By Jim Rossignol on May 1st, 2008 at 8:53 am.
A couple of months back I went to a dinner party. It was a modest, grown up affair, albeit it with a bout of arm-flailing Wii play dominating the evening. I didn’t know the host all that well and, as we found common ground, we got to discussing his game collection. We sat and picked out titles, as I imagine menfolk might have discussed a shelf full of books or vinyl records in previous decades. One of the games he had on there was Stalker, which he had played through once and not bothered with again. Too gloomy, he said. And there really wasn’t much to it.
Needless to say, my feelings were quite the opposite.
Too gloomy? Only once through? I had played Stalker countless times since that initial run through, and now I put it on in quiet hours, just to soak up the atmosphere. There’s something evocative and slightly alarming about finding fictional worlds that you want to taste repeatedly – I remember watching Bladerunner countless times as a teenager, as if I could capture something of its atmosphere and sentiment in my tiny brain. I knew the story inside out, but I wanted to explore it further and to possess it. I think that’s one of the most compelling things about our favourite videogames: you get to be down there in the celluloid, mucking about in other people’s imaginations. You’re doing, making decisions, and not just passively watching it flickering away on the TV screen. The traces that activity leaves on us are stronger somehow. The taste fades a little more slowly.
Anyway, I desperately wanted to explain what it was that I got from Stalker to my dinner party host, but I felt it was hopeless. I start off on a rant, but changed the subject. I’d seem obsessive, even boring. Tonight, having hopped into Stalker yet again, I know that I’m putting that grainy Bladerunner cassette on one more time, and I want to have a crack and explaining its appeal. After all, being faithful to our obsessions seems to be what Rock, Paper, Shotgun is all about.
So yes: I regularly drop back into Stalker just to do something in that world. I’ve completed it twice through and seen two of the endings. Now though I tend to wander around in the wide-open mid-section. I’ve seen it all, but it never quite stays the same. I’ve got a selection of saved games in the bar area, with my character at various levels of development. I’ve always got a bunch of larger missions on the go, but the simple “fetch x” or “kill y” missions from the bar give me a decent reason to go out into the wilderness for half an hour here, an hour there.
I start out by buying up ammo from the barman. Then I talk to this lovely fellow, who has lost his treasured rifle. Don’t worry, surly drunk, I’ll rescue your gun!
I head off out of the bar, and past the various groups of Stalkers sat telling each other stories and jokes in Russian. Moving out through the crumbling depot it occurs to me that there is not a single woman in the game. Not only that, there’s not even a reference to a woman. This means something, I’m just not sure what. No Country For Women Of Any Age?
But there are dogs. Evil dogs. I spy them through my binoculars, waiting for me. At this stage in the game I am poorly equipped and dressed in poor-quality stalker gear, but I’ve managed to pick up a formidable modified rifle. It’s one of Stalker’s random treasures – a high end assault rifle that uses the low-end, commonly scavenged ammunition. I kill the dogs at range.
I pass the the duty checkpoint, which acts as a gateway to the main part of the game. In some ways everything before the checkpoint is precursor the main game, but the areas before the checkpoint are also some of the best realised. This is where the game’s eerie atmosphere really comes into its own – with a familiar kind of dereliction littering the landscape. We’ve all seen buildings like these: evidence what is left behind after people are gone, evidence of the future. I hear a hissing and booming noise where a zone denizen has wandered into a hidden anomaly. Something dead goes tumbling through distant trees.
I hear shouts and then gunfire. I already know that it will be some friendly stalkers skirmishing with bandits. Early in the game I saved the life of a stalker in this area, and now he and his chums are doomed to perpetually fight off raids from the nearby bandits. The trio are far better armed than the bandits, I expect they would win the fight without my help. Nevertheless the bandits are between me and the lost gun. They could kill me at close range, since they’re armed with submachineguns, pistols and sawn-off shotguns. I settle down under cover, with a stretch of open ground in front of me. Again my trusty rifles sees me safe, at range. When the battle barks have died out completely I move in and scavenge.
