Stalker. Convince me.

[GiantRaven]

but you can agree with me that you get more often hungry during one day irl. you know 3 big meals a day and 2 snacks?

Yeah, but I don't tend to suddenly drop dead because of it. =P

 

[maturin]

I played SoC and liked it, liked the mods as well.

Would you recommend Clear Sky or CoP? Is either of them open-ended? Which has more and better landscapes and faction wars? Which has better realism and overhaul mods?

 

[Mr. 47]

There is an old Russian multiplayer demo on the internet somewhere. I found it, lets you do basic movements and fire a handgun, if you want to test out if the game will play.

My specs just scrape by SoC and CS (CoP won't work it seems. :|) and they seem less then yours, and I'm playing on Windows 7, so you should be good. A friend on steam voutches for the game, and what bits of it I have experimented with seem decent.

Off Topic.
This MAY be because of Windows 7, or my shite video card, but SoC, CS, and CoP take between 20-40 minutes to load a save. Anyone have this issue? Also, and more importantly, when I start CoP, when the adjectives pop up, the game freezes, any ideas? Customer service helped for a week and now won't respond... -.-

 

[Asuka Soryu]

Umm, okay. I know what you did last summer! Oh, wait... you mean a game called Stalker. Ha ha ha... Ha...

 

[Skuffyshootster]

I can't recommend it (at least the first one). I tried to like it, I really did, but some quirks ruined the whole feel the game was going for by leaving you without any solid guidance.

But apparently I'm in the minority, so you might as well buy it.

 

[Mekado]

Great games! I absolutely love the atmosphere, and the AI can be a real challenge on the higher difficulty settings. Mods like Oblivion Lost make the original Shadow almost perfect.

If I was to recommend anything with the Stalker series, it would be to completely avoid Clear Sky. The other two games are much much better. They're also a metric fuckton more engrossing and atmospheric, as well as not having a bunch of irritating gameplay mechanics, such as the bandits that mug you, the homing grenades, and enemies that are much more resistant to bullets than you are.

Yes, that too. There was one instance when I managed to clear an exit point of a map, with only a handful of bullets and a single med pack left. I left the map, and was greeted by half a dozen bandits. I managed to escape back, whereupon I found out that enemies respawn rather quickly. Yeah, it can be unfair...
Oh, and the part with the machine gun: when you first leave the swamp level to go to the Gordon (the first level of Shadow), you're greeted with a machine gun. Here's something the game doesn't tell you: you cannot get down from your spawn point atop the hill - you will always get killed. You're supposed to go back, even though Clear Sky, your starting faction, is no longer friendly towards you. I gave up on that game for a while after that...

Actually you can go down the hill, it's hard as hell you need to time your sprint and cover but it's doable.

It still takes me 2-3 tries to do it and i'm a veteran, i'll agree it's needlessly difficult, especially for something they throw at you right out of the "tutorial"

 

[Mekado]

I played SoC and liked it, liked the mods as well.

Would you recommend Clear Sky or CoP? Is either of them open-ended? Which has more and better landscapes and faction wars? Which has better realism and overhaul mods?

I'd recommend both if you liked Soc, for different reasons.

The faction wars is really nice in Clear sky (especially with mods), it's one of the main game mechanics, it's barely an afterthought in CoP (you can help freedom or duty take over ONE location, that's the full extent of wars in CoP)

As for landscapes and general eye-candy Call of Prypiat looks much better, it's also open-ended, when you finish the last mission they give you the option to stay behind and "sandbox", the npc's will now move around more, and will also enter prypiat itself (which is only army+monolith before that)

CoP also made a BEAST out of the F2000, with the auto-targeting system (dosen't target for you but highlights hostiles in the scope) though my favorite remains the trusty G36K


...Anyways, both are good, for different reasons

Edit: Oh OH! you can also run in a (modified) exoskeleton in CoP, think running tank

 

[GiantRaven]

Would you recommend Clear Sky or CoP? Is either of them open-ended? Which has more and better landscapes and faction wars? Which has better realism and overhaul mods?

CoP is more open-ended than CS, as it features a greater number of unique side-quests. I'd personally say it was better visually and had a higher level of 'realism' to it. It doesn't have any faction wars though.

I'm not really sure which of the two has better mods, since I only really explored that with the first game. I imagine it might be Clear Sky though, simply because it has been out for longer.

 

[Kenko]

Play all of them. Makes no sense playing just 1 or two.

 

[Yureina]

I've yet to really sink much time into STALKER yet, but what little I have seen I most certainly have loved. It does very well with atmosphere, is difficult but not too brutal, and seems to be a pretty good post-apocalyptic RPG. Fallout still is my favorite of all time, but this series does have some high quality to it.

Might as well check it out. I bought Clear Sky today myself, having already owned the other two.

 

[kzgonuts63]

There are enough differences between the three to make all of them worth playing, but they are buggy beyond belief! Pretty much ruined the experience for me

 

[doodger]

This series is honestly scary. It has great ambiance, and is very fun. It is, however hard. IN the first quarter of shadow of chernobyl, your gun shoots small plastic pellets instead of bullets. When i got my hand on a gun, it became even more epic!

 

[Merkavar]

i played the first stalker game. it was good, unique and fun.

bloody squid faces cloaking monsters

 

[Hashime]

Well Kaui... I can never spell your name, also hello from the realm of minecraft, it is the most atmospheric game I have ever played. My roommate knocked on my door and I freaked out thinking it was a monster from the game. That went on for about 4 days after playing it....

The only downside is that it is as buggy as people say. Fortunately there are community fixes available.

 

[Calbeck]

I just got bored with it. I ended up getting two of the DLCs, seeing great potential in the original game, but...I kept getting this strong MMO-ish feel where I needed to "check aggro" and "pull mobs" and the like. But this alone wasn't really what put me off --- it's when I realized that your role in the central combat mechanic is deliberately crippled.

See, it's SUPPOSED to be your equipment, and therefore the strategy behind your loadout, which determines what you can do. Get better guns, for example, if you want to be more accurate and such.

But what I actually GOT was enemies who were dead shots with the same exact weapons that, for me, were horribly inaccurate. If I poked out from behind cover, the AI rarely seemed to miss, no matter how little I exposed myself. Meanwhile, when THEY poked out at the same range and *I* fired on them, this same gun (in the same or better condition) was sending shot groups all over the place. I had to hose down an area to get one hit, while at the same rate of fire I was taking numerous hits.

This, mind you, on Normal difficulty.

So I couldn't improve my own skills to get AS GOOD as (let alone better than) the AI, and these awesome weapons went to crap the moment I got my mitts on them, making each small improvement along the way on my own part feel like I was getting ripped off each time.

It made the game feel like a chore, especially when this "open-world environment" nonetheless kept choke-pointing and thus reducing progress to a slog.