S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Stalker) Thread

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

Man, I want to give the game a chance, but I've dropped the difficulty to Rookie due to all the spawn fuckery. If stealth was worth a damn that'd be one thing, but it isn't, so it's not.

 

[Point Man]

Stalker 2 being a complete mess has compelled me to actually give Shadow of Chernobyl a proper try, so far I can confidently say that Unreal 5 is a fucking cancerous game engine and any game made on it is bound to either be 150+ gigs or a horrible, blurry, unoptimized mess.

 

[tintiddy]

Stalker 2 being a complete mess has compelled me to actually give Shadow of Chernobyl a proper try, so far I can confidently say that Unreal 5 is a fucking cancerous game engine and any game made on it is bound to either be 150+ gigs or a horrible, blurry, unoptimized mess.

After uninstalling 2 I decided to finally take the dive and try GAMMA and it is utterly insane to me how much better it looks and runs. I have a very beefy GPU and I could just barely run 2 at 60 FPS while upscaling and even then the game was smeary as shit and had horrible stuttering. On the other end, GAMMA runs maxed out at 120 FPS native res and the game looks crisp as fuck with no temporal vaseline in sight. It's unreal (pun intended) to me what we lost in the insane race for graphical "fidelity". It seems to be okay to sacrifice absolutely everything if you can make a screenshot where the main character's ass hairs are rendered physically "correct".

 

[Something Awful]

I'm enjoying playing this on easy, since getting mauled to death by mutants in the dark is not my idea of a good time. Haven't run into any significant bugs.

 

[Miller]

Do I need mods if I want to play the first game?

You are a moron. The old games were janky pieces of shit that did unconventional and cool things which made them worth playing despite their problems. Stalker 2 is a shittily designed Far Cry clone with a Soviet sorry I mean UKRANIAN reskin. I really can't stand your kind of attitude: "Why are you complaining? Old product also bad LOL welcome to teh zone!!!". Get some standards.

That's what I don't understand. I keep seeing fans of the previous games do damage control by memeing the bugs as "part of the game, lol". What was the point of switching from their in-house engine to Unreal if the game is buggy and the AI brain dead?

 

[tintiddy]

Do I need mods if I want to play the first game?

If you've never ever played Stalker before I would really recommend just playing the original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl with if any mod maybe the Zone Reclamation Project installed, which mostly contains bugfixes. The game is really good unmodded, albeit a bit different to what you might expect Stalker to be if you've only watched YouTube videos on the larger overhauls. Play on the highest difficulty because paradoxically it is much easier and more consistent. The guns (including yours) act like pea shooters otherwise.

If you play that and like it, play Clear Sky. If you like that (or don't like it but want more Stalker), play Call of Pripyat. If you want more after that, try Anomaly or GAMMA (the latter being a tailored modpack for the former). These are huge reworks based on a custom version of the engine and include most if not all content from all three games stitched together into a massive world with tons of shit to do. You can play as any faction, customize an insane number of settings and there's more systems (survival, weapon mechanics, crafting, squad, etc.) than you can experience in a lifetime. You can really get lost for days playing these versions, I seriously have to force myself to put it down once I get sucked in.

If you just immediately want the "Stalker experience" as the community thinks of it you can skip the original games and go straight for Anomaly/GAMMA, but you will probably be overwhelmed by the amount of locations and game mechanics. You also miss out on experiencing the original game, which for all its faults is an incredibly atmospheric single player experience, and I think it's maybe hard to go back to it if you've already experienced the overhauls.

I keep seeing fans of the previous games do damage control by memeing the bugs as "part of the game, lol"

It's cope by people who are incapable of critical thought and who think that faults with a product they love reflect on them. Power to you if you enjoy the sequel, but why even join the discussion if all you are going to say is "well I think it's actually good that it is bad"? Like are you getting paid to say shit like that or what lol.

 

[Chapalapachapa]

first ctd lol

 

[30+GameOvers]

Do I need mods if I want to play the first game?

That's what I don't understand. I keep seeing fans of the previous games do damage control by memeing the bugs as "part of the game, lol". What was the point of switching from their in-house engine to Unreal if the game is buggy and the AI brain dead?

So they can fool console tards into buying their game, knowing full well most fans will just pirate it on PC. Obviously you have to entire the console cattle with "gud graphix" or else they will start mooing and goo back to COD or NBA.
BTW "fans" copying about the game being buggy is hilarious, since I see this shit every time Bethesda releases something too.

 

[There Is Light At The End]

Stalker 2 being a complete mess has compelled me to actually give Shadow of Chernobyl a proper try, so far I can confidently say that Unreal 5 is a fucking cancerous game engine and any game made on it is bound to either be 150+ gigs or a horrible, blurry, unoptimized mess.

Nah, it's 4k textures. That's true bloat. Every game should have OPTIONAL 4k textures pack, that download SEPARATELY from main game. Example - fallout 4. Without 4k but with all add-ons is 34 gigs. 4k textures add extra 40.

 

[SpookyObserver]

Nah, it's 4k textures. That's true bloat. Every game should have OPTIONAL 4k textures pack, that download SEPARATELY from main game. Example - fallout 4. Without 4k but with all add-ons is 34 gigs. 4k textures add extra 40.

