Can someone explain S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to me?

[Jandau]

Recently I've been clearing my backlog of games I missed out over the years and on the list there was S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Now, from everything I've heard, this game is widely loved and considered awesome. And since I love Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I was ready for something like that, with slightly less RPG elements. I installed the game, along with the Complete mod, which from what I understand fixes a ton of bugs and vastly improves the graphics.

After 4-5 hours, the game is poop. Seriously, I don't see how or why this is so praised. Hence, this thread - I can't help but think I'm missing something.

The game is ugly. I'm not talking about the technical level of graphics, the design is drab, boring and ugly. At no point did I go "Wow, that's cool!". At one point I was sent to clear some mutants out of a farm. I was all set to see something cool, but found two amorphous blobs on tiny legs that bobbed around uselessly. Visually, it caused me pain.

The story and setting are disjointed, poorly set up and make little sense. I don't get anyone's motivation, the writing seems like it was done by a 12-year old, there wasn't a single interesting character. I had little idea what I was doing or why, and couldn't care less.

Finally, the gameplay was vanilla FPS. Here's a gun, point it at things and press the fire button. That's all. And it wasn't even well done - the guns were boring and bland, there was next to no feedback concerning me hitting or missing, it felt like an amateurish FPS, like something you'd find on Steam early access for $10.

And then I went into an empty farmhouse and while I was looking around 6 guys with machine guns spawned right in front of me. No warning, no reason, they just popped into existence in front of me and murdered me instantly. At this point I turned the game off.

So can someone please tell me what the hell? I've rarely seen a game that, once I played it, felt so bad, but was at the same time so universally praised by everyone I've heard talk about it. I couldn't find anything enjoyable in the 5ish hours I put into it. I kept waiting for it to get good, but it never did. Not even a little. And I like games like it, it's not a situation where a person plays a genre they hate and then acts surprised when he hates it. I like shooters, I like survival games, I like postapocalyptic settings. This game just did all of these things remarkably poorly...

What's the deal here?

 

[SajuukKhar]

People enjoy STALKER because its a very hardcore game. Even with some of the best armor in the game, you can get insta killed by some NPCs if you arent expecting it. Which panders to the "every modern game is too casual easy" crowd who thinks every game should be "one shot you die" hard to not be casual. Aka, 90% of the reason The Souls games are so liked.

The story is also disjointed, partially because of terrible translations, but also because your not supposed to get it until near the end. You dont understand anything until you remember who you are because you dont understand anything about yourself.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

For one, it is a seven year old game by now and it has, just like most games that are that old, not aged well. The deal with the STALKER series is that it was among the first FPS-series that introduced an open world, serious inventory management, realistic gun physics, survival horror elements and an AI that was very good for its' time and managed to fuse all these elements into something that actually worked. STALKER also has an atmosphere that few games, even today, can match. It nails the oppressive and isolated feeling of being a lone stalker in a harsh, dangerous zone full of things that are out to get you and in some of the later levels (the research labs in particular) it has some really impressive ambiance.

But at the end of the day, it is a game from 2007 and it can't escape its' own legacy of clunky gameplay mechanics, a story that was severely shortened and altered as funding ran out and a development process that was both too long and too messy. For what it is worth Call of Pripyat is a much better game, managing to actually take those things that worked in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky and making it all fit together.

So I suppose the tl dr is the same as always when these threads are brought up: You can't judge a game that's almost a decade old against the standards of modern games, it has to be placed and judged within the context of the time and gaming market/culture it was released at.

 

[Jandau]

People enjoy STALKER because its a very hardcore game. Even with some of the best armor in the game, you can get insta killed by some NPCs if you arent expecting it.

which panders to the "every modern game is too casual east" crowd who htinks every game should be one shot you die hard to nto be casual.

The story is also disjointed, partially because of terrible translations, but also because your not supposed to get it until the end. You dont understand anything until you remember who you are becuase you dont understand anything about yourself.

I didn't notice it being particularly hard. I died twice because I went to places I wasn't supposed to go yet, and that's fine. I also died 3 times due to random bullshit or bugs, like the 6 guys spawning on top of me that I mentioned, which isn't the result of the game being "hardcore", it's a result of bad design.

As for the player not being supposed to get the story, that isn't the problem. You have amnesia, I'm OK with that. Amnesia is useful for setting things up so the setting needs to be explained to the player. But nobody tells me anything. Why am I doing anything anyone tells me to do? Why can't I ask for basic info about the area? Why the hell are people even around Chernobyl? Vague is one thing, but this is just bad and nonsensical.

Compare it to, say, Fallout 3. At the start, when you leave the Vault, you effectively know nothing about the world you're in, pretty much the equivalent of amnesia. So what's the first thing you do? You go to a nearby town and start asking people what's going on, who are you people and in general, what the fuck? The game uses your assumed lack of knowledge properly and provides you with information.

