No more Stalkers?

[MetalCraze]

Remember GOG closure? Perhaps GSC is just launching their new site
And the thing about going to consoles is ridiculous. The next console generation is coming very soon, why bother with this old shitty one?

All console generations are old and shitty ones. XBawks III will feature an outdated hardware too. Most likely will be based around some Athlon II due to crazy Intel prices that won't help $300 price tag.

 

[Oriental European]

Holly shit what the fuck.
I thought GSC are rich as fuck.

 

[baronjohn]

What a shame. Call of Pripyat was an excellent game.

It's a good way to go, if an intelligent, engaging, difficult, and complex shooter such as that was their last game.

If there was anybody other than Bethesda to whom the Elder Scrolls license should be given, it was GSC. Call of Pripyat is the finest among open world first-person games.

Intelligent? Stalker wasn't intelligent, it was generic juvenile modern fantasy. A macho-man gunporn shooting gallery with bullshit new age deus ex machina.

Complex? Not really. You made things die by aligning your crosshair with the enemy, that was about as sophisticated as it got. I remember only 1 puzzle (in COP, to get an artifact) in all 3 games, and it entirely optional.

Difficult? Until you got a scoped rifle, maybe. After that it was ez.

TES shits all over Stalker.

 

[CorpseZeb]

TES shits all over Stalker.

Calling this BS would be too easy, so enlighten us, what is your baseline of good FPS? CoD: MW3 or BF3 I presume...

 

[Wyrmlord]

It was a pretty intelligent game.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

TES shits all over Stalker.

You're a joke.

 

[Reptilian Shapeshifter]

That brings me to an interesting question: What is the tax rate for corporations in Ukraine?

If they belong to bandits in power - none. For everyone else they can go as high as the government wants.
Bah even simple people will soon be forced to pay taxes for... homeless animals. I kid you not. Next stop - air.

All governments are criminal enterprises by design. Some are simply more blatant about it than others.

 

[baronjohn]

It was a pretty intelligent game.

How was it intelligent? Seriously!

Did it have an intelligent setting? Fuck no. It was juvenile shit. If Stalker were a book it would be trash even by the average 12 year olds standards.

Did it have intelligent gameplay? Hell no. You shot people and monsters till they stopped moving and then you collected your reward. If you are capable of breathing autonomously, you are capable to completing Stalker.

Compared to Deus Ex, which was a moderately intelligent game of some complexity and nuance, Stalker is like a monkey playing with its own feces.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Did you look at the quest designing and problem solving in the game?

Gosh.

Call of Pripyat left me quite stumped on how to recruit Strider or how to find Magpie, until other quests revealed the solution to it.

What are you going to say - it was obvious to you how to recruit Strider or find Magpie? It took me a week to figure it out.

 

[CorpseZeb]

It is not only matter of quest construction or nice difficulty level, but Stalker series are one of the less'o'scripted games out there. Deus Ex, while being a great game, doesn't has thingies like A-life. So maybe, instead just running and shooting in the search of orgasmic and mythical "end of game", look around for a while. Stalker is worth of it.

 

[Shadenuat]

If Stalker were a book it would be trash even by the average 12 year olds standards.

http://acer-a500.ru/uploads/posts/2011- ... talker.jpg
My 12 years cousin loves them

As on topic - half of Ukrainian gaming industry dead just like that. Kinda sad actually.

 

[Satan]

Stalker's gameplay was mediocre at best, but it had superior atmosphere and the first one had pretty good storyline. It had also A-life (which wasn't well implemented, but it still was 100 times better than scripted events in other FPS) and the game wasn't too easy.

ArmA2, Red Orchestra and STALKER were the only good FPS released in recent years. And even if you don't like them for whatever reason you still ought to admit they are important for the genre. If not them we'd only have arcade shooters like CoD,BF, Crisis, Bioshock etc.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Hey, SoC not really, but Call of Pripyat was really good, even a classic in the vein of Looking Glass titles. Had they strived to follow on that I would have called this a sad day.

But they were already on the way to become another console developer so I don't think it's is a big loss. Popamole Stalker? No thanks.

That brings me to an interesting question: What is the tax rate for corporations in Ukraine?

