Yes, this has me somewhat anxious as well. I pretty much threw CS away. It felt too action-oriented and pretty much ruined STALKER for me, but if they're going back to the stalkers=loners just trying to get by thing, I'm interested. Especially if they're trying to move back toward the accurate reconstruction of the Chernobyl area instead of fictionalizing it like in CS again. That thread says that GSC made some substantial optimization progress with their X-Ray engine, also.The Rogue Wolf said:
As for your sidenote: Yes. I usually got Duty pissed at me. And yes, it does make the Bar a no-go area, unless you freaking rule like me. (You might remember from a long time ago: I'm the guy that thought it was too easy on Master difficulty.) Get an assassination quest, target is in bar. Hm. Sneak in at night under cover of a storm, get past the first guards, go between the inner patrol routes, find my mark at a campfire with a couple buddies, leap out from behind a sat-up mattress, AK-74 with silencer in hand, aim-fire-aim-fire-aim-fire. Dead. Dead. Dead. Sneak out. Goddamn I loved that game.
Yes, that's my favorite book. The game was, honestly, a terrible adaptation of the book, I thought. The book seemed to flirt more with the idea of the Zone being impossible to understand than the game did. They both kept saying "It can't be understood, makes no sense" but seriously, it was pretty easy to "get it" in the game. The book was guilty as well, but I think that the Strugatsky brothers at least tried to make it a little less cut-and-dry with anomalies, adding a few more freaky bits in the first experience with the Zone.Gormourn said:
Something I think I might like to see is a more faithful adaptation of Roadside Picnic in game form. If they made the Zone more of a single-person or small-group type thing instead of having a bunch of stalkers in it at once, and focusing on trying to really get the weird physics (that is, physics that are physics but don't correlate with reality, like mis-cast shadows, things rolling uphill, positional gravity effects, hallucination (a game with really good hallucination mechanics would be nice), or other weird things) working well, it would be really cool. If some company could truly make a level with physics and goings-on that were impossible to predict or understand, my life would be complete. Just imagine the multiplayer possibilities!
