S.T.A.L.K.E.R Thread

[Nayr The Jew]

Your thoughts on the game series as a whole or good cheeki breeki time you would like to share.

 

[Chin of Campbell]

I really enjoyed playing through Shadow of Chernobyl, but I haven't gotten around to the rest of the series just yet. I hope the new one coming out next year will be good.

 

[break these cuffs]

Misery, for CoP, is one of the best overhaul mods ever made.

 

[Reynard]

Legit it's my favorite series and including the mods and stantalone mods I've played I've wasted about 2000 hours or so. I didn't keep track, but it's been about ten years since I picked up Call of Pripyat and was sucked in for the first time.

Misery, for CoP, is one of the best overhaul mods ever made.

I agree. However, my favorite is the Anomaly mod for Call of Chernobyl. More balanced than a lot of the other mods but still tough as nails.

 

[Some Manajerk]

One of the few FPS series i've liked and kept coming back to. loved the original and Clear Sky, CoP i haven't played as much, though i can't really put my finger on why i like it less than the others.

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

Misery, for CoP, is one of the best overhaul mods ever made.

Last time I loaded in Misery it was brutal. I remember one of the guys doing the balancing being a fucking sadist.

 

[break these cuffs]

Last time I loaded in Misery it was brutal. I remember one of the guys doing the balancing being a fucking sadist.

I like punishing games. I don't think that they're right or the only way to play or anything. I just like consequences. I don't really game much anymore, but the games I do play are generally old and unforgiving. We're talking Angband, a 90s roguelike styled in Tolkien. The most modern game I enjoy, that gets compared to STALKER a lot, is Escape from Tarkov. It's brutal. The combat is short, fierce, and final. It's of course not without faults. It actually ruined FPS for me. The gunplay in Tarkov is so fucking good that the gunplay in every other FPS feels like trash. I'm talking dogshit so bad I exit out after the first gunfight. I loved the STALKER franchise for it being different and engaging. Misery took it to a whole different level for me.

 

[Uncle Phil]

I was a big fan from the original Shadow of Chernobyl and finished it a few times, Call of Pripyat also. Tried the Clear Sky prequel but it was pretty badly broken at the time (faction wars and etc did not work) so I never finished it.

Big love from me also for the Misery mod for CoP: I agree it was punishingly tough, rewarded grinding a bit too much, but when I finally finished the game with that mod I felt a real sense of accomplishment. However....

The one I feel everyone should know is "Call of Chernobyl". This titanic supermod requires a working install of CoP (steam version works) and is THE definitive "classic S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience". Contains the playable areas of ALL THREE classic STALKER games in one massive overworld, with stacks of new features, high-def models and textures, customizable night/day cycle and weather system, and tons more. Massive libraries of weapons and armor. The engine has been overhauled with a lot of DX11 graphical features, and for the first time a STALKER game is fucking smooth and stable to run, frequently going many hours of gameplay without a CTD.

CoC has many varieties of campaigns, allowing you to play any faction, spawn in many different regions, and to enable/disable the quest system. I.e., if you spawn as a Loner in the Rookie Village on Storyline Mode, you basically get a classic campaign. But you can also play in Roguelike mode with permanent death (where you can try to find and loot your own corpse to recover some of your progress). Or play as a zombie which kinda sucks ass as I recall.

If you love how complex and intense Misery is, CoC is much broader in a number of ways. It doesn't have EVERYTHING that Misery does (noticeably absent is cooking, equipment-maintenance materials, as well as the 50 kinds of cigarettes and booze). These features are not likely to ever be folded into CoC, since the mods each took the XRay engine in a complete different direction in terms of code, and apparently the mod teams fucking hate each other anyway.

