Anyone Looking Forward To STALKER ?

[Arumakani]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=145065

 

Some new screens. Textures look good and the sky still looks ace.

[Arumakani]

Some Stalker:Clear Sky screens. looking good. Supposed to be a prequel to the original game.

 

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=183936

[jdude]

I'm looking forward to this despite Stalker 1 Just for the environments :]

[Unstoppable]

I'm taking a wait and see approach. STALKER was good but failed to be great. Still has too many bugs as well. I find it unacceptable.

[jdude]

I remember when STALKER came out people kept raving about how cool it would be to have cooperative on it and how someone should make a mod for it. However no one ever did, anyone know if this stalker will have coop?

[Unstoppable]

No it won't and you were only a google search away .

[rebb]

I liked Stalker quite a bit, despite it's problems. Can't wait for Clear Sky, altho it will have one feature that i don't like much - the periodic "blowouts" that will hurt your max health over time. Kinda like an artificial time-limit. Fuck time-limits .

 

At least thats what i read in some Magazine.

[Gildoran]

Is it possible that the blowouts might occur with the progression of the story rather than every X minutes? That might be an interesting way of increasing the difficulty of early areas later in the game...

 

But yeah, I hate time-limits with a passion (except in limited small-scale cases such as underwater or during a dramatic sequence)... there's a reason they've been abandoned since the days of sprite-based games.

[rebb]

I just checked again in the Magazine, and it says "over the course of the game" - so it could be like you said, a part of the actual "story" and not some imposed timelimit like in Fallout for Example.

[jdude]

Talk about a lazy way to increase difficulty

[Ishtvan]

I liked Stalker quite a bit, despite it's problems. Can't wait for Clear Sky, altho it will have one feature that i don't like much - the periodic "blowouts" that will hurt your max health over time. Kinda like an artificial time-limit. Fuck time-limits .

It shouldn't matter much if you can still get ridiculous powerups all over that make you regenerate very quickly or increase max health.

[Ombrenuit]

Stalker is one of my favorite games as flawed as it is. It's one of those games that is just more than the sum of its parts. Sure there is a lot of room for improvement. A LOT. But for me the atmosphere of the game made up for everything (in fact just beat it again today). It could have been a lot better--it was obviously pushed to be completed (i.e. the huge gaps in the maps, how you get transported strait to the power plant effectively skipping half of Prypiat). But it really makes you feel like you're there trying to survive in the Zone. Honestly I wish we could have gotten the Stalker that was originally concieved by GSC, but it was still a great effort that I hope inspires further games into that direction.

[jdude]

One thing I really hope they improve is the translations, both written and audio. I didn't like how 1/4 was English and the rest was Russian. I also didn't like the horrible text translations

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Everything Russian was inconsequential. Given the subtitles no reason not to like the Russian speech. What audio translations do you mean, the horrible English some people had? That was intentional, the main character is the foreigner here, it is in Ukraine after all. I was gleefully hoping my understanding of Russian would give me a tactical advantage in some situations, but, no such luck.

[jdude]

By horrible translation, i mean the text which would sometimes read things like: "You must going get the tools"

[Ombrenuit]

By horrible translation, i mean the text which would sometimes read things like: "You must going get the tools"

 

The game wasn't perfect--but what do you expect? They're not a powerhouse developer. They don't have unlimited resources and much of the team did all the voice overs. They likely translated it themselves.

[Vadrosaul]

They've done about six patches, laboriously fixing the translations errors and quest bugs. Plus there is a fuckton of good simple mods done by the fandom.

[Unstoppable]

They've done about six patches, laboriously fixing the translations errors and quest bugs. Plus there is a fuckton of good simple mods done by the fandom.

 

Yes they have, however if you throw a grenade in the room where you have to find a key quest npc, he will blow up. Meaning if you don't have a save before entering the room and doing that you're fubared. Have to start the game all over.

 

Luckily I backup every hour so I had an extra save. However back tracking an hour through creepy hell lab was not fun . It was easier of course.