If they belong to bandits in power - none. For everyone else they can go as high as the government wants.
Bah even simple people will soon be forced to pay taxes for... homeless animals. I kid you not. Next stop - air.

In Soviet Russia, tax pays you

 

[Metro]

Eventually I have to get around to playing CoP but SoC was mediocre at best. The FPS mechanics were good but the overall game itself was pretty sloppy.

 

[Quilty]

I enjoy playing Clear Sky with the faction wars mod. It makes the game shine by removing the campaign features and just letting you live the life of a stalker who's just trying to eke out a living by doing simple quests and helping out his faction. The atmosphere is stunning.

 

[deus101]

No qte, no cover system, no regen, scrounge to survive and get the weapons nesesicry to survive.

(fuck splling)

and most of all..NO SHITTY OVERDONE "LET ME CRAM HOLLYWOOD SHIT DOWN YOUR THROAT"


A few simple well done, cgi cutscenes.....

and the fact...that you DIED quite often if you didnt handle all the overwhelming enemies properly.


Serisuly...that is good....game..

 

[Metro]

I don't know about CoP but I was never short of anything in SoC.

 

[Wyrmlord]

I am rather surprised that Baronjohn prefers the heavily scripted, heavily trigger cutscene-based, and heavily linear Human Revolution instead.

That was totally a more complex game.

EDIT: By the way, why are you guys just writing STALKER, instead of the separate games of each series? There is next to nothing common between Clear Sky, Shadow of Chernobyl, and Call of Pripyat. They are worlds apart in style. It seems to me that you are conflating the legitimate flaws of Shadow of Chernobyl onto Call of Pripyat. How do you get to say, "Call of Pripyat is bad, because Shadow of Chernobyl had such and such flaws."

 

[baronjohn]

We're just talking about intelligence and complexity, and Desu Ex wins in both categories.

Desu Ex heavily scripted and linear? Really? As I recall it had hubs in which you were free to go anywhere, the only difference is that in COP you could go between the hubs at will (which wouldn't have made sense in HR anyway). On the other hand in HR there were always several paths to an objective and it permitted different approaches - talking, sneaking, non-lethal, lethal. Stalker didn't have this variety, there was usually just one path and your problem solving always involved shooting until nothing was moving any more.

 

[The Vanished One]

Bad news. The Stalker series are my favourite FPS's together with Arma II. Against my own principles I held out hope for an improved PC-only Stalker II, more of the same but with at least the worst flaws corrected.

 

[Raapys]

DX:HR was far less crappy than it could have been, but I'd hardly compare that scripted, dumbed-down consolized next-gen aRPG with what's most likely the best free-roaming shooters ever made( at least when modded).

 

[Burning Bridges]

CoP and SoC are practically the same game. The only real difference is that CoP was built around a somewhat more open-world structure, with MQ objectives encouraging exploration of each zone.

Superficial. CoP has much less restricted maps, much better balance, more interesting and mysterious anomalies, friendly stalkers, all taken together it has the experience I expected from the first Stalker. SoC in comparison was monotonous as hell.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Not to mention that Shadow of Chernobyl has tight funnel points based on advancement in the main quest.

You will not unlock a SEVA suit or an Exoskeleton in Shadow of Chernobyl prior to advancement to a late point in the main quest. So if you were running around, doing sidequests, and "exploring" a little, you have succeeded in perhaps being marginally better than the player who forces through the main quest.

In Call of Pripyat, you can engage in deadly artifact hunting side missions to build up your wealth and get an Exoskeleton and Lynx sniper rifle from get go.

It's a world of difference.

 

[Wyrmlord]

I found CoP's premise of building a super party to assist you on the road to Pripyat to be very interesting.

What would have been better is having the party assist you for a much longer time across the rest of the game, add the possibility of them abandoning you if you go to places or do things that antagonize, and add the possibility of finding them and winning them over again to re-recruit them. They could have made several indirect roads upon indirect roads for reaching Pripyat, instead of having just one area. And they should have stayed after Pripyat as well.

By the way, CoP had an embarrassingly low kill count. You would normally have 900-1000 kills at the end of SoC, but possibly less than 100 at the end of CoP. However, a larger number of them would be mutants rather than human.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I will think of Stalker every time I see abandoned buildings, that's the games legacy.