Gamespot was recently able to score an interview with GSC Game World's Anton Bolshakov to talk about their upcoming FPS for the PC, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. The interview actually tackles tons of game aspects so let's not dilly dally any longer, let's just get to the gist of the whole thing, shall we?

Game development: Bolshakov says that their current dev status is "close to the finish line" and are just fixing bugs, fine-tuning the balancing, optimizing the game for different configurations -- basically just polishing up the game.

Single player combat: There will be 30 weapon types, most of which will be upgradeable with silencers, grenade launchers, etc. The game also boasts of true bullet ballistics, making the weapons, bullet speed, and grenade explosions highly realistic.

Multiplayer modes, etc.: There will be three multiplayer modes: Deathmatch, team Deathmatch, and the artifact hunt. You guys know already how the first two modes work, but as for the Artifact hunt, it's a mode where the players are split into two teams and compete to get the most artifacts that appear randomly on the map. And of course, the team with more artifacts wins.

When asked about the other features that users can look forward to in the multiplayer feature, here's what Bolshakov said:

...other features of the multiplayer are dynamic day/night cycles, a ranking system, upgradeable weapons, and different types of cartridges for every weapon type. We specially designed maps for multiplayer. We used professional cyber-sportsmen in designing and balancing maps. Multiplayer supports up to 32 players over LAN or Internet. We'll have the multiplayer beta open soon.