79 replies to this topic

[Blood-Pigggy]

Anyone else get a chance to check this out yet? It's just been released today in North America (the 20th of March) and it's totally awesome, buggy as hell, but awesome.

What really gets me about the game is the AI, and how atmospheric the game is. It really feels like you're in Chernobyl. Some of it is absolutely terrifying, playing the game alone in a dark place with Surround Sound and a decent monitor can really make you feel utterly alone when night comes in the game world.
It isn't exactly the prettiest game around, but the lighting is absolutely amazing.

The AI is crazy good too. I've had guys ducking and weaving in between buildings and they actively try to flank you. The cool thing is that they actually try different things as well, if you continuously kill bandits by hiding around a doorway, you might find that after you shot the second one that they get smart and starting pelleting the doorway with bullets and grenades. I've been killed by enemy Stalkers who decided to run out back a building then come around behind me after ten minutes of fighting in an interior.

The wildlife is also really interesting, I've helped fellow Stalkers kill wandering dogs and boars, or watched as another person came screaming out of nowhere with around ten dogs running towards him. They also behave realistically as well. Wild dogs will circle their prey and surround them (this is especially cool when you and a few other Stalkers face off against them).
There's a lot of bugs, I've had people walking into walls for no reason, and NPCs ignore me forever unless I walked a mile and walked back.

And speaking of walking, you can go anywhere in this game, it's free form like Oblivion, so people wondering about that can be at ease. It's not exactly the most roleplaying heavy game there is, but the inventory/trading system is almost exactly like Fallout's. In fact, I can go as far to say that the game FEELS almost exactly what a first person Fallout would be like, I definitely got some Deja Vu visiting some of the little towns (outposts, as they're called in STALKER).

Probably the coolest thing I've seen about Stalker is that the world is completely dynamic. Important characters CAN die, unlike Oblivion, and it isn't from any scripted crap either. You can be in a middle of a quest, only to find that while you were gone the traveler that gave it out to you decided to go for a walk and was ambushed by a few bandits and was killed. The game doesn't really discriminate on the status of characters. It can be kind of annoying though, I've had traders die from mysterious anomalies while out doing a quest for them, like right inside of their protected store and everything, I'd just walk in and their body would be sprawled on a table with stuffed knocked everywhere.

It's kind of retarded to walk into a room only to see a fat dead trader who gave you a quest to have died with the corpse of a random wild dog in the back of the room. I can't even figure out what happened sometimes. One time I even found an quest character dead on the other side of the world, like five hundred miles from where I first met him, and he died from walking into a bandit installation, there was like 500 of them.

Aside from dumb stuff like that, the game can be pretty cool. People that were worrying about how long it took for it to finally come out should go check it out, it's not the prettiest game ever, nor is it bug free, but it's crazy fun.

[BeefontheBone]

Preordered it ages and ages ago, and they posted it to me yesterday apparently, so I'll get back to you when it arrives The PCG review I read said pretty much the same as you - far from bug free but plenty of fun.

[Juni Ori]

Looks cool. However multiplayer modes are surprisingly limited and lacks imagination...

[Potatoe]

I'll have to check this out when I get my new computer.

[Doubler]

*Patiently waits for the 23d*

[Blood-Pigggy]

Juni Ori, on Mar 21 2007, 08:06 AM, said:

Looks cool. However multiplayer modes are surprisingly limited and lacks imagination...

They do suck and when I try to join most games I disconnect everyone because when a person with a legit copy of the game joins a server with people with pirated copies it causes them all to crash because the game finds out their game isn't the right version.

The Singeplayer is definitely the main draw.
I don't know why this game is being pirated so much, some people are real jackasses.

[Doubler]

Hey, BP, how about a couple of custom screenshots? [/begging]

[Blood-Pigggy]

[Doubler]

Cool, thanks!
*Gets less patient*

Is that an artifact glittering in the distance?

[Dimsey]

Have it! But it doesn't run on my computer. >=/
Time for upgrades.

