Vivian on 12/9/2013 at 11:08

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OK, so I've actually stopped playing it because I realised I've got too much to do to get sucked into a never-ending survivalist quagmire. However, that said, this mod has a lot to recommend it. I started as a sniper, which means you specialise in sniper rifles (duh) and shotguns, which seems nicely balanced - got both ranges covered. Pretty much the first thing you learn (and probably the most alternately annoying/engrossing feature) is that you have to avoid dog packs like the plague. Other mutants, even bloodsuckers (although they are nightmarishly difficult to fight) can be taken on quite effectively if you stand your ground and pick your shots. Dog packs, usually led by two pseudodogs, just pop up out of the foliage and overwhelm you. Whenever you are somewhere with dense cover (which is most of the map due to the veg enhancements) you have to listen very carefully for barks or howls. Once you find a decent repeating shotgun it's a bit easier, but even then you are relying on a) never missing and b) having more shells in your magazine than there are dogs.

Human enemies are well done. They throw grenades a lot, and the work it takes to bring them down measures up to the quality of their equipment. You can take out a low-level bandit with a pistol shot to the face, but a heavily armoured merc will take (and dish out) some serious punishment. Basically until you've scavenged or managed to buy proper armour and a decent rifle you are utterly reliant on bushwacking isolated high-level human enemies, or setting traps with explosives. Again, gives you a nice sense of progression.

Anomalies are bloody lethal (as are psychic enemies) and you need a (very expensive) scientific suit to be anywhere near most of them. A decent gas-mask will let you into the toxic ones, but acid eruptions will still end you. Controllers and psychic poltergeists are likewise something to be ran the fuck away from until you've got a decent helmet or scientific suit. Smoking weed, or amusingly, reading a porn mag, will give you some level of psychic protection, but only enough to get off maybe two or three decent shots, so you might get lucky with a rifle grenade. Human zombies, also, are totally bullet sponges. Like, seven or eight 7.62 rifle bullets to the face bullet sponges. Zombies though, who knows what's going on.

Guns and armour wear out and take damage, but you can repair them yourself given suitable equipment. There is a nice division between maintenance and repair - a gun can be maintained with anything for cleaning/lubricating. Gun oil and gun cleaner are best, but vodka, water, animal fats, bits of paper etc etc can be used in a pinch. Repair kits are needed for more heavy jobs. It's generally cheaper to scavenge a semi-workable rifle and repair it than to buy a pristine one. Armour can be repaired with sewing kits, glue, duct-tape and mutant hides, again with more expensive kits needed to rectify heavier damage.

Most of the useful drugs make you extremely hungry - a morphine shot, for instance, will stabilise you and get you moving again after a heavy hit, but it also might make you so hungry you die. I understand the idea, but it's a bit weird in practice when spontaneously starve to death while shotgunning a boar in the face. Also, there are seemingly hundreds of drugs, armour upgrades and food types, all with various stacked and balanced effects, medkits and bandages take time to apply, eating both takes time and requires you to take your helmet off, you can smoke fags etc etc. It's pretty in-depth.

SO, overall, if you are up for a stalker experience, this mod makes for an arse-kicking stalker experience. It's atmospheric, very pretty (the heavy fog weather particularly so, visibility drops to like 20 meters), very challenging, but once you work out how it all works, actually pretty well balanced. Definitely recommended. I just realised that it's still sort-of warm outside and I should go skateboarding/hang out with people rather than lock myself in and spend hours wondering round in a stalker game.

BEAR on 17/5/2014 at 20:44

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I'm currently in Yantov in Misery 2.1 and figured I would post an update in case anyone is hankering for playing CoP. I know the big news is lost alpha right now, but I've finally gotten settled into Misery to the point where its...well...less miserable.

While the beginning of the mod is very tough, once you figure out the basic mechanics it is cool. I am playing on the next to max difficulty, which has been fun at times but in the sake of wanting a good balance in the game between difficulty, realism and fun I would suggest bumping it down 1 more (whatever the 2nd difficulty is called).

