MetaChat REGISTER   ||   LOGIN   ||   IMAGES ARE OFF   ||   RECENT COMMENTS




artphoto by splunge
artphoto by TheophileEscargot
artphoto by Kronos_to_Earth
artphoto by ethylene

Home

About

Search

Archives

Mecha Wiki

Metachat Eye

Emcee

IRC Channels

IRC FAQ


 RSS


Comment Feed:

RSS

07 April 2007

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the S.T.E.A.L.E.R. [More:]

Haw haw haw. I am so clever.

Anywho..somebody is in trouble.
Wow. If they did grab those files from Doom3, I can't believe they were dumb enough not to change the file names. Stalker was rushed out at the end, so I'll bet someone was going to change them, but ran out of time.
posted by Zack_Replica 07 April | 10:18
Apparently there are some things from Battlefield 2 in there as well.
posted by weretable and the undead chairs 07 April | 10:38
What the fuck?

Well, I just finished uninstalling it. It sucked, and this was the last straw. I'd return the damn thing if EB games would take it back...
posted by CitrusFreak12 07 April | 12:23
Hey, CF12 - why did it suck? I was thinking of picking it up sometime soon, and I'm interested in what you thought was bad (and good) about it.
posted by Zack_Replica 07 April | 12:35
I can't find the exact post I'm looking for (their forum system on gsc SUCKS), but I'll try and explain why it sucks:

I feel lied to. 30 square kilometers that you can fully explore with no boundaries! Completely open ended, non-linear gameplay! Vehicles! HA! Bullshit. There are barbed-wire fences surrounding each "level" that prevent you from leaving it, or sometimes invisible radiation that doesn't even set off your Geiger counter and ends up killing you within a few seconds unless you have the proper supplies to get rid of it. The gameplay, much like the levels, is COMPLETELY LINEAR. GTA was more "open ended" and "non-linear" than this thing! No vehicles either!

You would think that since the world the game is based in is doused in radiation and populated with deadly anomalies and equally deadly mutant creatures, that it would be pretty sparse as far as people were concerned. I come across more people in a single level in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than I do walking across campus to class. It's ridiculous! There are so many people there just hanging around!

The engine is chunky and I say this running a not even year old very nice Dell laptop, I have to play the game on the lowest settings. The LOWEST SETTINGS. Just to get sub-par framerates! All the "trading" all the "side quests", they're so utterly bland and repetitive that you can't help but do the main storyline out of sheer boredom. You can only clear out the same camp of bandits, destroy all the mutants in such and such an area, or find some modified gun or body armor so many times before you want to bang your head against the keyboard.

This game had potential. So much potential! I waited a solid six years for this game, and actively watched it in it's development. This was the single largest disappointment in my personal gaming history since... you know, to be honest I don't think there's even a precedent for this. Congratulations, GSC and THQ, your abortion of an FPS has become a benchmark of awfulness. When faced with a not so pleasing game in the future, you will most likely hear me utter the phrase, "Well, it wasn't as bad as S.T.A.L.K.E.R." Although, let's be honest; to match S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s Summit of Suck would be an achievement in it's own right.

My utter disdain for this game can only be truly expressed in the words of David Thorpe:
This was a nauseating bacchanal of badness. This was an all-star gala tribute to sucking. This was a star-studded, cast-of-thousands fucking historical Roman epic of shit.
posted by CitrusFreak12 07 April | 13:12
I have played through it and I'll give you my thoughts too.

Things take an inordinate amount of damage before they can be killed and it is not entirely consistent in what can bring down an enemy. If you shoot someone in the head, you usually kill them with one shot. But early on this is all but impossible unless you get really close and they usually kill you first if you try that. Sometimes you can step in a bush or something and make noise when sneaking up on someone, but sometimes they hear you coming for no apparent reason. At the same time I have shot at bandits, missed them and hit a wall right behind them, and they did not notice!

Compared to other shooters it is extremely hard to hit things. Have a head lined up, you might hit a leg instead or hit a wall well behind and off to one side. The game attempts to make firearms more realistic but while it works at times, sometimes it goes overboard and makes guns harder to fire/aim with than they really are.

I like that an arm or leg shot is not fatal as it can be in a lot of shooters, but if you shoot a man repeatedly in the chest, he might continue to attack you as well. The wild dogs and boars can be hit six or seven times in the torso before they fall. I have also seen them fall after one shot that appeared to hit a non-vital area. And ammo is not that easy to come by, especially early in the game. There are already some mods that make the difficulty more consistent, make damage more realistic. If you shoot someone several times in one arm, they stay up but if you shoot them in the chest they go down. One even adds bleeding so an NPC shot in the thigh might bleed to death over time. But without mods the game is pretty inconsistent and it is fairly frustrating early on because you have such limited ammo available. If you could depend on consistent damage from your weapons it would be less of an issue.

Bandits and similar enemies are very annoying because they respawn. You fight hard to clear out a warehouse and then suddenly it is full again. You might stop to do something in an area that you have completely cleared out and while you are busy an enemy will spawn right on top of you. You get sent on a ton of missions to kill x bandits or retrieve y and they get very repetitive and boring early on. The game looks very good at times and some of the effects such as lightning revealing your position at night are very nice, but again the a.i. is inconsistent and it might let an enemy that is standing near and looking towards you miss you or one might "see" you when you are hiding behind a large object and not moving or making noise.

The game is not as open as they claimed. They use fences, areas of stronger radiation and a few other tricks to keep you in bounds. It might not be as much of a corridor-shooter on rails as say Doom 3, but it is certainly not as open as a Gothic III or Oblivion or even remotely close to that. I can understand some of this, but the game could have been MUCH more open than it is without problems. Plus you see areas beyond fences that you will never get to visit. Simple short fences can not be climbed over or jumped, I have to think they could have at least came up with a better containment system if they didn't want you to explore. I ran into a few areas that it appeared I could get into, no obvious obstruction and yet I was unable to access them. Like running into invisible walls.

There are some bugs, some really annoying, some not so much. The first patch that came out made saved games unusable, so you deal with the problems or you start over. This very very delayed game still feels very very rushed. The people that seem to like it the best are the ones with a bunch of mods installed and I will probably give it another go in a few weeks when it has been patched some more and the mods have fixed the rest of the major issues.
posted by weretable and the undead chairs 07 April | 13:36
Wow, that's really too bad. I'd been looking forward to this for years as well, and I was going to upgrade my vid card next week and check it out. Things like the fences/invisible walls and unrealistic damage (enemies being harder to kill than the game mechanics should allow) only end up making me look for cheat codes.
Guess I'll get the vid card and just take another stab at making Oblivion run on my system again and wait until Stalker is loaded out with fixes and player mods. Maybe.
posted by Zack_Replica 07 April | 13:47
I've had a brain seizure and can't remember if PCI Express vid cards are compatible with PCI slots. My motherboard's a little old. :( Help?
posted by Zack_Replica 07 April | 15:06
Nope--PCI-E is a different slot.
posted by box 07 April | 15:14
Poop. AGP for me then.
posted by Zack_Replica 07 April | 15:15
oh, and thanks, box
posted by Zack_Replica 07 April | 15:16
Three Point Status Update, Weekend Style || I don't want Vista!

HOME  ||   REGISTER  ||   LOGIN