[Crispy]

Bit of a quandary for developers. Make important NPCs immortal (lame) or let you kill them (game-breaking)? Ideally you'd be allowed to kill them and still be able to finish the game, just in a different-and-possibly-harder way (Deus Ex did this with some important NPCs, not all), but that raises lots of sticky workload and design issues if you undertake to do it universally.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Or have it that when you kill a quest NPC he becomes his body double or twin or a random stranger, while the real guy didn't come to office today, is home with a cold, and you can still finish the quest.

[Ombrenuit]

Yeah my biggest complaint with Stalker is that I broke the game a total of three times for various reasons, unable to complete the true endings as a result *sigh*. But I finally labored through a new game to do it.

[phide]

Bit of a quandary for developers. Make important NPCs immortal (lame) or let you kill them (game-breaking)?

One way that works is to have little messages after you kill a critical NPC informing the player that the NPC he just killed probably ruined the game (and to have a competent quicksave system). Generally, though, if critical NPCs aren't immortal, players should generally know to be extra careful around these NPCs and to save at appropriate intervals. If players aren't aware of how critical a given NPC is, the designers haven't done their job properly.

 

Of course, if you're the type of player that plays STALKER as if you were Rambo, then obviously no amount of "don't kill this guy!" is going to help, and designers probably shouldn't bother trying to cater for that. The lazy man's approach is the Oblivion "you can't fuck this game up because they'll just get back up" approach -- the ultimate hand-holding experience. A good middle-ground is to not allow the player to cause damage to these NPCs in the first place (don't allow the player to shoot/attack when the crosshair is on the NPC, in other words), which is a simple but effective method employed in many shooters.

 

I'm only sort-of/quasi looking forward to Clear Sky. It's supposed to be what STALKER should have been, they say, but is what STALKER should have been a game I want to play? Tough call for me.

[sparhawk]

I started to play Stalker last week, and the atmosphere is pretty good. However the gameplay, I'm less excited about. It plays like a shooter, but you don't have good guns, and the AI usually stays pretty far away. So it feels to me. But you can not really sneak up on the AI either, because they usually detect you early on. So it feels to me, as if the devs couldn't decide wether to create a straight shooter, or some RPG like game, and did both of it, with only the bad aspects of each.

 

I mean, I run around with a silenced handgun, but I can't employ it properly because of the sneaking up not really working, and even if I hit the AI straight, it takes a few shots before it goes down. For the shotgun the distances are to far and again it's not possible to sneak up on them anyway. And for the machineguns, there is never enough ammo around, so I can not take them out from a distance either.

[Ombrenuit]

I started to play Stalker last week, and the atmosphere is pretty good. However the gameplay, I'm less excited about. It plays like a shooter, but you don't have good guns, and the AI usually stays pretty far away. So it feels to me. But you can not really sneak up on the AI either, because they usually detect you early on. So it feels to me, as if the devs couldn't decide wether to create a straight shooter, or some RPG like game, and did both of it, with only the bad aspects of each.

 

I mean, I run around with a silenced handgun, but I can't employ it properly because of the sneaking up not really working, and even if I hit the AI straight, it takes a few shots before it goes down. For the shotgun the distances are to far and again it's not possible to sneak up on them anyway. And for the machineguns, there is never enough ammo around, so I can not take them out from a distance either.

 

You have to employ headshots as much as possible as a result (and to better aim, double crouch). It does kind of suck that its a bit hard to sneak up on enemies. I actually like the inaccuracy of the guns. It makes things much more intense. I'd suggest using the shotgun at that point in the game until you get the mp5--its very powerful, but you have to do a lot of running and gunning.

[SplaTtzZ]

Or you could always get one of the many mods that make the game halfway decent. Eventually you'll get to the point where you've got bucket loads of cash and nothing to spend it on, particularly cos none of the stupid vendors sell anything worthwhile; and good luck trying to find ammo for your dragunov or whatever.

I downloaded a mod that made all weapons and ammo accessible from every vendor and whilst you can sort of cheat with it to get powerful stuff at the beginning; I found that in moderation it made the game more playable, and at least i was able to use my guns.

Edited March 26, 2008 by SplaTtzZ