I retrieve the gun from the tunnel, which seethes with multiple anomalies. I’m fairly used to these traps now and they do me no harm as I fish out the lost rifle. Not a bad piece of kit.
Then I hear more distant yelling and more gunfire. The direction of the sound tells me that it’s not a fight that my friendly stalkers are involved in. There’s something going on beyond the nearby hill. I jog round to see what’s up. It’s a fight going on between some pretty heavily armed neutral stalkers and the bandits. I join in, taking down first a bandit and then – sorry! – one of the stalkers. Normally these chaps would ignore me, only firing on dogs and bandits, but now I’ve crossed that line. Fire on one of their party and they’ll attack. They almost kill me, opening up at close range. I dive behind cover. I reload, go back out and shoot them both. It’s disappointing, and strange. There’s less meaning in the deaths of these two than the death of a fly. Yet, because I’d swatted them due to a simple accident, I felt bad. Stalker has some of the most excruciating deaths, where NPCs are injured, but not dead. They writhe on the ground in agony. If you have allies they’ll often finish them off with a pistol shot – something I assumed was scripted when I first played the game, but now I’ve come to realise is the natural behaviour of the people of the zone.
And it’s here the game fails me completely. One of the stalkers that I had not meant to harm is still alive, but maimed. Because he was neutral and I attacked him, there’s no option to offer the medkit and save him like I did with my besieged friend across the valley. I contemplate the crippled fellow for a few moments. I pull out the pistol and do what needs to be done. After all, he might have ammuntion. And that’s no use to him now. I think about leaving things there and playing something a bit less grim.
Not for too long though: there’s a twinkle in the vegetation at the bottom of this valley: an artefact! Getting closer, I realise it’s one I’ve not seen before. I sprint forward to grab, and step straight into anomaly. Somehow, I survive its dragging, booming gravity effect, and step away injured. Stupid. The artefact is gone. I wander back up the valley, where everything is turning soft pink with the sunset. I have another skirmish with bandits, risking close range combat for the thrill of it. I look at the map and see that there are some “stashes” marked nearby – places where stalkers have left some loot that I can later collect. It’s in a pipe by a derelict crane, according to the description. I can’t find anything. A bug? Or is the game lying to me?
All of which random occurrence and rooting about in the rumbling corners of this game make my anticipation of the sequel, Clear Sky, all the more acute. In just the same way that so many people put on Crackdown or a GTA game just to have a blast, cause anarchy, or explore the world they’ve bought from the shops, so I like to hang about in The Zone, killing dogs and getting buying ammunition. It’s a fractured experience: I can’t even be said to be developing anything as I might do playing Oblivion or some other open-ended RPG, but still, it drags me down. If I want anything from Clear Sky, it’s more space and freedom. More drunks lamenting the loss of their Kalashnikov…
It’s getting dark. I start to head back to the bar, almost by instinct. No point being out in the rain and dark, and I’ve got to take the gun back to its owner… There’s no need to, of course. I can just quit the game. And I do. But I’ll be back.
01/05/2008 at 09:08 Lukasz says:
STALKER is great but i’ve never finished it. Bugged quest for Freedom put me off from playing it for half year. Now the game doesn’t want to run properly (My computer needs a format and from various reason I cannot do that. But funny how Ep2 with much better graphic works flawlessly).
I’m sad :(
06/03/2012 at 15:28 greasy says:
Download stalker complete mod -> free play mode, live that fun again.
Also, the movie its based on is amazing.
01/05/2008 at 09:21 John P (Katsumoto) says:
“If I want anything from Clear Sky, it’s more space and freedom.”
Well, Clear Sky looks like it will provide just that, and if it lives up to its predecessor I can’t see any other game competing with it for my affections this year.
Am replaying the original right now, weirdly enough (just got to the Red Forest), and I know what you mean about just wanting to explore and “live” it. Even once you’ve “finished” an area in terms of the main story line, that area still teems with life. It’s been a while since i’ve done X16 at Yantar, for instance, but on a brief pop back to Wild Territory to have a poke around and see if there were any good artefacts lying around, I found it buzzing. Bandits fighting off Bloodsuckers, whilst a heavily armed Duty squad was clearing through the whole area trying to “pacify” it. I love how unscripted the whole thing is, and Clear Sky looks like it will triple this element! I CAN’T WAIT.
