never managed to receive the wide attention they deserved. A dedicated but niche fanbase pulled enormous work by fixing the many bugs, balancing the gameplay and even improve the trilogy games visually and technically. Naturally, when Vostok Games was founded, many were hoping for a spiritual sequel to the immersive single-player FPS games.
What followed though was Free-to-Play multiplayer FPS Survarium. The similar post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe setting was like salt on the wound. With a mixed user review score aggregate of only 51% positive reviews, the communities complaints at Pay-to-Win mechanics and the failed promise to include a PvE mode resulted in the once beloved developers to lose a lot of goodwill.
With Vostok Games’ second title, Fear the Wolves being yet again a multiplayer-focused FPS with a similar setting, it will be interesting to see how the player community will react to yet another developer jumping ship on the popular Battle Royale bandwagon.
