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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.- Shadow Of Chernobyl

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

23:01 / 01.04.07

I've been waiting for this for YEARS.

And now it's here. It's- well, on one level it's an impenetrable mess- the map system is well-nigh incomprehensible for the first few hours, and it's a real 'mare trying to figure out what you're supposed to be doing and where you're supposed to be doing it...

...but by crikey, this is a brilliant game. It's like BEING in Roadside Picnic (one of my favourite SF novels, about which I feel a Books thread coming on, but more of that elsewhere at some point)...

the weather effects are wonderful. Walking through a field of grass, and there's a breeze, and the stems all sway... then maybe there's some lightning. Or rain. The sky looks beautiful.

And the anomalies! Man, the anomalies! The Zone is just... well, it's just FUCKED. In a good way.

I know they've just nicked the idea and transplanted it into Kiev, but... this really IS everything I ever imagined when I first read Roadside Picnic as a teen. Right down to the fact that you have an unlimited supply of bolts, so you can throw them before you into areas you think may be suspect and see what happens.

And while the AI on the humans ain't any better than anyone else's- well, better than most games, worse than Far Cry or F.E.A.R.- everything really does, despite the scaling down of the game's original ambitions, seem to be carrying on its own life, with or without you. It's really quite strange to see an NPC, who, last game, had been a really important character, stumble into the middle of an anomaly and die. And then to be killed by a pack of dogs while looting his corpse, and after you die to see them drag your corpse away. Or to realise that animals can be scared by loud noises, and save your ammo.

It's really...

...ummm...

I don't know what it is. Whatever it is, I love it. Lots of things about it really piss me off, but... it's gonna take Bioshock or Crysis a lot to beat this for the best game of the year.

ARRGH! It's even hard to describe what's so great about it, given that it really seems to go out of its way to make it hard to get into. It just... it just GRABS you. Or did me, anyway. And, as I believe I mentioned, I love it.

Anyone else playing this? Someone help me out with something more coherent. PLEASE!!!

Phex: Dorset Doom

12:14 / 02.04.07

I heard there were quite a few bugs in the initial release, and some have said the unpatched version is 'unplayable'- is this true?

12:59 / 02.04.07

What? What the hell is this? Where do I get this?

16:02 / 02.04.07

It's getting the thumbs up from most of the people I work with who play and when the AI works it apparently can be amazing. Like for example following a group of other Stalkers at a distance, watching them fight off some bandits and then spontaneously set up an ambush to deal with some mutants they've spotted. And then be killed by a pack of wild dogs

.

Patch wise the first one is out and they're working on the second one which will be a lot bigger and fix a lot more along with adding extra areas on the map and sub quests. So the dev's aren't just abandoning the game, they're continuing to fix stuff and I suspect even if they do stop before everything is fixed, the fans will patch and mod this game six ways to tuesday

.

Phex: Dorset Doom

17:02 / 02.04.07

Grr... Why is it PC game developers are always releasing unfinished games and fixing them with patches? And now it's happening to console games since the next generation of consoles have Internet capability. And wasn't S.T.A.L.K.E.R (damn that's annoying to type) already delayed by three years anyway?

19:39 / 02.04.07

Because consumers let them get away with it, is why. I've just returned to PC gaming after a few years away and am, tbh, disgusted with my experiences so far. It took about three hours of downloading patches before Dawn of War would even load instead of hanging and locking up my DVD drive.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:00 / 02.04.07

I've had no bug problems so far other than needing to update my graphics card driver, but I hear a lot of people have.

Kiltartan Cross

15:52 / 03.04.07

I'm liking it very much, especially given that I only read Roadside Picnic (and saw Stalker) for the first time a month or so ago.