01/05/2008 at 09:27 Ian says:
I’m going to get back to STALKER as I never got far into it. I understand there’s patches which tidy it up now so I’ll do that and get back to it because even from limited play it’s one of my favourite game worlds. So desolate, every building you look at could be teeming with life (animals, bandits, stalkers) or morosely empty and you just HAVE to know.
One of my favourite moments was very early. I saw some people in the distance as I was running through the countryside. Upon further inspection they were bandits. Three of them. I left well alone and took the long way around. I was walking along the side of a road bridge further on and stopped. Gunfire. I went up to a tunnel going under the bridge and saw some stalkers who, it turned out, were fighting the exact same bandits who I’d left alone. Naturally I got involved, but it just struck me how different it might all have been if I’d tried to take them on alone.
01/05/2008 at 09:27 Pavel says:
Yahoo ! Its nice to see someone else who enjoyed Stalker as much as I did! First time I finished it with static lightning, it was great experience.Then I played it after upgrade, so now with fully dynamic, and it was even better…this game has simply the BEST atmosphere ever put in the videogame.Clear Sky can’t come soon enough!
01/05/2008 at 09:28 arqueturus says:
I’m still trying with this Jim. I play it for a bit and get a little further but then I get distracted by something else and go to that.
I can see glimmers of what you mention but I haven’t reached the part where the factional stuff kicks in so have yet to experience full flavoured Stalker.
I’ll try again soon.
01/05/2008 at 09:36 Jim Rossignol says:
It’s probably worth stressing that the factional stuff is woefully underdeveloped. To GSC’s credit they seem to have realised this for Clear Sky and are capitalising on it.
01/05/2008 at 09:40 arqueturus says:
*sighs*
Maybe it won’t get any better then. Still I need to play it for a bit longer to find out.
01/05/2008 at 09:45 Muzman says:
Nice piece. I’m the same. I’ve got a save where I’ve come back to the Bar from Prypyat (before the point of no return) and I just branched a whole lot of saves off there as I wander around and just do whatever. I became basically a professional Zone trapper, collecting every monster part I know is worth something and then cashing it in for the various missions or with the scientists. I did this for what must have been game-weeks. I was fabulously rich and had to ask “why am I doing this?” a few times, but then some weird thing you’ve never seen before happens or you say “Well the village bloodsuckers are probably back by now” and get back on the hunt. It’s quite remarkable.
Actually there is a reference to women in the game: one of the jokes told around the campfire goes something like “A Stalker reaches a crossroads with a sign post. The left direction says ‘beware anomalies and radiation’, straight ahead reads ‘monsters and a few artifacts’, the right direction sign reads ‘Inns, Women and comforts’.
The stalker thinks for a while and then heads straight ahead. He mutters to himself “better the devil you know I suppose. I wonder what ‘Inns, Women and comforts’ is? I’ll have to ask barkeep.”
It was cool to find that out. I had wondered if the whole stoic masculinity of the game was just a product of not understanding what was being said most of the time, but no it’s in there.
01/05/2008 at 09:45 Jim Rossignol says:
Factional stuff is still one of the best aspects of the game, despite being underdeveloped.
01/05/2008 at 09:48 Freelancepolice says:
Still yet to pick this up, shamefully!
01/05/2008 at 09:58 John P (Katsumoto) says:
The campfire conversations are probably amongst the best reasons to take up Russian. Or Ukrainian, I dunno which it is.
01/05/2008 at 10:05 Okami says:
And it’s here the game fails me completely.
Relations to NPCs are the point where most games fail me, especially open world ones like Gothic or Stalker. It’s all very binary, either they hate you and you have to kill them or not. Sometimes you’ve got hostile, neutral and friendly, but that’s about it.
Games that are completely scripted, and linear, like Half Life or most Bioware RPGs (yea, they’re linear. They may have a few branches in their storyline, but they’re still linear) don’t have this problem. They’re like theme park rides, you just hop in, hang on and enjoy the ride. Everything get’s served to you on a plate and you don’t question it.