If you aren't familiar with what Misery's selling points are, here is a quick synopsis. Misery doesn't modify (much, I don't think) the overall story or quests of CoP, but it does add a lot of gameplay mechanics. Chief among them that you would notice early on is that all weapons you find except those you start with or can't afford from any vendor are very broken. Once you find a yellow (1/3-2/3 quality) you will be ecstatic. This adds some tension early on when you can't yet afford good weapons, but you've found a weapon that WOULD be good if it didn't jam on you at just the wrong time. Some of the most memorable times I've had so far have been when my gun jammed at just the wrong time and I had to scramble to pull out my pistol to try to save my skin. There were some Alife modifications I think, and you can now adjust the distance at which it becomes fully active (visible, not just in-memory simulated). Given that the mod is overall more difficult and that your weapons and armor are worse/harder to get, mutants are scarier. Packs of dogs/psuedodogs/cats are actually a serious problem, bloodsuckers are still nearly impossible to trade blows with (and I'm vastly better geared now than the entire first zone), so you can't just wander around blasting anything that comes near you. I've spent a fair amount of time on more than 1 occasion having to take a really long way around an area because there is a big dog pack or a snork or bloodsucker that I can't run past who always ends up coming for me and there are no good rocks to get on top of, but it definitely makes it feel more real. Another change is that anomolies are really dangerous. Like, kick your ass immediately dangerous (except whirlygigs or whatever, you can avoid them the same as usual but if you get caught its death). Bio and thermal are particularly bad and tend to suck your health down in no-time. I just finally got a decent suit that protects against thermal enough to where I can even to near the burning homestead. I almost had to totally avoid those places in the first zone, only in the 2nd can I actually go around them, which makes getting artifacts definitely harder.

When you start out (as recon at least), the first thing I did was just try to make it to the ship to get my bearings. The mask I started with made it almost impossible to see and it wasn't even helpful except against radiation, so take it off and make a run for it. I got caught by snorks and bandits several times on my way and my weapons were about worthless, so get to Skadovsk asap and pick up any junk/stashes you can along the way, and avoid fights. From there, you can start picking up easier missions and exploring for stashes while you look for a decent enough weapon to get by. Honestly, killing stalkers and mercs is the way to get nicer stuff. The longer you play, the better stuff they seem to have, but I never liked murdering my fellow stalkers so I often just followed a pack around, waited for something to attack (usually didn't take long) and then looted them. Be quick though, they'll loot eachother really quickly.

Some mechanics it took me a while to figure out which were frustrating early on:

1 - Food: If you don't eat, it will kill you. Eating increases your stamina, and if you even have the grey hungry icon you will slowly lose health. If it is yellow or red, you will eventually die from it and it won't take that long. Food is also rare to find and expensive to buy, so you are stuck between eating irradiated mutant meat and then trying to purge the radiation (which has a similar health affect) or you shell out the money for food.

2 - Sleep: Sleep is supposedly necessary, but I haven't actually noticed myself getting tired, but that may be because I tend to sleep occasionally anyways because it will get too dark/scary to try to make it home from somewhere and for immersion I like to have to hole up and sleep, and it gets seriously dark. Trying to walk home in the dark feels like in real life, you can see about 10 feet and you are sure there are monsters in all the bushes (except its often true), so occasionally I'll do it just for the "fun" of getting caught. Sleep will make you seriously hungry though, which means it costs $$. Get a sleeping bag early on for sure.

3 - Repairing stuff: This is supposed to be a big realism mechanic, but it took forever to get comfortable with it. There are gun cleaning kits, gun repair kits, light/medium/heavy sewing kits and a huge number of patch kits, glue sticks etc that are all used for repairing armor or weapons. Most of them only work above some % of durability, which is probably way higher than any weapons you will find for a while. The decent repair kits are +20k, and I ended up finding one on a dead merc before I could afford one. The main idea seems to be to keep your stuff repaired while its manageable cost wise, because having one of the techs repair a gun from 10-20% is hugely expensive. There are tons and tons of stuff that are multipliers for repairing either guns or armor, so you end up hoarding a lot of this stuff. I found actually after writing this up the first time that if you select one of the multiplier items from the list, it uses that one immediately, I thought that all the items would stack but that would make it way too powerful I guess. This means you don't need to hoard nearly as many of the ones that only add 1-2% if you have a bunch of re-usable higher percentage ones.