STALKER just tells you nothing, doesn't let you ask any questions and expects you to go with it. It's not being vague, it's poorly designed.

 

[SajuukKhar]

As for the player not being supposed to get the story, that isn't the problem. You have amnesia, I'm OK with that. Amnesia is useful for setting things up so the setting needs to be explained to the player. But nobody tells me anything. Why am I doing anything anyone tells me to do? Why can't I ask for basic info about the area? Why the hell are people even around Chernobyl? Vague is one thing, but this is just bad and nonsensical.

All of these questions are answered in like the first 20 minutes of the game.

You are doing these things for these people for information about STRELOK, the only name in your PDA when you were found, that had a note saying kill the strelok, thus making it the only lead you have to go on about figuring out who you were.

You can ask about info about the area, you can pretty much every NPC "whats up" or "heard any rumors" and they tell you things about the zone.

They tell you they are around Chernobyl, because, ever since the zone was created, powerful artifacts worth tons of money have also started being created as well, they hunt artifacts for money.

, like the 6 guys spawning on top of me that I mentioned, which isn't the result of the game being "hardcore", it's a result of bad design.

Ive never even heard of that happening honestly.

 

[Muspelheim]

No, I cannot. You tried it out and you didn't have fun. It happens, it's as simple as that. Some games just doesn't connect, for various reasons.

For me, STALKER comes to life at its most when I'm being hunted by things I can't see, inside a dilapidated factory and with the geiger counter counting down my remaining time on Earth. It's the atmosphere, and that is one of the most difficult things to quantify in a game. And sometimes, that isn't enough to reconcile for the defficiensies.

 

[JazzJack2]

Well difficulty, challenge and extremely well modeled bullet physics are a large part of the reason people like it but the biggest reason why I personally love STALKER (and why lots of other people do) is the atmosphere, there is simply no game I think of that even comes close to the atmosphere found in STALKER.

The reason you may be finding it so shit though is because you are playing Complete mod, the first time you play you should only be using bug fixes and graphical overall mods anyway instead of gameplay overall mods. But Complete is shit even if you have already completed the game vanilla and I seriously don't understand why anybody recommends it because it basically spoils the whole game.

 

[MysticSlayer]

The game is ugly. I'm not talking about the technical level of graphics, the design is drab, boring and ugly. At no point did I go "Wow, that's cool!". At one point I was sent to clear some mutants out of a farm. I was all set to see something cool, but found two amorphous blobs on tiny legs that bobbed around uselessly. Visually, it caused me pain.

Keep in mind, the game came out in 2007 and was originally planned to come out in 2004 I think. That's why the graphics are so dated, even by 2007 standards, and why those mutants look like "blobs".

As for the aesthetics, it's a post-apocalyptic setting meant to give off a lonely, foreboding atmosphere. It's sort of supposed to look that way. Fallout 3 itself had a rather drab aesthetic, but it did have the benefit of being released four years after when STALKER originally was supposed to be released.

And then I went into an empty farmhouse and while I was looking around 6 guys with machine guns spawned right in front of me. No warning, no reason, they just popped into existence in front of me and murdered me instantly. At this point I turned the game off.

I've put in about 75-100 hours into Shadow of Chernobyl, and I've never had that happen once. I'm not saying it can't happen or that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are some glitch-free heaven (far from it), but don't think that that experience happened to everyone.

But nobody tells me anything. Why am I doing anything anyone tells me to do? Why can't I ask for basic info about the area? Why the hell are people even around Chernobyl?

Except the game does explain a lot to you. If you're paying attention to conversations and actually talking to people, you can learn early on that STALKERs were drawn to The Zone because of artifacts that were incredibly valuable due to almost supernatural properties, and many of them hoped to get rich by braving the hazards of The Zone and getting these artifacts out to people who would pay them well for their work. Over time, factions like Duty and Freedom began to form around about how to deal with what happened, and STALKERs began finding new ways to pursue money and power, such as taking contracts that were different than just going after artifacts. Marked One happens to be a STALKER with amnesia who had one of these contracts on his PDA: "Kill Strelok", a well-known yet mysterious STALKER who had found a route to the center of The Zone, which was a place thought impossible to reach. Essentially, as a STALKER, it is your job to carry out that mission, especially if you want obtain the money, resources, and respect necessary to survive in The Zone. Of course, there is also the possibility that tracking Strelok down will also help you recover your memory.

And it isn't like any of this is some incredibly mysterious thing. Most of it is clearly stated within the first thirty minutes of the game, with most of the rest being heavily implied.

