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

Ah STALKER, one of the few games that genuinely scares me.

Preach. All horror games (that are trying to be horror games, like Dead Space and Resident Evil and so on) have too many obviously scripted jump scares - I'm looking at you, dogs and raptors and zombies coming into corridors through the windows. The STALKER games are most terrifying when there's no-one obviously trying to kill you. Because you're never sure that the next corner you walk round won't have a bandit with a double-barrelled shotgun waiting to loot your freshly made corpse. You're constantly waiting for the other boot to drop.

Finally got OGSE 0.6.9.3 patch infinity to run for more than ten (yay, improvement!) minutes and it's stopped being ludicrously unfair and graduated to the slightly better ridiculously unfair. I had to go screwing around with manual replacement of files to get the patches to work but that's by the by. There's still the odd "move to a new bit of the map and be ambushed by Snorks, Bandit squads and Pseudodogs that spawn right on top of you as soon as the transition finishes" problem but I have better shotgun now.

The localization is still sub-par - Duty and Freedom squads get called "quads" for some reason, but I've picked up a Gauss rifle and I'm nowhere near ready to go to either Pripyat or the CNPP, so the mod makers have made some changes I do like, and unlike the other mega-mod I'm into, "Call of Chernobyl", there's a fast-travel service, that's provided by the same kind of guys who did it in Call of Pripyat.

I still wouldn't recommend the mod as a first mod (or indeed standalone) but I'm feeling a bit more positive about it.

Moar OGSE news. It seems to be a more finicky bastard to run than I previously thought. The latest joy? Spontaneously not loading ANY saves and refusing to run at all until I deleted the whole bloody save file folder. I was charmingly, naively, positively sure I had nothing new to see in this whole gaming life of mine, but I'm not ashamed to say this - I was bloody wrong. I thought Bethesda games were screwy but this is in a whole new different galactic quadrant.

I might be having a problem with my graphics card as well, on this game and other STALKER titles, but it's an odd one - I've been getting framerates of over 130fps on medium settings at 1080p resolution for long periods before the game goes ping and falls over, usually with my system along for the ride.

Thirty years ago today the reason why folks like us play these games occurred. The disaster at Reactor Number Four in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

I think in an odd sort of way the games have helped keep the memory of what happened, and of those who died that day and subsequently, more in the public eye than otherwise would have happened.

New result, new post. Finally finished the OGSE 0.6.9.3 mod for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. On Master difficulty.

I still wouldn't recommend it - there's a lot of rough edges and things that don't make much sense therein, but if you really want a tough gaming experience that isn't the pit of despair that's the MISERY mod, it could be for you.

Found a mod for Shadow of Chernobyl that I can recommend a bit: Oblivion Lost. It's a big expansion on the storyline, with more landmasses to explore, some altered weapons, some new ones and artifacts that can be used to make death traps.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-oblivion-lost-30

It seems a bit harder than original.

Wow. Long gap.

Anyway, completed another run and three quarters of Call of Pripyat, now I'm neck deep in Call of Misery. Which is comprised of a lot of things, among them:

Clear Sky's maps

Shadow of Chernobyl's maps

Call of Pripyat's maps

Single-player content

Most of the Misery 2.x mod

and it's extremely difficult.

I never quite got into Stalker - may have to give it another go. Is there a definitive "version" to recommend?

And when you say difficult - do you mean that the realism is so far up that having a single bad bullet and an unclean rifle causes a misfire that burns your hands, results in gangrene and then kills you via blood poisoning in 2 minutes?

No, the difficulty even in Misery proper isn't quite that bad, but since the mod's original programmers were and are Russians, who wrote most of the hardest game mods using the STALKER engines since the first game's launch, (a lot of which still haven't received full translations into English) it is still rather tricky to the extent that just reading about it put me off installing the mod. Call of Misery is way more forgiving than vanilla Misery, but still harder work than Call of Pripyat.

As for the definitive version, well, strictly speaking, that would be vanilla Call of Pripyat - that's the game that had most of the bugs ironed out before its Western release, but it's also the game with the least amount of content and smallest area count. The storyline is also rather streamlined compared to the first two, but unlike those, it has free-play after the end of said storyline, allowing you to go back to wherever you want to and do whatever quests you've missed. I like the characters more than I do the other two, and it's more a game about survival in hell than feeling you have to be the game's version of Hercules (that would be Strelok, given what the poor sod has to put up with and destroy dwarfing that demigod's twelve labours.)

If you're only ever going to play one STALKER game, it would be the one I recommend above the rest, though I do love all of them. (Pro-tip - if you want to check out and play Call of Misery, you need a legal install of Call of Pripyat on your machine, as the game's install routine checks for this. If you don't have one, it won't run.)

It took me years to get into the franchise - the first game (Shadow of Chernobyl) was such a spike in gaming difficulty compared to the others I was playing at the time that I just couldn't get into it - but when I did click in to the the way I was supposed to play I ended up buying the rest of the franchise's games.

The game has a very active subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/

that I recommend you join - there's folks there who've played just about all the games, the mods, and know the tricks, and there's a guide to modding once you fancy more content to plow through.

I'm waiting for a complete version of that alpha restored mod to come out. Shadow of Chernobyl was a bitch to play but it was really awesome at times. The Battle of Chernobyl is probably one of the greatest events in FPS history.

Necroing this thread to offer a freebie.

I've a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Steam key which I don't need as I've already got it on Steam, Go G and Gamers Gate already. First Inbox reply asking for it gets it, so hit that PM button and I'll send you the keey

STALKER 2 got an actual trailer!

Day One purchase? Day One purchase!

They had better not fuck this up. What other people feel about Half-Life 3, I feel about this franchise.

On a current playing tangent, I'm working my way through the mod whose home page this is:

https://stalkersoup.forumotion.com/

It has all of the maps of the original three games, plus a lot of others that were in the original build of Shadow of Chernobyl before Take Two finally put their foot down, plus a lot of new monsters and other tech, and it's really good.

Like all the games, it has some bugs - in particular weapons that should have attachments being able to put on them aren't capable. It's also rather heavily scripted - go somewhere you aren't being expected to be and it can fall over as far as the game goes.

Final Release Date Announcement

September 5, 2024

I'm trying to figure out just how are these guys even developing the game despite the whole friggin war in Ukraine going on.

Part of me is worried the game quality will suffer as a result.

Edited by SgtRicko on Jan 17th 2024 at 2:22:39 AM

Didn't development move to the Czech Republic when the war kicked off?