But a lot of that Misery stuff is spergy bullshit that you won't miss when you have access to the arsenal in Call of Chernobyl. Fan of Glocks and wish STALKER had them? CoC offers various Glocks in 9mm, .45 ACP, .40 S&W and 10mm Auto. If you hate boxy plastic pistols, consider instead the stacks of pistols in .357, .50, 4.6mm, 5.7mm, etc etc and different flavours of each caliber (like FMJ vs JHP). Hell, there are probably at least 12 variants of Kalashnikov: off the top of my head, AK-47, AKM, AK74, AEK-971, AK-12, and more, plus variants of the listed, and about five rifles from the AK-100 series (that's the export variants chambered in 5.45, 5.56 and 7.62, with rifle and carbine versions of each). If you love your UMPs and P90s and weird Soviet machine pistols, there's plenty of all that shit too. More shotguns, more sniper rifles, just more more more of everything that you love about STALKER.

If you are considering playing Stalker again, you owe it to yourself to shoot a Bloodsucker in the face with a Saiga12 magazine-fed automatic shotgun.

edit: or a UMP in .45 (fuck the bullshit 9mm one) set to the 2-round burst setting, so each mouse click provides a pair of .45 slugs in highly controllable fashion. Excellent CQB alternative to a shotgun. Did I mention this mod allows you to put any weapon in either weapon slot? So you can go pistol/rifle, shotgun/rifle, SMG/rifle, etc...

edit2 for those who want to play it the way I am: you're looking for Call of Chernobyl 1.4.22 with the addons Arsenal Overhaul, Outfits Addon, Universal Higher Damage, Dynamic HUD.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

I remember talking to friends a decade ago and how they loved STALKER. I never tried it, but I always wanted to.

 

[Karl der Grosse]

I think Shadow of Chernobyl is the best time I've ever had playing a FPS. It's interesting because I hate FPS games, so for me to play through one multiple times meant it was something extraordinary. I bought clear sky and booted it up a couple of times, but somehow never got around to really playing it.

 

[break these cuffs]

I think Shadow of Chernobyl is the best time I've ever had playing a FPS. It's interesting because I hate FPS games, so for me to play through one multiple times meant it was something extraordinary. I bought clear sky and booted it up a couple of times, but somehow never got around to really playing it.

Shadow of Chernobyl felt like like a game outside of the FPS genre for me because it was so unique. At the time I though of it like a first person Fallout. Clear Sky was so fucking buggy for me that I never played it. I know there are memes and nostalgia for it because of that. Call of Pripyat was a fantastic game and gave moders a canvas to create even more wonderful experiences. STALKER should go down as a goat franchise.

 

[Win98SE]

SoC's development history is extremely interesting. Leaked pre-release builds of the game really paint a picture of just how much the publisher meddled with the final product in both positive and negative ways. Ultimately we got a really good game out of it, but GSC's vision was never truly met.

STALKER was a playground for AI programming, specially a type of "planning" AI called Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) that GSC rebranded as "ALIFE". The original vision was for each NPC in the game to have their own missions and day-to-day activities, roaming the Zone and engaging in faction warfare. This was one of the things that stretched out development - how do you tell a story in a constantly-changing world? What if an NPC gets to a quest objective before you do? An early-game area gets taken over by high-powered enemies? Etc. Eventually these behaviors were toned down or sidelined for inclusion in later entries, but we never got the true, open-ended Zone that GSC planned.

The best insight into what STALKER could have been is "build 1935", a pre-release version put up for download by GSC directly. This was STALKER before it was cut down to the version we got. The Lost Alpha mod intended to restore most of these assets, although I've never played it myself. This video is a quick overview of the 1935 build:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Build 1935 — Overview

Видео из билда 1935, доступного для скачивания по адресу: http://stalker-portal.ru/go:build_1935

www.youtube.com

Around 3:15 you'll get an impression of just how much larger and more lively the levels were originally.

Also of interest is this YouTube channel that covers some of the older/newer builds, but also does walkthroughs of a few levels from build 1935: https://www.youtube.com/user/kovek/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1

There really is no other game like STALKER, and with modern game development being what it is, it's unlikely we'll see something like it again. The mods that are still coming out of this series is amazing. There's too many to mention, although I really enjoyed LURK back in the day and would like to give it a shot again.