Good points for me:
The Zone. It is the Zone, although the anomalies should probably be a bit harder to spot than they are for the "proper" effect. Moving fast can be very dangerous, though. The general run-down / wrecked / wasted / wild atmosphere of the graphics is great, and the radiation and psionic effects are suitably nasty.
The AI. As noted above, it's not perfect, but when it works, it's great.
The stealth. Or lack thereof. No hiding in the shadows while your enemies traipse blithely by a la Thief; if you can see them, there's a fair chance they can see you. Sneaking in Stalker is difficult, but rewarding, and you can get away with murder if you're careful.

Bad points:
The documentation. I don't know what half of the artefacts I've picked up actually do, and getting used to the map and PDA was tricky.
The ladies. Quite simply, there aren't any. Every single stalker and every single NPC I've seen appears to be male; it's a little odd.
Post patch (now that armour degrades over time, which to be fair I guess was the original intention, and it does make sense) it's a lot harder. And the patch wasn't compatible with saved games, which was a right pain.
The game areas. Some of them are excellent, permitting of multiple approaches to any given situation. Some of them, however, are blatantly railroaded, and there's unfortunately quite often the feeling that "if I'm carrying grenades and several large guns, why, precisely, can I not force my way through that boarded up window?" Silent Storm it ain't.
There are also some occasional graphical hitches which hopefully the next patch will address, although by and large they're not a big problem.

I'll comment on the plot once I've made it through Pripyat...

unheimlich manoeuvre

17:56 / 03.04.07

E. Randy Dupre - It took about three hours of downloading patches before Dawn of War would even load instead of hanging and locking up my DVD drive.

If that was in the last few days and you were patching by connecting through GameSpy that would be because there was a DDoS on their provider.
I had the same problem patching to 1.2 and had to do it manually here.

[/tangent]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks amazing, shame my PC wouldn't cope with it.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:19 / 26.01.08

I'd kind of got distracted from this by BioShock and (inevitably) WoW, but Django was telling me the other day he'd just started playing it, and that inspired me to return to the Zone. And yet again I'm sucked in. Not even BioShock or Assassin's Creed (both of which had atmosphere in spades) did such a good job of immersing the player in their world. I think it's the light breezes that ruffle the grass that really make it for me, for some reason. Not sure why, but that little detail really does bring the whole thing to life.

Phex: Dorset Doom

13:39 / 26.01.08

I played it a while back and was mostly impressed. My five year old rig could only play it at minimum settings, and even then it got to be unplayable in wide open spaces but still, goddam if it wasn't one of the finest things I've played in a long time.
The sheer discomfort it manages to instill in the player is worth the price of admission. You're never comfortable, even from a purely tactical point of view. You will never have enough ammo to use the truly effective weapons for more than a couple of encounters, so you'll be dropping that shiny FT200M rifle for an Obokan, then a viper submachine gun, then a Walther P99 pistol... then you're charging Duty barricades with a knife, picking up whatever your first kill drops, hopping from body to body with less than five bullets for each of the twenty-something well armed killers. Then you're patching yourself up with your last bandage, but the bleeding isn't stopping. You've got to get to somewhere safe soon or the last thing you'll see is a decaying and probably radioactive factory being acid-rained on. So you take a short cut. There are more Duty soldiers on the way but you can outrun them. Then you get eviscerated by a Snork. A goddamn Snork

Then there's the psychological discomfort. Get away from the brutal but familiar military combat of the human occupied areas and the game becomes genuinely terrifying. You'll jump dozens of times during this game. The Controllers and their psychic attacks are particularly disturbing. There are apparently several other creatures that were removed from the original game but can be restored with a patch- information on them here (and goddamn I want the Dwarves back in the game).
I also failed at it. Miserably even. There are seven endings in all, two good and five bad. My particular style of play led me towards one of the bad endings, and being buried under a pile of gold coins. Lucky me.

There is a prequel to STALKER, named 'Clear Sky' released on Steam now and available in shops in March. It has more monsters (Dwarves plz!) and an A.I fight for territorial control as opposed to a overarching story. Details here.