S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

I'm probably going to browse Best Buy tomorrow, I'll be sure to look for it.

2001? Really, has it been that long? I hate those I feel old moments.

Any chance this is coming to the 360? It sounds like my kind of game, but my PC peaked its performance about five years ago.

9.8 gig of harddrive space?...They've gotta be fucking kidding!!!

(No, they're not apparently...Geez!!*)

Cue rants about expecting the game to 'suck them off', 'make them martiniis', etc, etc, etc...

(* Jesus H. Cock-gobbling, Spoon-bending, G-String Wearing, Christopher Robin)**

**Yeah, I know I'm going to Hell, but I'm taking this bastid WITH me!!!

I think it's pretty good but you would think after so many years in development there wouldn't be so many glitches, I'm probably going to wait for a patch then restart.

Just got it. Cover looks a bit like that HP Lovecraft game, Dark Corners of the Earth (which was very good). 10 gigs, damn that's right. Will report later on.

I wanted to play this, and thought since it was in development Hell for a long time, the req would be less intense, but my 2.8 Ghertz CPU cannot handle it - dual core preferred....!

Well then..

I like it. First impression feels like playing a present time Oblivion set in the darkest corners of Russia. Well made atmosphere. Runs playable on an AMD 64 3500 (1.6 ghz).

Don't buy this.

Here is why:

1. Bad bad coding resulting in bad performance:
for real dynamic lighting (DirectX9), you need at least Core2Duo 6400 with a Geforce7900 or better...
I have a P4 3.2ghz with Geforce 6800GS and have to play with DX8 static lighting, the game looks very dull and 2003ish.
Even with real dynamic lighting, the texture work and overall artistry is not nearly on the same level as Crysis /Half-Life 2... Textures do not blend in a cool way (road to offroad e.g.), high-res textures often times are just low res with some procedural noise on top and so on.
It just doesn't feel like real quality work.

2. firefights feel clumsy, there is no reel feedback if you hit someone or not.
Even with heavy caliber weapons, there is no real "payoff" when hitting someone. If this would be a "Fallout" or "Oblivion"-type game you probably could live with the shooter elements not feeling like in Doom or No One Lives Forever but the RPG side of Stalker is just tacked on, leaving you with a shooter with amateurish shooter mechanics.
The hit animations aren't good, overall animations look a bit ackward, no motion capturing whatsoever and the keyframe animations aren't what I'd call Next-Gen material.

3.
AI sometimes is kind of interesting (e.g. flanking you), but other times it just stacks the soldiers in a row doing nothing. After saving/loading, you often find yourself with the enemies in other states of awareness than before.
Worst part: enemies sometimes respawn in your face! Or you see them pop up in the distance.
Scripted sequences often don't work a la "shoot all the bandits attacking the camp for NPC X to give you reward, resulting in endless numbers of respawning bandits merciless attacking you for all time.
Or you clear a military outpost, just to see another patrol coming from that same outpost after a short period of time.
It just feels silly and destroys the "reality" of the situation.

4. some gameplay mechanics just don't work. the RPG elements like quests or the weight-limit together with no way of fast-travelling (like Townportal Diablo style) is ridiculously stupid. Money and the whole tradesystem is a joke. There are so many bandits spawning all over the place, just loot 10 bodies and you are overweight again. Money is worthless.


The atmosphere the game is trying to create is nice, fallout, end of the world like. But with all the shortcomings and bugs, enemies respawning, there is no real feel to the world...it just feels too lifeless, the events (like bandits attacking a safe camp of STALKERS) are way too repetitive. After a attack on a camp, you come back 5 minutes later and the camp is under attack again, from respawned bandits. It almost feels like your actions (killing them) don't make a difference at all, but their actions (killing your friendly NPCs) affect you in a bad way (the NPCs not coming back).

This is in no way a justified 8/10 game. maybe a narrow 7 when some bugs are worked out. And don't expect wonders...after all the waiting.

Crysis may thy kingdom come!

played a bit more and further impressions:

After all those years in development, you would think they'd tweaked the firefight dynamics until perfection but sadly firefight gameplay is just laughable. Despite every ingredient being there e.g. leaning left & right, different ammo types, fire rates, it just doesn't work or feel satisfying.

You know those older shooters like Kingpin where you would hit a guy and he just would continue shooting? It all came down to who had more health and armor...aka not good shooter gameplay. The first shooter that got the dynamics right in that way was Soldier of Fortune...if you would spray someone with a MG and you hit, the guy would be unable to continue shooting...that would seem like the first thing to implement when doing a first person shooter. But even after all those years some teams just can't get it right.
You could maybe be a little forgiving in the outdoor areas, where combat is more distance oriented but Close Quarters Combat is a real mess. You can shoot a soldier with an AK-74 put 4 bullets in his chest and he continues his attack. No retreat, no pause, no nothing. Not even a good hit animation.
This wouldn't be so bad if it were a DOOM-style game where you enter a room with 200 armor and 199 health and just play tank until the room is cleared, but in STALKER the hit damage for the player is semi-realistic and this means reload, reload, reload. (and we are talking 2nd out of 4 difficulty settings)
Some elements like having to use bandages to stop bleeding, which could be very cool, having to find cover for 3 seconds or so and then being unable to shoot are the exact opposite of what they could be:
You have to hit the quick bandage key again and again during firefights, just to survive 3 guys in a room. There is no animation, no sense of healing, no comment from the player character...just lacking a lot in some areas.


It's sad in a way that after all those years of FPS-games development on PC some teams have to relearn the essence again and again or fail in implementing it.

Another thing are grenades: No real hit radius, no shock animations

And I can't stress the importance of GOOD movement animations and blending of animations enough. It just fails in that part.

Pardon me for hijacking this thread, but is this game in any way based on the russian film Stalker?

No. No it's not.

Yes in a way it is. The guys who made the game draw some inspiration from Stalker. Read the synopsis for the film, it reflects the game (in a way):

Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, an alien place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers. [..] a man rises in the dead of night: he's a stalker, one of a handful who have the mental gifts (and who risk imprisonment) to lead people into the Zone to the Room, a place where one's secret hopes come true.

They took "the zone" and mixed it with the Tschernobyl reactor accident.
The Zone in the game (after a second incident) is a huge cordoned off area around the reactor sarcophagus.
Soldiers guard the place and Stalkers want to go in and find alien artefacts from radiation anomalies.
You play a guy who has a mark "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. tatooed on his arm, no identity and has to find out wtf he is. He has to go deep into the zone for this.
dunno how it ends...dunno if I keep playing it. kind of buggy the whole experience.

Just had a wonderful bug where i forgot to talk to a guy I had rescued, played the next stage only to find out that I had to rescue the guy again...this time surrounded by all the soldiers that spawned after I rescued him...I fought 20 (!) elite soldiers at once...the framerate got very ugly and after I rescued him a second time, finally triggered the next quest....
Seems very beta-version to me, and this after 6 years in development.

Yeah, i thought the story for the game sounded really similar to the movie.

I was disappointed by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as well. I'm not that good at FPS, but I felt constrained by the awkard mechanics. It was really frustrating to be surrounded by blind dogs and have them move way too fast for me to draw a bead on them. I felt like old Uncle Bob with a .45 in one hand and a cane in the other.
It did do somethings right though. Large outdoor environments and good textures made for a very spooky setting. I like the anomalies too, but they seemed a little forced in areas.