But as for why people enjoyed the game: It offered an interesting atmosphere that few shooters at the time did. While still being a shooter at heart, it gave a sense of vulnerability in a mostly uncaring world, plentiful resource management more similar to RPG games, a rather advanced AI, and a general sense that the world was alive and that much of what happened wasn't scripted. Yeah, a lot of the novelty has been seriously lost over the years due to all the other post-apocalyptic RPG/shooter hybrids that have been made since it released, but it still has a sense of atmosphere that few games offer.

Of course, it is sort of hard to quantify atmosphere and it is a mostly subjective experience. However, that is the reason many people liked it. Personally, I agree with you that Fallout 3 was a better game, but I still appreciate Shadow of Chernobyl for what it was.

 

[Thyunda]

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked the slow pace, I liked the desolate tone, I liked the sheer unpredictability of the game. I still would, if I could get the willpower to play through it again.

See, the game is so unpredictable, an essential questgiver got nailed in the fucking head by a sniper. Which, might I add, was the sniper I was tasked with killing. So this fucking sniper killed the guy who ordered me to kill him while I was on my way to beat him to death with his rifle.
Some bullshit right there.

 

[EmperorZinyak]

It's meant to be a game in which you are no more powerful than your adversaries, and you must use your superior human brain to win. In most games, you're given the option to brute force your way past most encounters. It's difficult but possible. But in this game, unless you are extremely patient you will probably end up running from several encounters, which I've never really done before unless I'm in an mmo and the enemies are way higher leveled than me. But in this game there are cases where I'm simply outgunned and need to slink away. When wandering the world you need to constantly keep your head on a swivel. There are a lot of cool horror elements too, and the game is very atmospheric overall.

 

[communist gamer]

It's a game that makes you just a dude, not some powerhouse or anything. It has a good story and ok writing. A killer atmosphere (i.m.h.o better then the one in fallout 3) You can learn a lot by talking to people so if your telling me you dont know anything then either you have some kind of bug or your lazy and dont talk/listen to people. Anything can kill you and when braving the zone you have to think and be prepared, you know like you would have to normally. Its popular for the same reason that dark souls is popular, because it dose a lot of showing but not telling, dose not hold your heand all the time, lets you explore and find things on your own, and is more about the world then the main cherecter.

 

[DrOswald]

If you went into Stalker expecting an experience like fallout then that is probably the problem. Stalker is not like Fallout. It is not about character progression, or about a story, or about doing interesting quests. It isn't even about seeing or shooting something interesting.

Stalker is a game about what so many games claim to be about. Survival. That is the one overarching objective. Go in to the zone, complete your mission, get out of the zone. Don't die doing it.

The complete mod makes the game significantly easier. I hope you can see why this is a problem in a game entirely about not dying in an extremely hostile environment. Even so, if you never legitimately died then you probably were not far in at all. You probably never made it out of the "tutorial" area. You will be insta killed by snipers you never saw or simply run down and eaten by dogs. Frankly, if you quit because you were killed in a completely unfair way, even if it was by a glitch, then Stalker isn't the game for you. Stalker comes from the school of game design where they count on you save scumming.

I will be the first one to admit that Stalker isn't for everyone. Stalker is a game that caters to a specific type of person in a way that had never been done effectively before Stalker and hasn't been done properly since. This is why you have seen so much praise for the game. It isn't for everyone, but the people who it is for love it.

Also, the game is buggy as hell no matter what you do. Save often and expect strange bugs, they will happen.

 

[Continuity]

For one, it is a seven year old game by now and it has, just like most games that are that old, not aged well. The deal with the STALKER series is that it was among the first FPS-series that introduced an open world, serious inventory management, realistic gun physics, survival horror elements and an AI that was very good for its' time and managed to fuse all these elements into something that actually worked. STALKER also has an atmosphere that few games, even today, can match. It nails the oppressive and isolated feeling of being a lone stalker in a harsh, dangerous zone full of things that are out to get you and in some of the later levels (the research labs in particular) it has some really impressive ambiance.

But at the end of the day, it is a game from 2007 and it can't escape its' own legacy of clunky gameplay mechanics, a story that was severely shortened and altered as funding ran out and a development process that was both too long and too messy. For what it is worth Call of Pripyat is a much better game, managing to actually take those things that worked in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky and making it all fit together.

So I suppose the tl dr is the same as always when these threads are brought up: You can't judge a game that's almost a decade old against the standards of modern games, it has to be placed and judged within the context of the time and gaming market/culture it was released at.

Bingo.

Even in its heyday Stalker was widely acknowledged to be a buggy mess that fell short of its promise, but its very much a rough diamond. Call of Pripyat is definitely the more solid of the three games but its also a little too clean, something is lost with the confusion of the earlier games; still I've played chernobyl and clear sky once each and I've played pripyat several times, so its definitely doing something right.

These games are about freedom, atmosphere, grit, and Russian charm. Not about cool things, graphics, or wow factor.