 

[Overcast]

Love the games. Very frustrating at times, but goddamnit I'd by lying if I said I didn't have fun with them.

Loved SoC's atmosphere and story, how CoP expands on what happened afterwards, and I find myself coming back to Call of Chernobyl quite frequently to see how long I can survive Ironman mode. (Not very long at all for the most part)

Duty 4 Life.

 

[Kill a Troon for Pikamee]

Stalker reminds me of my childhood. I grew up in the post-communist eastern europe in the 90s, and stalker really is the perfect eastern europe simulator. The first 15 minutes of SoC shows that perfectly. Going out from your small shithole village, getting attacked by dogs, having to fight bandits, curing your wounds with vodka and kiełbasa - it all brings back nostalgic memories

I think one of the best things about Stalker is how autistic the devs were about replicating real world locations. Everything feels like a real place, not like a video game location created by nerds who never go outside

I also never use any graphic mods (real weapon names is the only one I absolutely must use because autism). Unmodded graphics in the original games are perfect, post-industrial derelict landscapes of eastern europe are not supposed to look pretty. Eastern europe and especially ukraine is ugly and trying to make it video game pretty and shiny misses the point

DUTY GANG

 

[McAfee'sCorpse]

Right now I'm playing through shadow of Chernobyl and have been having a pretty good time with it. I decided to buy the bundle of all three games on cdkeys because I saw the trailer for HoC and thought it looked really good so I decided to play the old games. I really enjoy the tone of the game and the overall atmosphere. It really is different from all the other survival horror fps, particularly in its setting. I'm surprised more games don't use Chernobyl esque locations in their games (Fallout doesn't count). One gripe I do have with the game so far is traveling. I get that exploring the map is a key feature, but many quests require you to travel across the whole map. Not to mention the Marked One runs out of energy pretty fast after running. I just wish there was a fast travel option for some of the main hubs, but then again, there wouldn't be really any point to exploring would there?

 

[Jordi El Nino Polla]

Not to mention the Marked One runs out of energy pretty fast after running.

Are you using artifacts? My guy has infinite stamina and never bleeds.

 

[McAfee'sCorpse]

Are you using artifacts? My guy has infinite stamina and never bleeds.

How?

 

[Jordi El Nino Polla]

How?

You need to use your anomaly detector around sketchy areas and if there is a collectible artifact there, your minimap will light up. Then you need to toss bolts into the anomalies to chart a safe path or to trigger the anomaly so that you can run through it before it recharges and blasts you to death.

Artifacts can be equipped and will augment your stats and elemental weaknesses.

This is not explained entirely well within the game, but it is a huge aspect of it. Basically most of those invisible death traps you've probably walked into have a artifact hidden in the center of the danger. When your meter starts screaming at you, you walk toward the danger.

 

[Truman the Jewman]

Jeez, I used to be a regular on the STALKER generals on 4chan. I've probably got 10 different mods for SoC installed and playable right now, but as others have said I do recommend playing the games in order of release (with/without Clear Sky, as it is a polarizing game) and vanilla before adding any mods on top.

That said, I don't really play CoP anymore. If I want that big, polished experience I play Anomaly, modded and tweaked to my liking, because I honestly do get a little autistic and don't mind adding some realism to my very surreal post-Soviet experience.

If anyone is looking for mods for Shadow of Chernobyl after their first playthrough, I can recommend a few:

AMK 1.4.1: A simple vanilla+ experience. 1.4.1 > 1.4 because no WOOF WOOF.

OGSR: Vanilla+ with light soup (sorta like a megamod) elements added. Lethal gunplay, very atmospheric.

New Arsenal 5/7: Soupier and crazier than OGSR but contain fuckloads of guns and quests as well as new areas. Does contain Nazi ghosts and metaphor caves.

 

[Desu Vult]

IIRC you need 2 good endurance artifacts and 1 or 2 decent antiradiation ones to offset the penalty. Allows permasprinting with full inventory.

Thats in vanilla at least, been a while since I last played it. now have a hankering to try it again, in fact have it installed, but the install has shat itself somehow.