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

[NoX 9]

I am not even going to try to defend the games animations and character models, I personally find them to be not very good. Even for its time games of a similar drab-military style did better than it -see CoD 4: MW for example- but it does atmosphere extremely well. A large part of what drew people to the series originally was that eery look and feel. No game does decaying Ukranian factories better. The overal visuals and graphics of the game is not bad though, I think it looks just the part! Still, the game is 7 years old and by a fairly small company -now sadly defunct- whose only other game series I can recall was the excellent Cossacks, which brought me much joy.

The gameplay is fun to me. It feels suitably slow and deliberate for the setting, and at the time I especially enjoyed the survival aspect which felt quite diferent and new to me. Up to that point I hadn't played any games that really went into it like STALKER did, and it sparked my love for the whole post-apocalpytic survival genre that came to be in more recent years.

If you didn't like the game, then too bad. Some people do, some people don't! For me Call of Pripyat is the better one so maybe you could try it instead, but I suspect that if you didn't enjoy the others you won't find whats missing in CoP. I don't think the story of the Zone and why people are there is very hard to grasp though, so you must have missed a bunch of oportunities to find out about it.

 

[Jandau]

Wait, you haven't installed some sort of overhaul mod yet which fixes bugs, improves graphics and tweaks the balance? M8, what are you bitching about. Go do that. Oblivion Lost or STALKER 2009 are great for example.

I suggest you reread the first paragraph of my original post

 

[Rad Party God]

Pretty much everyone in this thread has nailed it about what's so appealing about the Stalker series, I'll add my two cents and I'll start off by saying that it's an extremely niche game for a VERY specific group of gamers.

It's the hardcore nature and unpredictability, sure, it's extremely rough, the models look and stare into the void like NPCs from a shitty korean MMO, but to me, the game comes alive when I'm in the wilderness at night with the howling or growling of creatures I can't see and can potentially kill me from a single swipe, I swear, no other horror or survival game has made me so uneasy and afraid of the night like this one.

Also Lab X18. In a good way, I dread entering that place every goddamn time.

Also, it definitely DOES look fantastic in the right circumstances, but I also think that '98 games still look great, so yeah, I'm not the right person to nitpick on graphics.

 

[UltraPic]

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.

You can blame that on the Complete mod, there is a good reason people insist on new player's starting without mods.

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

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.

You can blame that on the Complete mod, there is a good reason people insist on new player's starting without mods.

Eh... it really depends on the mod and game. For Stalker mods though you're pretty much right on the bat. Stalker mods like Misery for example are specifically designed to be absolutely brutal, to the point to where you'll probably want to avoid combat as much as possible unless you can ambush and kill a 3-man squad of bandits in under three seconds.

 

[beastro]

The atmosphere is great, the story, or at least it's explanation, isn't.

Zone of the best moments for me was getting into the underground of Agroprom, finding a corner to hide in an sat watching/listening to the bloodsucker down there hunt down and kill all the military guys before he came at me (had a light source in front of me so I was able to see him coming).

It pissed me off when I got back there in Lost Alpha only to run into it walking into the wall invised - at least the Buron or whatever was a challenge.

As for the looks, I didn't mind it - The Zone is a place more than any other where you'd expect a ton of brown and grey decay and while the graphics have aged, I find it's style appealing - I'm playing Lost Alpha and don't mind it.

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.

Never happened to me. In fact I enjoyed the farmhouse fight so much I'd go back to play around being sneaky on top of gathering extra loot to sell.

Eh... it really depends on the mod and game. For Stalker mods though you're pretty much right on the bat. Stalker mods like Misery for example are specifically designed to be absolutely brutal, to the point to where you'll probably want to avoid combat as much as possible unless you can ambush and kill a 3-man squad of bandits in under three seconds.

I don't understand people's issues with gunfights. Just stay low and keep finding places to pop out from that flank the enemy and they keep staying one step behind you thinking you're where you were last position. Stick with long range weps with scopes and if you don't have enough money/ammo to use the more expensive weapons, the scoped Abakan is still good because the early to mid game vomits its ammo for you to collect so you can afford go overboard using it until you've collected enough NATO ammo or some for the higher end silenced Soviet weps.

If you find yourself against more than a handful of guys nades, especially the large defensive ones can wipe them out quickly, though I prefer to open up with one and pick off the rest as they scramble for cover. If you find yourself stuck in a building, find a place that say from nades being tossed but can cover the entrance to your area and they rush in the bottleneck only to get mowed down.

Also from the sounds of it you have not left the cordon yet. Cordon is a horrible and boring starting area; the game VASTLY improves after it. My first experience with STALKER was EXACTLY the same; i got confused after a few hours and left the game. I gave it another look a few days later and since then I've loved the series. It's a game that you really have to put some effort into but once you are used to its systems it gets a whole lot better. It also does not help that 1/2 of the game's core systems are never explained properly to you. Also it's not really a game for everyone; if you can't get past that barrier to entry that is not your fault.

Sadly I found this only got worse with Lost Alpha. Had that been what they launched vanilla with I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much. Cordon is the same but the Garbage is worse than it's vanilla counterpart with little to do in it with the remainder of the game until you get to Agroprom being a ton of running from place with place with little combat besides downing a few dogs and zombies.

It has left thankful they compressed the vanilla game and forced more combat into it.

 

[SajuukKhar]

STALKER Lost Alpha on Ultra DX10.1 looks better then most AAA games of today...

I dont get it people, even good old Clear Sky is VASTLY better looking then any 7th gen console exclusive and can in many places even win out against current PC titles.

\Not really, it has al lthe same graphical problems the original ones did, such as incredibly low resolution and low polygon armor and character models

 

[Zak757]

Reading this thread made me get STALKER SoC with the complete mod. Love it and about 3 hours in.

MP5 or AkS-74u?

 

[Quadocky]

masculine Ennui and smelly desperation combined with the existential horror of radiation equals something only heavy metal fans could love.