Also, its a survival game that's pre-minecraft, or in other words its a survival game that pre-dates the entire survival game genre. In that context its easy to understand why it got so much love.

, like the 6 guys spawning on top of me that I mentioned, which isn't the result of the game being "hardcore", it's a result of bad design.

Ive never even heard of that happening honestly.

Oh it does happen, quite a bit actually especially in areas where there are programmed "waves" of enemies, sometimes those waves will spawn into an area you just cleared in a very disconcerting fashion.

@Jandau also, you state you've played 4-5 hours of the game, well to be fair I was just as mystified as you in the first few hours. My advice, ditch the mod and get out of the starting area. If you don't feel like you have the patience, which is fair enough then consider just skipping to call of pripyat.

 

[Skeleon]

It's supposed to be drab and depressing. It's a broken place, the Zone. The people there are dubious characters, although some are more reliable than others. The best part about it aren't the MMORPG-like quests to gather ten dog tails but to just go out exploring, finding artifacts, hidden caches, investigating industrial buildings, clearing out bandits etc..

All that said, I didn't like Shadow of Chernobyl nearly as much as Call of Pripyat. Clear Sky is the game that first introduced a lot of the features that make Call of Pripyat so great (like artifact detectors, upgradeable weapons, larger areas for exploration) but Clear Sky was buggy and problematic in many ways. Call of Pripyat is the best STALKER game to date in my view. If you don't like Shadow of Chernobyl, you'll probably not like Clear Sky for some of its issues. Skip both and try Call of Pripyat, perhaps.

Or maybe you just aren't the kind of player who likes these types of games: Very difficult (especially on my favourite, the Master difficulty), kind of depressing, sort of post-apocalyptic (even though that only applies to the Zone as far as we know), very open, lots of opportunities for exploration and side missions, but a rather slim primary storyline. You've got to want to go out and look at the world, find the hidden places and caches. Don't expect to have them hold your hand and guide you through because they won't.

 

[Trizzo]

snip

What you are playing? Stalker SoC or CoP? What mod? Because if you're playing Call of Prip with Misery mod your gona have a bad time and if your playing Shadow of Chernobal of course the game isn't going to look great it's old.

STALKER is amazing but if your looking for a story or something outside of the gameplay you're gona have a bad time.

Why is it 'amazing' you ask. Gameplay, tough AI and atmosphere.

STALKER does not hold your hand. It will tell you where to go but nothing about getting there. It will give you some seemingly innocuous mission which is just going to slam you. You can't tank damage, regnerate or even heal in enough time to not die to single gunshot wound starting out. You have to creep, scout, eek out an existence and progress. You have to run from gunfights you can't win. Otherwise you just going to QQ atfer a quick save grind. It apppears that you didn't even more than a few hundred meters from the start of the game...

 

[Ragsnstitches]

The Original Vanilla STALKER did not age well in most regards and it was sort of a disasterpiece. The development of the game started somewhere back in early 2000. After nearly 5 years it finely came out, and it was full of bugs and poorly implemented features (stealth being the worst). But as others have said, at the time it NAILED atmosphere. For those that endured the bugs and accepted the game for what it was, they found a diamond in the rough.

Today it has survived in the hearts of many by a very passionate modding community. STALKER Complete being the weakest of the major mods (because it only refines the core game, which was already lacking), other mods enhance the games strength which was atmosphere and a well modeled ballistic system. Currently my favorite mod is Autumn Aurora 2, for oozing with atmosphere and adding content that was missing from the base game or broken on delivery.

The sequels were hit and miss.

Clear Sky has mechanical improvements over STALKER but is often regarded as a lesser game and it was, somehow, buggier then the original. It's still worth the experience for those who enjoyed SoC, but it falls short.

Call of Pripyat is the definitive vanilla experience as it implemented much of what was lost in the original and as of the last patch is the most stable vanilla game, but at the time of its release it felt really dated, as it was based off of a modified engine that was old by the time Shadow of Chernobyl was released.

Ultimately the series can't be called anything but niche. It's got a quality to it that I and others really appreciate, but has enough going wrong to put everybody else off. If nothing enticed you about the vanilla game, no amount of modding will save it and I doubt the sequels will change your mind either.

 

[Zipa]

I can't speak for others but for me personally the aesthetics, art direction and atmosphere are just amazing. I like the urban decay theme it has to it and it does it very well, especially with some of the graphical overhaul mods that are out there. That and Chernobyl has always interested me.

Plus as others have said its more difficult than your standard shooter, you are not some individual with awesome powers that let you kill and act without consequence you are as powerful as the NPCs and maybe even a bit less so at the start of the game.

There is a good collection of mods around to that range from simple graphical and bug fixes to full on added content and hardcore modes that remove the UI and add things like having to eat and cook to survive.