Fucking fortnite lets you omit files to reduce download size, its ridiculous it isnt common practice to decide what you feel is essential for your gameplay.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Fucking fortnite lets you omit files to reduce download size, its ridiculous it isnt common practice to decide what you feel is essential for your gameplay.

There is a theory going around that this is intentional, to make sure you only play a few select games since you won't have space on your hard drive for anything more. COD has been ridiculous about this, being big enough lately that it could take an entire smaller hard drive all to itself.

 

[ostronaut]

i haven't touched xray shit in years but if i recall anomaly still has the janky ass half baked CoC squad system where instead of every squad being spawned and then given tasks by the AI director so its all controlled by scripting, there's a mish mash of hard coded ai behaviors on maps, hard coded named squads, and dynamic stalker squads that make any abstract development goal really difficult because there's three different ways the game does things and they didn't decide to stick with one

It's still there. Shitomaly and Gaymma fags are too busy copying guns from tarkov to worry about any of this shit tho. Gotta enjoy that tacticool gameplay of 2007 AI that slowly walks towards you when in the open

 

[Flying Meat Wagon]

It's still there. Shitomaly and Gaymma fags are too busy copying guns from tarkov to worry about any of this shit tho. Gotta enjoy that tacticool gameplay of 2007 AI that slowly walks towards you when in the open

I don't really blame them for not trying to fix A-life more. Working with the X-ray engine and enjoying it is an exceptionally autistic trait.

 

[Moonglade Feral Druid]

Still having plenty of fun with Stalker 2, just got though wild island. Putting holes in the heads of tardified monolith is oh so fun. (psi-blasted zombies.)

 

[big pauper]

It's still there. Shitomaly and Gaymma fags are too busy copying guns from tarkov to worry about any of this shit tho. Gotta enjoy that tacticool gameplay of 2007 AI that slowly walks towards you when in the open

the AI is a lot like the hl2 soldier AI, it's quite good for the environments the built, but it completely breaks down once you put it into situations it was never meant to be in or the node pathing is bunk - and the node pathing is extremely bunk on the maps that aren't from SHOC or COP.

because you can do pretty much everything except fix the ai node pathing by monkey patching the objects file (i dont remember what its called, the one written in perl) at runtime, that's what anomaly does. i guarantee nobody in the anomaly development team has a functional copy of the SDK (hands down the most arcane piece of shit imaginable, 1992 unix gui levels of dogshit) or done a manual build of the objects file since they built the original executable - it's essentially never going to be improved

 

[Kulee Baba]

So I remember playing Stalker 1 a few years after release and I hated the OG's shooting mechanics. You could line up a basic headshot and it would do nothing. Made the basic Makarov feel like total shit. I alleviated it by installing one of the "realistic gunplay" mods and I remember chatting about it online. A few real hardcore Stalker fans looked down upon me considered me a scrub I was essentially cheating.

Well I see Stalker 2 Markarov is way more in line with how I thought it should have been from the start. So suck it OG fanboys who see modding as cheating.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

So you can't just climb the heavily telegraphed vehicle with a ladder, you have to smash your way through a bunch of crates and take a running leap onto the same part the ladder would have taken you.

Guys, I'm starting to think the environmental design of STALKER was a fluke.

 

[jeff7989]

So I remember playing Stalker 1 a few years after release and I hated the OG's shooting mechanics. You could line up a basic headshot and it would do nothing. Made the basic Makarov feel like total shit. I alleviated it by installing one of the "realistic gunplay" mods and I remember chatting about it online. A few real hardcore Stalker fans looked down upon me considered me a scrub I was essentially cheating.

Well I see Stalker 2 Markarov is way more in line with how I thought it should have been from the start. So suck it OG fanboys who see modding as cheating.

I don't know, to me it was fine, made getting sawn-off from bandits and then upgrading to AKSU from army checkpoint more rewarding.
One-shot anything requiring zero skill at the start of the game seems boring.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

i haven't touched xray shit in years but if i recall anomaly still has the janky ass half baked CoC squad system where instead of every squad being spawned and then given tasks by the AI director so its all controlled by scripting, there's a mish mash of hard coded ai behaviors on maps, hard coded named squads, and dynamic stalker squads that make any abstract development goal really difficult because there's three different ways the game does things and they didn't decide to stick with one

Single unit "loners" (Hardcoded like Barkeep and dynamic units)
Squad "Dynamic" (Quests/ roving stalkers post resets from psy-storm/player travel/emissions)
Squad "Static" (Most infamous is the alpha squad spawn if you piss off a faction enough)
Mutants similar system.
Oh and they took out fucking AI searching for artifacts in the anomaly mazes and dynamic anomalies cause they broke it too hard.

Don't forget compile is like muti-day for the game since you have to compile all maps at once.

People are angry that A-life 2 isn't real and the game just spawns enemies around you. I'm more annoyed by the combat AI just forgetting about the player in the middle of a firefight and walking away. It completely ruins my immersion every time, it's just so blatant that the game is broken.

Hey, at least they aren't stuck swapping weapons and firing RPGs point blank.

 

[Endlosung]

In-game radio features this song, it's about how the whole world unites against Russians and how the "Russian rabble" will disappear from the face of the earth. It features the UPA flag on YouTube. It's kinda funny that it's a cover of a commie antifa song and yet it features that flag lmao. How long until Russians call Stalker 2 a nazi game and NAFO bros start coping how akchually the meaning has changed?