1 Hour in and underwhelmed

Neb on 15/5/2008 at 13:40

Quote Posted by Muzman

This sounds like a lot of driver problems, similar to when it first came out. I wonder if your video drivers are too old, or maybe too new.

I just updated my video drivers and the crashes are gone at least. :D

Quote Posted by 242

Believe me, you won't want invisible anomalies further in the game, at least first time through. There will be much more dangerous things you'll need to worry about, you won't like to distract your attention to things like invisible anomalies.

Fair enough. I'll leave them be for now. I'm liking the ones which make your vision go hazy. They've got a bit of subtlety to them at least.

Quote Posted by steo

Whoa. Sounds like you've got a lot of bugs, no wonder you're not enjoying it. What spec are you using?

AMD 64 3200+, 1024mb RAM, GeForce 6600 (256mb). It's actually performing pretty well and I can't tell much of a difference between setting everything to either medium or minimum in terms of video settings (with static lighting). I'm not too fussed about looks though.

Quote Posted by mothra

well, you won't find any encouragement from me. If YOU don't like a game YOU should stick to that opinion, maybe rethink your reasons if they are foolproof and valid but don't go somewhere else: i think this game sucks, please convince me otherwise.....

I'm just trying to give it a chance. As I said, it got something right. I loved getting destroyed on my first few encounters with bandits and having to go back with a different strategy.

Quote Posted by mothra

play longer than an hour. I would say the "real" game kicks in once you are at the rostock bar, got your first real armor and a nice decent weapon. (at least ak).

Quote Posted by mothra

if you don't see good things after 1hour play (i did see them immediately) then you won't find them later.

So which one is it?

Quote Posted by mothra

if you don't have the patience, this game is NOT for you.

Patience isn't really an issue. It's more a lack of motivation (and that's besides the bugs). The amnesia cliche is fair play, but I see no reason why I should even care about Strelock. In fact, I don't want to know. The same applies for my tattoo. I could imagine other stalkers getting wasted and ending up with "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." tattoos on their arms in the morning after joking about being the marked one.

Really, what I'm looking forward to is reaching Chernobyl and discovering more about it.

Quote Posted by mothra

just remember, it's NOT a railshooter. you have to PLAN and THINK. no halo, no strippers. patience pays off, especially on HELL difficulty.

Yeah, it quite obviously wasn't 'on the rails'. Thanks for lumping me into the Halo box too.

BEAR on 15/5/2008 at 15:23

I can personally say this, while graphics are usually not the biggest issue to me, they did make a difference in this game. I played it first on a 6800GT and it was good, but not fantastic. I am currently replaying it with a 8800GT and a better processor with the Oblivion Lost mod installed (that brings back the sun and moon) and it looks freaking awesome, and that makes a big difference in the atmosphere.

Oblivion Lost is an awesome mod, depending on your gaming style it might or might not be too much for you. I am actually having more fun now than I did my first time through. It makes killing enemies easier but you can also be killed easier, which in the end makes it better for me. The added craziness they added by modding the A-Life system makes the game a lot more random and you see more people in different places with more random battles (which is great). You should consider installing it if it doesn't just butcher your system (if you can run it with full dynamic lighting it really does improve the atmosphere considerably).

I hope you enjoy the game, it was and is terrific for me. Though, installing a new game without using the newest drivers and not installing the patches and then complaining about problems is kind of silly.

steo on 15/5/2008 at 18:23

Well I guess I've been lucky with Stalker because I played up to the army warehouses with version 1 and didn't encounter any major bugs nor have I since updating. In fact, the game has only crashed perhaps three times that weren't due to mods.

ZylonBane on 15/5/2008 at 22:18

Quote Posted by Neb

Controlling my character in general feels like a chore along with needing to move my mouse over the mat many times to get from one side of the inventory to the next

First, it sounds like your mouse sensitivity is set ridiculously low.
Second, you don't have to drag at all. Just double-click to move items.

Also, the plot in STALKER is pretty much inconsequential. Think of it as more of a really atmospheric single-player MMO.

Neb on 15/5/2008 at 23:54

Will do.

I'm gradually getting a bit more engrossed as I go along. The bugs seem to be less prominent the further I get from the very beginning too. I guess now I need to spend more time playing than ranting.

