STALKER

[ShadowTail]

I take back my negative comment about the AI, apart from the a couple of glitches I've seen some very clever AI now.

I'm still not convinced about the game's greatness though - it just doesn't feel right. The main thing I miss is the lack of feeling of impact when you shoot someone or when you get shot. It feels too much like a game (unlike the great feel of CoD2 for example).

It's not awful, don't get me wrong, but I'd be hard pushed to give it any more than about 70%.

[betamax]

A heads up- do NOT go anywhere near Pripyat or CNPP unless you are armed to the teeth, have a hundred clones similarly armed and are under Jesus' personal protection. It's rock solid and you can die in seconds regardless of how skillful you are.

All the factions are present, fighting to get to the wish granter artifact first and you have to fight almost all of them, plus military helicopters. And radiation. Lawks!

Pity, as I was enjoying the gentle learning curve up to now too. I like the game an awful lot in general. It's like they made a Fallout mod for HL2. Wonderful.

[Zzap64!]

Can anyone confirm if it works on Vista or not?

Cheers

Confirmed! I use Vista and it works a treat.

[zip accident]

Bump: Sorry about that.

I'm just starting on this, and it's bluescreening XP. That's supposed to be a rare event with XP I thought. Has anyone else had this, and does the patch fix it?

So far I'm liking it, more or less, but having to enter names to save games is a chore, and the rest of the UI outside the game proper seems pretty clunky to me.

[zip accident]

This is getting to be a right pain. I can progress, but I get killed a lot by seemingly random events. There is too severe a shortage of stuff, so I have to search containers, but it's still real time, so I get killed a lot while I do. Saving game often would be the answer, but that's a real pain too, there isn't a sensible default filename, and it won't accept a null filename, not even once. Generally weak enemies that turn out occasionally to be super strong, and occasionally turn up in unbeatable numbers, do not make for a fun game. I'd rather have stronger enemies that aren't half so random.

I do like a lot of it, and I like the directions the story seems to be going, and I'll probably go back, but not tonight, I quit out to Windows and I'm staying out for a while, and that's happening too often.

[betamax]

This is getting to be a right pain. I can progress, but I get killed a lot by seemingly random events. There is too severe a shortage of stuff, so I have to search containers, but it's still real time, so I get killed a lot while I do. Saving game often would be the answer, but that's a real pain too, there isn't a sensible default filename, and it won't accept a null filename, not even once. Generally weak enemies that turn out occasionally to be super strong, and occasionally turn up in unbeatable numbers, do not make for a fun game. I'd rather have stronger enemies that aren't half so random.

I do like a lot of it, and I like the directions the story seems to be going, and I'll probably go back, but not tonight, I quit out to Windows and I'm staying out for a while, and that's happening too often.

There are certain areas you can't really go to until you've saved enough cash for the correct armour or lucked out and found one of the many fairly overpowered suits hidden in tricky places

Spoiler: show

like the disused buildings in the train yards have a certain locker with one suit, sometimes two, sometimes one retardedly powerful one you really don't deserve for jumping in a window, eating some pills and opening a container

(usually intermittent radiation hotspots or semi visible amomaly mazes- dont attempt it at night for fucks sake). Once you have the suit/s you will find the enemies are a lot less of a threat, even in numbers (mutant dogs I'm looking at you, you stupid overpowered fuckers).

[zip accident]

A heads up- do NOT go anywhere near Pripyat or CNPP unless you are armed to the teeth, have a hundred clones similarly armed and are under Jesus' personal protection. It's rock solid and you can die in seconds regardless of how skillful you are.

...

Pity, as I was enjoying the gentle learning curve up to now too. I like the game an awful lot in general. It's like they made a Fallout mod for HL2. Wonderful.

I got recently got to Pripyat, wandering about, finding things, mostly dodging friends and enemies, but now it keeps crashing on me. Anybody else get that in that region? It quits out the the desktop, with no warning, just a flash of the Windows taskbar? (the whole of the grey thing along the bottom of the desktop), then suddenly the whole desktop is there and the game is gone. Savegames in there just don't load, drop straight out to Windows, the savegame before those is an autosave, I wonder if it's corrupt, but I would expect that to throw it's own wobbler if it was, not plant one for the rest of the game and later saves to trip up over. It did throw up an attempt to send an error report to the devs once, but that's one out of more than half a dozen, and it didn't work either. It may be relevant that this is a return visit, I went back to cash up some goodies (mostly from elsewhere), but even so surely that would have been tested?.

Spoiler: show

The strong suits don't stop the dogs though, not when there are 15 or so of the beggars. All in all, everything is too strong, particularly the player and the animals/monsters, but other humans with strong suits too. It really doesn't help that the suits and guns knacker out with use, and can't (unlike more or less equivalent items in Oblivion), be repaired. Oh, and the weight-limit is way too low for my liking.

[betamax]

Spoiler: show

The strong suits don't stop the dogs though, not when there are 15 or so of the beggars. All in all, everything is too strong, particularly the player and the animals/monsters, but other humans with strong suits too. It really doesn't help that the suits and guns knacker out with use, and can't (unlike more or less equivalent items in Oblivion), be repaired. Oh, and the weight-limit is way too low for my liking.

That's because the dogs attacks are a separate damage type to bullets, fire, radiation etc. Ohhh! And another tip for the dogs, if you kill one the others will randomly scatter and regroup. Firing a shotgun at them usually has the same effect.