It’s like the uncanny valley of AI. There are moments when you’re really surprised by the behavior of the NPCs, when it all really sucks you in and you allmost believe you’re dealing with humans. And then the illusion get’s shattered and you realize it’s all just a game.
01/05/2008 at 10:07 garry says:
Come in! Don’t stand there!
Come in! Don’t stand there!
01/05/2008 at 10:08 Jim Rossignol says:
I like to think of him as the friendliest doorman in the world.
01/05/2008 at 10:10 Gurrah says:
I was always hoping for Jagged Alliance-esque features like crafting barrel extensions or more responsive triggers. I mean the modified weapons are already in the game, why not give the player the ability to mod his own? Here’s hoping it’ll happen in Clear Sky.
01/05/2008 at 10:11 John P (Katsumoto) says:
The guy in Yantar is far more annoying.
Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello. Hello? Hello.
The worst thing is the scientist’s bunker thing isn’t soundproof or anything, so even on the far side of the swamp investigating that crashed helicopter you can still hear him faintly in the distance..
Hello? Hello.
01/05/2008 at 10:14 Cargo Cult says:
I’m already seeing STALKER influences in this ‘ere new MINERVA map I’m working on. Perhaps a little to do with another, real-life ‘zone’ a friend and I explored recently – namely the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland. We didn’t see any mutants wandering around, but some of the architecture was amusingly similar…
01/05/2008 at 10:18 tom says:
I wanted to love stalker as much as i love the book/film. But my graphics card didnt love it and i still havent got around to upgrading. When a game based on atmosphere looks like a progamers quake stripdown it loses the impact for me. It will be the first game to grace any new hardware i get though!
01/05/2008 at 10:25 Crispy says:
‘Underdeveloped’? I heard that it was cut because they were taking too long with the game.
Anyway, what’s funny about your story is that same gun you have to retrieve for the barman -in my game- was showing on the map as inside the wall of a building and completely unreachable. This is what keeps me from re-playing Stalker, fear of one of the greater-spotted bugs included with the release completely ruining my experience. I will say that Stalker did reel me in incredibly, and when games do that I tend not to perform any manual saves at all and just ride on the edge of my seat the whole way, because getting into the frame of mind where you think you need to ‘save’ every 5 minutes breaks the immersion. So, it’s a pity that Stalker had me hitting some horrible progress-blocking bugs that forced me to restart a number of times, losing usually hours of progress at a time.
It’s one game I can rely on to give me a good experience when I return to play all the mods that have been released for it. Anyone got any hot tips for Stalker mods?
01/05/2008 at 10:28 John P (Katsumoto) says:
For a completely different, but bloody amazing experience, you have to download and play the “Nuclear Snow” mod (do a google).
If you aren’t feeling that drastic, most people recommend the “realistic weather” mod, and I like the “no time limits on quests” mod so that I don’t have to run back and forth across the map deserpately but can instead take my time.
There’s one in development called “AMK” mod which looks to be the most insanely ambitious mod ever, including blowouts, sleeping and new AI whereby the Stalkers chat to each other (and you) using IMs and actually go around picking up artefacts and hoarding them etc. But yeah, insanely ambitious.
01/05/2008 at 10:30 cHeal says:
“Come in! Don’t stand there!
Come in! Don’t stand there!”
he he yeah that’s tremendously annoying.
Stalker is my favourite story driven game ever, for me it was the most significant progression in the FPS/action genre since Dues Ex and even with all its faults (which are numerous) atleast it tried to do something new, something exciting and for its atmosphere alone it deserves major kudos. I loved the Combat, I loved the missions and story. It all just worked for me.
Funnily enough Stalker also pushed me further away from liking Half Life 2 + eps. Ep1 was a complete mess and though the second was much better it was all just so old, so boring since having played Stalker.
01/05/2008 at 10:30 phuzz says:
I only picked stalker up a few weeks ago, but apparently I’m just about to reach the Red Forest, right now though I’m doing exactly the same stuff as Jim (and some of the rest of you), side quests and random bandit slaying. Wiping out packs of animals and checking out a few of the stashes around the place.