Off I go. *salutes*

Martek on 16/5/2008 at 00:24

Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate

THQ and GSC made a big mistake when they released it as far as it was unplayable and you needed to install a patch just to get it running.

now they're at 1.00007 ... if you've just installed the game without patching it.. its gonna suck and theres going to be glitches.

My first playthrough was unpatched; and while there were glitches (like stealth not working after reloading; and the undocumented hard-coded "speed up the game" key that I happened to map as my crouch key or something and thus I would die of hunger in like a minute or two and not know why.. :0 ), the game didn't suck at all - it was great and no gamebreakers that I ran into.

Definately patching is good; but STALKER is playable all the way through, an fun, unpatched.

For the OP, I liked STALKER right out of the start. It's one of my favoriate games. :)

Martek

Koki on 16/5/2008 at 06:31

I too was disappointed in STALKER, but that's what you get when you develop a game for two centuries.

Risking being redunant - that's a lot of bugs I didn't have, and I was playing at 1.0004 as well. Try getting Zone Reclamation Project, it's a fanmade patch which fixes a lot of stuff.

I wouldn't turn off the anomalies(Or indeed use any mods at all, ZRP being and exception since it doesn't change the gameplay) on your first playthrough, the levels are quite big and going everywhere tossing bolts all the time if you don't know them would get quite damn frustrating.

vurt on 16/5/2008 at 06:37

I hated STALKER the first time i played it (for like 1h), i thought the aiming was shit, and the mouse had this "floaty" feeling to it. I upgradered my video drivers and turned down the mouse sensitivity a lot which really helped, it has even become one of my absolute favorite games on the PC.

Thirith on 16/5/2008 at 07:13

Like Operation Flashpoint (and, for some reason, a number of Eastern European releases), Stalker does pretty badly at the sort of instant gratification you get from highly polished Western releases. At the same time, though, the more you put into the game, the more you get out of it. You just have to get past the initial "Why am I playing this? It isn't any fun!" impression, which may last an hour or two (less with the right patches and perhaps a mod or two). If you get past the game's "event horizon" (the point at which you've put in enough time and effort to make it worthwhile), it sucks you in and doesn't let go.

Rogue Keeper on 16/5/2008 at 07:23

Quote Posted by BEAR

Oblivion Lost is an awesome mod

I checked the mod's extensive readme and gosh, this looks like one serious biig mod, altering the game significantly, but I liked 98 percent of the changes they have made and now it looks like it makes Stalker even more atmospheric and chalenging game. I am usually sceptical of large mods but I think I'm gonna try this one out before they (yawn) release 1.1 patch.

It looks like OL shapes the game into what I originally expected it to be - a hardcore survivalist sandbox adventure with great deal of randomness in NPC spawning and migration.

Also, blowouts + anomaly spawning sound like :thumb:

Quote Posted by Thirith

I think one reason is that game designers and other developers from Eastern Europe have great esteem for classic adventure games and dungeons. Many of them are in their late 20s and 30s and were growing up on Monkey Islands, Wizardries, Dungeon Masters etc, spent long hours looking for clues and crawling dungeons, learned to appreciate slower pace in storytelling, which was in the end very gratifying. For example Black Isle games built on Infinity Engine and also Fallout have enormous enthusiastic fanbase in Central and Eastern Europe, two or three major Fallout mods were made in Czech Republic (I hope at least one - Between Good and Evil - will be finished and not zombified).
Bad thing is that games from Eastern European studios are usually badly marketed in Western Europe and America. They often have a weak publisher and also they can't compete with hype of FEAR or Crysis or whatever shortliving supernova Ubisoft/Eidos/Activision/... throw at spoiled gamers craving for graphics/AI/physics advancements. And one harsh review in PC Gamer or Gamespot or IGN can hurt a lot. Sometimes even agressive anti-piracy measures which are beyond developers' decision can hurt a lot. That's the case of Cold War I praised recently in GenGaming - a notable stealth piece with original story, which unfortunately failed on western markets because of weak publisher.
Another thing is that many times games from Eastern European studios have many bugs, which need to be solved with series of patches, but that's probably because these (by western standards) poor studios often can't afford to pay regiment of betatesters and there is also push from the publisher.