Q: If it is an action/RPG, why will you be unable to improve your character's skills then?
A: This is a role-playing game without growing experience of your character, without changing characteristics and levels. We'd like the player to work out his personal mastery, moreover S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an action/RPG, where much is dependent on skills of the player himself. To our mind, the changing characteristics, levels and character experience destroy realism we try to create in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. With the rest, it is virtually a normal RPG - players travel the Zone, collect artefacts, weapons, reveal anomalous zones, communicate and trade with each other. The player develops economically, just as in "Elite". He earns money, buys new equipment, weapons. Owing to that, new parts of the Zone are revealed to him. I.e. those, which you won't initially reach with a pistol and simple detector.
What refers to characteristics, an experienced player will already act quicker and smarter than a newbie.
We come out of presumption that the player plays as stalker - a mature, thoroughly prepared person, living in the Zone. He can be compared with a soldier who is trained to accomplish a mission. The soldier is trained for the task, but when on a mission, everything depends on himself. In the course of accomplishing the objective he cannot improve his skills drastically. That is why, unlike other games, the player, for instance, does not start playing as a character whose submachine-gun-holding hands tremble or who cannot hit a rat with his sword 9 out of 10 times, and within the next 10 years of the game time he becomes a demigod hitting a bird in the sky with his eyes closed and evading machinegun volleys. Classic system of skills is justified in third-person-view games, when nothing depends on the player's actions, like in Diablo, for instance. The player can only click on opponent - then dice are cast and, basing on skills, mathematical calculations are done. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. this is the player's mastery which grows, and not abstract skills of a model on the screen. If the player has mastered weapon peculiarities, knows weak spots of the enemies, knows equipment and Zone anomalies, has an excellent reaction and accuracy etc - he gets an appropriate result. The hero of the game is the very player - everything depends on him solely.
These are the reasons why there will be no upgradable characteristics. The only possibility is their decrease under certain conditions.
And additionally, to our opinion, a true role-playing game is not determined by presence of growing characteristics, experience and levels, which are nothing more but the elegant gameplay elements, whose goal is to keep up the interest in the gameplay. Experience, skills and characteristics can be added to any game, but it will not become a role-playing title due to that. It will only be a role-playing game when there are interrelations between the characters, when the player has a possibility to choose a role for himself in the new world, that role dependent on his actions and decisions.
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