So two weeks to Clear Sky

Buying it soon.

 

I've been replaying STALKER in anticipation. Had some very odd things happen thanks to my choice of mods this time around. Now my mind will be fresh for any changes they claim to have made to the new game and I can compare the two.

 

Do you suggest any mods?

 

If you're interested, I've been playing with Oblivion Lost for a while. It's good for the most part. Gives you the option to have your gear repaired, "restores" many mutants, lowers the respawn rate in some places and adds more enemies in some others, and much more. It has also many shortcomings. There's a horrible weather effect (luckily very rare) that looks like a display problem, sometimes the "blowout" will kill NPCs whose AI doesn't tell them to seek shelter, the vehicles are difficult to steer and the AI is not prepared to react to them, the new AI for the controllers is rather frustrating and unforgiving even if you have high telepathy protection (and the bastards take whole clips to die), the english of the mod is bad.
My advice? OL is worth trying, but play the game with "lighter" mods first.

 

According to two guys I know who've already played it Clear Sky is an incredible shit.
I mean they say its much much worse than original.
The bland level design, the retarded respawn, stupid AI (heavy scripts are in your face now, whereas in Stalker GSC at least tried to hide that), much bigger amount of unneeded swearing,
Everything as I've expected.
+ at ag.ru forums there are the same comments.

 

If I recall it correctly, when Chernobyl hit shelves, the internets was also full of whiny bitches. Trust no one. Play yourself. And then buy it if you like.

 

Except Stalker 1 was indeed shit.

 

Except that it wasn't

 

STALKER > FEAR

(A matter of personal preference, of course. I recognize that FEAR is a lot more polished).

 

no

 

Are you comparing corridor shooter with stalker?

 

I've modded the shopkeepers to have a greater inventory, I believe. The trader at the start certainly had a boost to his stock. I went through the appropriate files in a text editor for that (notepad). I added in the missing hunting style shotgun. Did that with the text editor too. I've got the aliVe mod. I also increased my weight limits so I can carry all the extra crap I want to try out, like utilizing (r00fles) the RPG to shoot down helicopters or wipe out large groups (notepad again).

AliVe is pretty good so far. Don't expect the story to match the normal pacing (story-related NPCs can end up being slain early on by chance), but it's been interesting so far. It mixes things up with the mutant and NPC encounters, including some very good moments that happened purely by random.

One good random moment was when wandering up and down doing the random quests for money and loot when I spotted some bandits patrolling the area in the distance. I was far enough away that they hadn't spotted me, so I got the binoculars to get a closer look. Just as I got a good view the patrolling bandits walked right into the sight of some neutral/loner stalkers, who promptly opened fire and killed one of them before he could even draw his weapon (blasted off of his feet by a shotgun, by the look of it) and injured the other. The bandits freaked out and so did the rest of the loner stalkers. A massive fire fight ensued. As this was going on about ten mutant blind dogs, led by two of those nastier psuedodog types, was drawn by the noise and possibly by the fresh meat on the bodies. They swept in as a large pack. Cue a huge mess with people panicking and firing in all directions (I had to hide behind a tree a few times because of stray machine gun fire spraying all around me even at that distance), dogs circling the NPCs and leaping at people's throats and killing them just as they are shot out of the air, shots fired at enemy stalkers, accidental friendly fire deaths because of the spray and pray tactics and moving targets. Glorious carnage.

When the noise stopped I started to sneak over. By the time I got there all that was left was one bandit executing a loner stalker that was begging for a medikit and I in turn did the bandit the same favor. There were bodies everywhere. Lots of free loot. I had to head off to the nearest trader to dump it.

I've had a few moments like that.


EDIT: Spore is out the day after STALKER's update? Now I've got to pick one to waste my time and money on...

 

more like comparing 2 corridor shooters. It's just that the corridors of one are wide.

 

Corridors are indoors.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor

 

But skyway, what is life but one great corridor?

 

Oh, a metaphor, I get it. I didn't realize we were critiquing games based not off of real faults, but metaphorical faults. Thanks for your input.

 

Oh my goodness, I just went to ag.ru, and everyone is indeed hating it. Using Google Language Tool.

I tried to find some positive stuff, but could not find a single one in all those 50 page threads on it.

 

Um... I've been playing it for most of the night, and I like it. The combat is unrealstic (everyone's a walking tank) but satisfying, the AI's decent, the fighting between factions feels chaotic and fun, few bugs (once I had to reload to get an enemy squad to counterattack a point I was trying to capture), there are lots of equipment upgrades (some require others, some are mutually exclusive, you can even refit a gun for another type of ammo). The only problem I've had so far is not being able to get past a certain machinegun nest during daytime at all. Apparently you have to waste time while waiting for night to arrive, then sneak past.

 

Well sure. It isn't like the design of maps was basically a one big corridor right to Chernobyl NPP with a few branches. Starting with the 1st map which is a one big corridor and ending with maps in the second half of the game - the map before Prypiat even had really small passages.
But hey I can live with that really - however Stalker had lots of another shit like mad respawn, non-existent excuse for a story, boring MMORPG quests, poor area design where locations feel like GSC just decided to throw stuff in them randomly, especially Yantar factory in the middle of the forest with no roads leading to it, enemies wearing some fat armour even if it looks like a jacket (bandits can take 10 bullets to the torso and still live like nothing happened. I remember with first guns it even takes 3 headshots to put one of them down). And that's just in the beginning of the game - whereas in the end it sometimes takes 60 bullets from G36(!) to put one spetsnaz warrior down.
Add to this shitty optimization of the engine and healing sausages.
Stalker is a monument to bad design and laziness. They've spent 6 years just to make a poor alpha version of the game.

 

Bad optimisation? The game ran beautifully on lower end systems. At least it ran at all.

 

Do I have to remind you of first two versions of Stalker (1.000 and the first patch which didn't fix anything really) that had tons of memory and video memory leaks? The forums of Stalker had numerous complaints.
As for me - on my R9600 Pro with 128 MBs RAM Stalker was unplayable even in DX7 mode because of the leaks and on GF6600 with 256 MBs RAM it always managed to leak so hard that required texture memory was around 350 MBs just after a hour of play.
Only with 1.0005 GSC really managed to fix it (though the situation became much better in 1.0003 already). Hey there even were complaints from GF8000 users with 640 MBs on board that it leaked.
And now consider that there was a leaked beta of Stalker with DX7 mode (they didn't change anything graphically since then really - in DX7 mode of course) back in 2004 which ran perfectly ok even on my R9000Pro 64 MBs at the same maps with the same graphics settings)

 

The Ecologist station at Yantar oozed atmosphere, though. At least give it that.

 

I didn't say that Stalker had no atmosphere. And I will give the game that it had a nice atmosphere.
Unfortunately atmosphere is not enough if you have everything else messed up.

 

I just hate people that are bitching about '3 bullets in head' etc. This is fucking game. It supposed to be fun playing and fucking challenging on hard difficulty. Such arguments were passable if they game was realizm simulator, but for fuck's sake it is not.