Oddly enough I spent yesterday afternoon batting emails back and forth with a mate about places to go explore in the zone (hey Corporal!), it’s just one of those games that creates those little experiences that you talk about with your mates later;
“There was this one time I was trying to carry a whole bunch of guns back to the bar and…..”
01/05/2008 at 10:33 nexus7 says:
*…the game based on the sci-fi story “Roadside Picnic” (authors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Strugatsky).*
Ep2, worth to mention, has a glitcing bag on nvidia g92 gpu, so i can’t play it at all.
i play stalker, second time now, cause there aren’t any competitors/
:greets:
01/05/2008 at 10:37 heretic pride says:
crispy: i don’t think that’s a bug; the family rifle is underground, in an underpass
01/05/2008 at 10:40 Jim Rossignol says:
Other than the sound loops and a couple of physics freakouts I encountered almost no bugs in Stalker, even unpatched. I am well aware that this has probably skewed my experience somewhat.
01/05/2008 at 10:49 Rook says:
I’ve never quite understood Stalkers buggyness reputation. I played through unpatched on Vista so of course I had the dreaded save crash in two different areas fixed by reverting to static lighting in those maps, but apart from that and some AI glitches it was plain sailing.
As an aside, I picked up both Roadside Picnic and Stalker the film because of this game. I thought Roadside Picnic was a good, but stalker can be safely skipped (although the bit with the dog is so pretty).
01/05/2008 at 10:57 Cigol says:
I never really enjoyed playing STALKER in the sense of completing the quests or storyline – but I can still relate to the Blade Runner analogy, as there’s just something intoxicating about STALKER and how it ‘feels’, that atmosphere I guess, which makes playing it so fresh.
01/05/2008 at 11:03 roBurky says:
My experience of Stalker was lots and lots of bad guys that needed firing at repeatedly with a rifle from some kind of cover, until you hit them in the head. The combat just got terribly repetitive after several big buildings full of bad guys, and I gave up.
Was I just doing the wrong missions, or something?
(I tried reinstalling on this new PC, but it crashed every time I tried to save the game.)
01/05/2008 at 11:03 Strelok says:
Actually the movie is strongly recommended to film buffs. It is deliberately not following the book cause the Strugacki brothers (they also wrote the screenplay) did not want to repeat it and settled for something different.
On the other hand, Roadside Picnic is one of their more “mainstream” books (probably the most easily digestable) and should be a good read for everyone.
01/05/2008 at 11:12 nexus7 says:
…
gsc has changed publisher: now it’s deep silver.
i hope atari is just chose wrong… way. i think it’s question of QA.
fun
01/05/2008 at 11:13 Jim Rossignol says:
I enjoy Tarkovsky films, and I enjoyed the film of Stalker. It’s entirely at odds with the game of course. Glacial and action-free.
01/05/2008 at 11:14 Gap Gen says:
There are some nice touches. Like the first character you meet tells you to bump off a guy pretending to be his agent. This guy happens to be wandering outside the Duty complex, and if you shoot him a band of Duty men shoots you back. The solution I found was to lure a pack of dogs towards him and let them do the killing.
The atmosphere of STALKER is unrivalled – you’ll spend the whole time half-stalking, half-running from wild animals and human foes alike. It’s a shame the ending is so linear, because the feeling of carving your own path is very powerful. That, and meeting those invisible guys reminded me that I needed to put on clean underwear anyway.
01/05/2008 at 11:15 meatpeople says:
Oh STALKER, how I loved it. Even in spite of crash to desktop and bluescreens to hard reset (seriously), I still played it through twice.
I’m actually playing BioShock now for the first time, and despite my love for SS2, I’m not impressed. In some ways I think Stalker slightly ruined it, at least from the visual angle – I fell in love with the radiation-drenched saturated visuals, and the plasticy high-specularity of BioShock (and so many games; why do they do it?) just irritates me all the more. It didn’t in Doom 3 for example.