[BeefontheBone]

To answer Doubler's question, yes that orangey thing is an artifact, probably a pretty crappy one out in the open. I've played a few hours so far, and my impressions are very good. There's a couple of issues with performance (very smooth, except for periodic pauses, presumably while it loads a bunch of new stuff - smoother than Oblivion on the whole, albeit not as sexy, but much grittier and more realistic). The autosave feature seems to be pretty random, so I've had to train myself to save fairly often (it's easy to get killed very quickly by anomalies or radiation). Some of the quests are rather throwaway (I completed several "fetch artifact or mutant part" ones by getting the stuff firrst) and it's a bit of a trek back to the guy who assigns them early on (he's at one end of the Zone, so you have to do some backtracking) especially if there are some anomalies or the highly-irradiated train tracks in your way. The loner Stalkers don't seem to be sufficiently wary of me when I point a shotgun at them at point-blank range, making it a bit too easy to nick their (albeit crappy) stuff if you've no morals - I expect that'll wear off later on though. It feels a bit like a roguelike in some ways at times - you die easily if you're not careful (although you can reload, of course), have to eat and sleep once in a while (unlike Oblivion's irritating sleeping, it seems to make more sense in Stalker), and can only carry so much stuff (again, without the irritating "I can't move now, but if I drop 2 arrows and those leaves I picked from a plant, I'll be able to run faster than a horse" thing Oblivion does), weapons degrade and ammo isn't too common nor too easy to come by.

It doesn't quite manage everything it set out to do, and it was never going to really, but it has a damn good go. My favourite bit is the English - some of it's terrible, but it actually helps the immersion since the characters involved are presumably speaking it as a second language (in thick Ukranian accents for the most part). The immersion is very good actually - it's one of the most convincing settings I've seen in an FPS or RPG, except for maybe the city sequences in HL2. Well worth getting if you've a half decent rig to play on, and a bit of patching should really help with the remaining issues.

[Blood-Pigggy]

BeefontheBone, on Mar 31 2007, 12:31 PM, said:

To answer Doubler's question, yes that orangey thing is an artifact, probably a pretty crappy one out in the open. I've played a few hours so far, and my impressions are very good. There's a couple of issues with performance (very smooth, except for periodic pauses, presumably while it loads a bunch of new stuff - smoother than Oblivion on the whole, albeit not as sexy, but much grittier and more realistic). The autosave feature seems to be pretty random, so I've had to train myself to save fairly often (it's easy to get killed very quickly by anomalies or radiation). Some of the quests are rather throwaway (I completed several "fetch artifact or mutant part" ones by getting the stuff firrst) and it's a bit of a trek back to the guy who assigns them early on (he's at one end of the Zone, so you have to do some backtracking) especially if there are some anomalies or the highly-irradiated train tracks in your way. The loner Stalkers don't seem to be sufficiently wary of me when I point a shotgun at them at point-blank range, making it a bit too easy to nick their (albeit crappy) stuff if you've no morals - I expect that'll wear off later on though. It feels a bit like a roguelike in some ways at times - you die easily if you're not careful (although you can reload, of course), have to eat and sleep once in a while (unlike Oblivion's irritating sleeping, it seems to make more sense in Stalker), and can only carry so much stuff (again, without the irritating "I can't move now, but if I drop 2 arrows and those leaves I picked from a plant, I'll be able to run faster than a horse" thing Oblivion does), weapons degrade and ammo isn't too common nor too easy to come by.

It doesn't quite manage everything it set out to do, and it was never going to really, but it has a damn good go. My favourite bit is the English - some of it's terrible, but it actually helps the immersion since the characters involved are presumably speaking it as a second language (in thick Ukranian accents for the most part). The immersion is very good actually - it's one of the most convincing settings I've seen in an FPS or RPG, except for maybe the city sequences in HL2. Well worth getting if you've a half decent rig to play on, and a bit of patching should really help with the remaining issues.

There's a patch online that makes them speak Russian (still with subtitles) or some other language, it takes away the crappy voice acting.

[Doubler]

I finished the game a few days ago (in three different ways, that's all, I think?). The last few bits were a bit disappointing, so I'm just roaming about in the locals up to Pripyat (The game gets rather generic FPS after the red forest - and when you go to the NPP there's no turning back).

Overall not a purchase I regret, though.

I do like the voices too. Imho they sound rather real at times, not perfectly played and acted, not cheesy and horrible (well, a bit, like in real life)
The language makes it all the creepier at times (especially NPP), just a pity I can't understand the jokes

By the way, am I the only one who really enjoys sitting around a campfire after long trips deep into the zone and listen to people talk and play guitar?

Quote

sleep once in a while

You can sleep?
I scoured my manual for it, and thenr read online that it was removed.

[Blood-Pigggy]

Them talking and playing guitar is pretty cool but it starts to get annoying when you notice that they won't ever do anything else with their free time.

[Potatoe]

I hear the area is quite tubular. I might buy this or ArmA.