4 - Artifacts: Artifacts themselves don't seem to be really worth equiping, they are mostly good to sell or hoard for selling/quests. They all have radiation and their bonuses don't even seem to have a big affect (for example, thermal +200% has next to no affect because your thermal protection is miserable until you get the 80k scientists suit). There are boxes for putting artifacts in that allow you to haul them home without being irradiated, and there is a special tool you start with that allows you to take them out again (you right click the box -> use to put them in, right click the tool ->use to open a box). Beard in the first zone has quests for specific artifacts that usually net you more cash than just selling them outright. It can be a chicken/egg problem though because if you have no money, you can't get a suit which you can use to get artifacts and then make money. You sell a lot of trash and weapons that will barely make enough money to buy food/medical gear early on, but there are some artifacts you can get without having to have the science headpiece or armor.
5 - Drugs/medicine: Drugs and medicine are a big focus, there are pills for everything and they all have side effects that aren't great, but amusingly all the drugs in the game are pretty much side-affect free (cocaine has 0 drawbacks and is great, cigarettes give you calories and reduce radiation, pot improves psy resistance but makes you hungry), so you will hoard a bunch of stuff like that. The only ways to increase your health is stimpacks (quick, can be done in combat) and medpacks (cheaper, but have to sit there and do it and it takes 10-15 seconds). You will feel like you are always slowly dying and constantly patching up. The medic guy in the home bases will also fix you up, but its not really much cheaper unless you are also glowing green in which case its a good deal.

6 - Main quest: This is another chicken/egg issue because there is some nice stuff at the helicopters, but only 1 of them was even remotely accessible early on (can't get the iron forest one because it was surrounded by 2 burers, a poltergiest and a hoard of zombies and those long legged freaky things), the one on the plateau you have to go through the burning homestead which requires chugging a bunch of stimpacks and sprinting to the teleporter because no way you'll be able to get the 80k armor early on. The 3rd one in the swamp can be accessed by sprinting through the bio death cloud and then you can loot the bodies/stashes for some decent military stuff.

7 - Weapons: Weapons are somewhat class based, so as recon (bad first choice) only SMG's and pistols are good, shotguns are medium (so there is a lot of recoil, disorientation after shooting). I'm realizing pistols are really good though if you can get a decent one with a really fast fire rate and a big clip (found one in Yantov that is 18 round clip and pratically a machine gun in rate of fire that actually works much better close range than a SMG).

8 - Combat: Related to armor and weapons, combat was really hard as recon for the first half of my experience so far. A single bullet could often mean a quickload, so that would get frustrating after a while. Combat is all about mobility as recon, you need to be as light as possible and once you fire off a few rounds from one vantage point, duck behind a hill and circle around while the enemy is looking at where you were, and hit them from behind and repeat. Luring a pack of zombies to fight mercs or mercs to fight a psudeogiant etc is a worthwhile tactic I used quite a bit.

9 - Making Money: This one is important and took me a while to figure out. I was used, in previous stalker games/mods, to selling ammo and guns from fallen enemies/scavanging to make some money. Unfortunately in Misery, guns are almost always broken and even when they are not (and in some cases, at 100%), they are only worth ~5% what you would have to pay to buy them, so though you can drag a bunch of pistols home from zombies or assault rifles, they'll only sell for at best 500ru and usually more like 100-300, and they are heavy. The best way I found to make money early on is by selling unsable items (you'll find a fair number of these), items that can be used for repairing weapons and guns (you need some of these but not a huge hoard). Artificats are good once you can get them, but you really need the artifact containers to keep from getting super irradiated while you carry them, and you pretty much have to have at least the scientific headpiece or armor to get those which both cost a lot. To get to the point where you can do this stuff, the best thing I've found is hunting. Most mutants are lootable (especially if just killed) and have 1-4 items (usually 1 or 2) that can be fairly lucrative. The ones that are for experiments, even if they are "common" can be work 400-600 a piece. Hunting mutants, even common ones can be dangerous and tricky, but even with a crap gun or guns you looted and wont try to keep, you can usually take out a flesh or boar if you are careful. You also find a lot of already dead mutants, so if you check all of them you can sometimes get something. It would be hard to level up entirely on this, but they are an infinite resource and it should keep you in food and med kits until you can make better cash by selling artifacts and completing quests.

I'm not sure this will actually convince anyone to play it, now that I re-read it. I also did one other thing that improved my overall enjoyment: cheating. I increased my weight limit (via a config file) to ~80kg. I decided that it didn't make sense that I had such a crazy low weight limit, and I couldn't handle good armor or heavy weapons, so mobility I took for myself which made the game more fun and less frustrating, but since it means I carry more normally I'm not absurdly mobile, just reasonably so and I often run out of stamina anyways and stumble around to be in line with the name of the mod. Its rough but I've been having a freaking blast and I'm going to get back to it right now.