I really wish that at the end of the game they allowed you to simply roam the zone and take on random quests outside any plot structure. Not sure how well it would have worked but it’d have kept me playing for quite a while.
I can’t wait for Clear Sky. I never tried any mods; must do that.
01/05/2008 at 11:16 Ian says:
Before I play I’ll be getting that no-time-limits mod I think.
I’m also hoping there’s one that means the AI enemies aren’t capable of shooting a gnat off a sparrow’s arse (a sparrow hiding in a hedge) from 2000m.
01/05/2008 at 11:18 James T says:
Tarkovsky did Solaris, didn’t he? *grinds teeth*
Akin to what meat said above, STALKER definitely ruined Bioshock for me; STALKER had me suspecting that maybe ‘FPS/RPG leaders’ had belatedly, blessedly learned from Deus Ex in regards to map openness and multi-approach narratives (as in DX, you’re very much restricted to the one narrative path, but you have several different ways to traverse it), I remember blasting through Yantar or suchlike thinking, man, Bioshock’s gonna have to blow my mind now, if it’s gonna be anything like it’s cracked up to be. Buuut I talk quite enough about ‘Shock already…
I actually haven’t been looking forward to Clear Skies much, as all I’ve seen is some locations and the ‘team warfare’ example video — and I hate team stuff, unless it’s so unintrusive that it lets you do your own thing anyway, like HL2. …And it’s a prequel, so I don’t think the story’s going to blow my mind unless they’ve got something real clever up their sleeves. But having just gotten back into this brilliant, horribly-optimised game, my enthusiasm is revived. If Clear Skies carries on and enhances the freedoms and terrors and promise of STALKER, cleans up its erratic AI (I find the requirements of a stealth approach vary enormously from scene to scene, and game to game; sometimes the AI is ‘human’, sometimes it’s as omnipotent as a GTA3 policeman) and makes the game run like it should (I encounter few to no bugs in STALKER — the performance, however, is ridiculously ‘variable’, by which I mean, ‘utter shit for me, allegedly good for some people’), it is going to be outrageously good.
I was scavenging for PC sales figures earlier, and yaknow, according to GSC-via-IGN in Feb, STALKER’s sold 1.65 million? Pretty neat. Maybe that’s thanks to the long years of expectation, but I dunno about that — personally I’d never even heard of STALKER until I read the Eurogamer review, and it’s not like I avoid gaming news…
01/05/2008 at 11:24 martin says:
me loves stalker too. it runs flawlessly on my linux box. i hope clear sky also runs on my linux box.
01/05/2008 at 11:31 Joe Martin says:
…but it’s still a fetch quest. You could write something nice about this for a quest in Morrowind too, but it doesn’t mean the game is fun once you’ve done 1000 of them.
Still, I do like STALKER. Personally I love it for the feel of the guns and the bullet physics. And the subtle references to the book.
When I want atmosphere though, I do have a few games I play over and over. Barista 2 is a favourite as a stand-alone indie title (free too):
http://blended.planethalflife.gamespy.com/
Grotto King and some of the HTML games from the same site are pretty good too.
01/05/2008 at 11:36 James T says:
Absolutely it’s a fetch quest — and I hope to see those embody a far smaller proportion of Clear Sky’s missions — but baby, it’s all in the journey.
01/05/2008 at 11:50 Yhancik says:
@ Crispy : About mods
I tend to prefer small single-purpose Mods to the Big Overhaul ones. In this regard I liked the AliVe Mod (Discussion & Download) that makes the A-Life more free / less scripted / less predictable. The guy who made it tried to avoid breaking quests, but since I’ve never finished STALKER, I can’t tell…
There’s a Less Generic Bandits mod that bring a little variety in bandit fashion, here
And this one looks interesting, but i haven’t tested it yet, and i don’t know how compatible it is with AliVe.