Regarding the weight limit and repair issues, you can download content patches that fix those without breaking the game.

Regarding the crash issue, the official patches should have fixed it for XP users.

[zip accident]

I really don't seem to be able to load any savegames made after the autosave on the way into Pripyat. It may be if I can exit the region into the further spaces, I will be able to save games from there, but given how much grief I get in the area that may not be possible without savegames. I am running patch 1.05 (USAian, I tried loading the European patch, it said something like "USA game version detected, aborting", the only way to patch the game was using the USAian patch).

[zip accident]

Well, I did run through that without stopping, and now it seems I can savegames again, maybe, but the game has gone berzerk, unfriendly stuff all over the place, and hostiles too. I didn't really want to run through, there seemed to be some nice loot in there, but if you can't save the game, that's the only way.

[zip accident]

Erm, sorry for my third post in a row in this thread.

Grr.

Spoiler: show

Not impressed with the blowout business. I kept dying of it, so I went back to the entrance to the level, but they'd closed that down so you couldn't get back to the previous level, but you could go past it within the level. However, the blowout for some reason doesn't reach beyond the original bounds of the level (hooray), however, it does last forever, if you're sat there (I waited, nothing happened) (a very big boo!). If you go in to the level, you start dying, if you come out again, you recover, but since there's no time limit on that, you can't play on from there. Which makes the whole silly business a time trial, and I hate, hate, hate and loathe time trials.

[zip accident]

Erm, sorry for my third post in a row in this thread.

Make that four.

A heads up- do NOT go anywhere near Pripyat or CNPP unless you are armed to the teeth, have a hundred clones similarly armed and are under Jesus' personal protection. It's rock solid and you can die in seconds regardless of how skillful you are.

Mild Spoiler:

Spoiler: show

All the factions are present, fighting to get to the wish granter artifact first and you have to fight almost all of them, plus military helicopters. And radiation. Lawks!

<edited to modernise spoiler layout>

Pity, as I was enjoying the gentle learning curve up to now too. I like the game an awful lot in general. It's like they made a Fallout mod for HL2. Wonderful.

Hm, I didn't see it that way. I was playing on the "stalker" difficulty level if I remember rightly (the begininng of the game is a while ago now), but I died a lot all over the place, and that didn't seem to get much worse in those regions.

Spoiler: show

I didn't piss off the Duty faction, but I didn't see enough of them in there that that was likely to be a factor.

Not being able to save in Pripyat was I'm sure a bug, probably caused by my doing something unpredicted, annoying, but bugs, if unlikely to be tripped very often, can be forgiven.

Spoiler: show

I don't forgive placing artifacts throughout the NPP region then making it a time-trial to cross it.

I'm also not keen on the introduction late in the game of:

Spoiler: show

Anomalies that you have to use as transport, when the usual reaction to anomalies is avoid them like the plague.

That one probably wasted a good hour, trying to get through the pain/radiation fields at ground level, when the pain/radiation field is ground level only, and the action at that point takes place on ledges, walkways and rooftops.

I've now seen three endings, I'm not very impressed really:

Spoiler: show

Cutscenes aren't really my idea of the way a game should end. If your character is going to shoot something or someone, it should be you shooting, and if you get to make a wish you should at least get some choice about what the wish is.

There are certain areas you can't really go to until you've saved enough cash for the correct armour or lucked out and found one of the many fairly overpowered suits hidden in tricky places

Once you have the suit/s you will find the enemies are a lot less of a threat, even in numbers (mutant dogs I'm looking at you, you stupid overpowered fuckers).

I've ended up not liking that concept.

Spoiler: show

You get guns and ammo from fallen enemies, and those get stronger the further in you go, but the armour gets stronger at about the same rate, armour which mostly isn't that well hidden once you get further in and actually need it, and the bad guys get armour nearly as strong as yours (some the same, some weaker, when you don't have the strongest, some stronger). They might as well have left the armour out of it, and only used guns of the same power throughout the game. I think if they had to have armour, it would have made sense to be able to strip it from dead guys like you can ammo and guns.

Also, there is no trader further in than the bar (Yantar is sort of further in, but the only way in and out of Yantar so far as I could tell is via the bar, so it's not on the route from the bar further inward, as I think of inward), so from there on there's no buying or selling anything, especially annoying since the journey from Pripyat -> NPP is effectively one way (perhaps you can get out again before you trigger the blowout timer, but that seems to be triggered by moving about 100 yards from the entry point, so that's not really useful IMHO).

[grue]

After buying this last night for 2 euros I've been having a blast.

I installed the No Headbobbing and Subtitles mods so I won't get a headache from the terrible headbobbing.

It oozes atmosphere and I totally love the hard as nails realistic feel so far.

[Devlin]

After buying this last night for 2 euros I've been having a blast.

I installed the No Headbobbing and Subtitles mods so I won't get a headache from the terrible headbobbing.

It oozes atmosphere and I totally love the hard as nails realistic feel so far.

I can't even get it to run at all. It just crashes when I start a new game while "prefetching objects"

[grue]

After buying this last night for 2 euros I've been having a blast.

I installed the No Headbobbing and Subtitles mods so I won't get a headache from the terrible headbobbing.

It oozes atmosphere and I totally love the hard as nails realistic feel so far.

I can't even get it to run at all. It just crashes when I start a new game while "prefetching objects"

Strange, it started from the get go.
Is it the steam version? Perhaps a visit to hell..ermmm...steam forums could help.