01/05/2008 at 12:09 James T says:
The only ‘Big’ Mod I like is the comparatively lesser-known ‘Basix’, which chucks in vehicles (drive a Yugo into a springboard anomaly at full speed, jump out ahead of time, and look at it become a speck in the sky!… and then crash to earth a few hundred metres away. And you can still drive it), pops in lots of ‘variant’ weapons (Spetsnaz carry camouflaged Abakans with slightly rebalanced properties, for example), plus a deleted weapon or two (I love the long shotgun — the ‘TOZ-34′, I think it’s called; beats the sawn-off into a cocked hat), and it includes a bunch of trader stuff like repairs, fixing the Freedom Compound trader’s cashflow problem, things like that. The only problem with it is that the story mission guys actually kit you out with some of the souped-up stuff when you accept a mission (‘since they wouldn’t send you out on their errands with a pistol and a foul mouth’), which coddles the skilled STALKER player a bit; that said, since the bandits and enemies are now routinely carrying better weapons, you do need better gear to survive, so it’s not completely patronising…
Best to play STALKER through with more minor fix-y type mods first, but Basix is fun. I think this is the final version.
…That version might have some of the deleted monsters. I don’t know what they’re like, a bit weird apparently. Old men with monkey limbs or something.
01/05/2008 at 12:27 Turin Turambar says:
Of course you can replay Stalker. It’s a solid shooter, with some freedom on top of it.
01/05/2008 at 12:32 Chaz says:
I enjoyed the atmosphere in Stalker immensely. I really love that whole grey skies wilderness and decay thing, with nature slowly claiming back the crumbling vestiges of abandoned buildings. Unfortunately overall I found the game a bit disappointing, especially as my expectations for it were quite high. My main problem with it was that it didn’t feel very open; the different zones although nicely constructed, just left me feeling very hemmed in. The timed missions that had me running back and forth through the different zones only served to make me more aware of the constrictive nature of the zones. In that sense I think Boiling Point worked far better for me, a huge open world with no barriers, which was actually how I was expecting Stalker to be. Plus there was a few ideas they had that they pulled from the game in the end, like having to shelter from blowouts, and shooting birds and various other wild life for food as you got further out and into the zone. The food thing now seems to have little point other than to fill up your inventory with heavy tins of spam and sausages.
Having said all that the game still has its moments, for instance going down some of those underground bunkers were possibly some of the most scariest and tense moments I’ve had in a game. Sneaking up on some bandits and fighting my way into an abandoned factory was also a tense and thrilling experience, especially since death can come very quickly in Stalker.
I only got half way through the game before leaving it, although its one of those that I still fully intend to finish off some day.
Now if only those two devs could get together and make Stalking Point: Road to Chernobyl.
01/05/2008 at 12:33 AndrewC says:
I like the attitude of playing along with the random happenings, both good and bad, a game throws at you, rather than the quickloading as soon as something imperfect happens – most games seem to encourage the latter response and most gamers, especially ones who grew up playing the much more linear, limited games of old, have internalised it. Or me, anyway.
But, well, it is still just a fetch quest. Relating in-game stories is fun, and better than descriptions of abstract play mechanics, but is it really this sort of mission that makes STALKER so special for you?
For me, and for lots of people judging by comments, it’s that ineffable atmosphere that does it and an attempt to root out the things in the game that cause it might better communicate the arguments for this game – and how it is different from others.
For example, in comaprison to most post-apocalyptic games (Gears of War!) which are full of characters who seem happy to be there and give off a vibe that all the desolation is cool, no-one in STALKER wants to be there, they are all trapped, and just trying to survive. This change in attitude towards the gameworld changes the player’s attitude towards it. I thought that was a pretty big thing in regards to atmosphere.
As another example (touched on in the above article), the slightly cranky is-it-a-bug-or-not behaviour of many NPC’s objects and missions in the game actually work to unbalance the player’s relationship to the world – it is not predictable, and anything really could happen simply because something might happen that even the programmers didn’t want to happen – something that becomes explicit and deliberate when the brain scorcher is starting to mess with your mind. An example of pragramming failure actually feeding in to themes in the game, making cons pros.
And, now i’m done telling you your job, when is the new game released?
01/05/2008 at 12:39 Jim Rossignol says:
August 29th.
It’s not *that it’s a fetch quest* that makes it special, but that it allows things to happen along the way which make such a limited quest replayable. I could do that again and face a different outcome. That’s unlikely to happen in any other FPS I can think of. Most games sorely lack random encounters, or events in which you’re not actually involved – like the fight between the bandits and the Stalkers.
01/05/2008 at 12:43 kadayi says:
I’ve still yet to finish it (My last save had me just about to head into Prypyat) but it is definitely a game I always recommend to people despite it janky interface, as a game that truly needs to be experienced if your into gaming.
One of the things I particularly like about the game is that the combat is more realistic in terms of the range at which you engage. Much as I love HL2 for it’s gameplay and enjoyed CoD4 for it’s frenetic pace, the combat in both games tends to be much more in your face, where as with stalker it’s a little more distant (and you want to keep it that way to survive), but nevertheless equally as brutal, which I think greatly adds to the morbid Blair Witchesque horror of forcing you to delve into the darkness and claustrophobia of the labs in order to pursue the story line. You know you have to go down there, but you know you don’t want to, and you know it’s going to get very very ugly, but you can’t stop yourself (shudders). The other great aspect I like about stalker is the degree of constant vulnerability you feel. Regardless of whatever nifty gun or stalker suit you come across you never ever feel that bad ass. You know it only takes a bad chance encounter with a pack of wild dogs or mercenaries for everything to go completely tits up, it keeps you on your toes.
01/05/2008 at 12:45 Joe Martin says:
I get your point, but I don’t really agree when it comes to STALKER. Mainly because it never seemed random to me – every time I entered that area the Bandits would still be fighting the Stalkers. I’d stop, wipe out all the bandits, then next time I came through then I’d get the same thing. I got bored of it.
There’s a lot to like about STALKER and there are some truly random bits – like stalkers wandering into anomalies and so on, but the fight isn’t a good example to me because it was recurring.
Maybe it’s just me, but if I really wanted random then I’d play Nethack or something. I do like the idea of random stories, but the stories I saw in STALKER were all a bit too samey.
Not that its a bad game – like you, I’ve finished it twice and replayed parts of it much more than that, but the random stories bit never struck me as STALKER’s strong point.
What was a strong point was the stories in combat – bullets ricocheting, deflecting, spending a good fifteen minutes planning out how to take down a squad of duty guards, using grenades to flush people out and finding random weapons along the way. Those are the stories which make STALKER stick in my head.
01/05/2008 at 13:09 Rob says:
Great article, makes me want to fire it up again; I never really got into it the first time.
01/05/2008 at 13:27 UncleLou says:
““Come in! Don’t stand there!
Come in! Don’t stand there!”
he he yeah that’s tremendously annoying.”
Hehe, yes, but at least it’s just one character that says the same thing over and over again.
/glares at Assassin’s Creed
“Stalker is my favourite story driven game ever, for me it was the most significant progression in the FPS/action genre since Dues Ex and even with all its faults (which are numerous) atleast it tried to do something new, something exciting and for its atmosphere alone it deserves major kudos. I loved the Combat, I loved the missions and story. It all just worked for me.”
You are me, and I am you. I have nothing to add. :-)
01/05/2008 at 13:35 Nick says:
The raid on the freedom base is one of my favourite gaming moments. The first time I did it the duty guys got themselves killed, so I waited untill dark snuck around (after sniping out the alarm) with a vintorez, exacting covert revenge. It was amazing fun. Then I found the armory and raided that.
I never finished Stalker, but it gave me more hours of entertainment and fun than most games I’ve played in the past 5 years.
01/05/2008 at 13:35 Senethro says:
Get out of here Stalker!
Get out of here Stalker!
Stalker gave me a taste for survival. I still remember the first night I was caught outside, stumbled into an anomaly before dragging my wounded self under a bridge. There I decided to wait until dawn, perched on a pile of crates with a shotgun, listening for wildlife. I was joined by a couple of other stalkers and twice we had to fend off dogpacks. Just as it was getting light we heard gunshots and voices and I decided to hang around with my night buddies a little longer. We weren’t kept waiting long as some bandits came over a nearby hill, looking none too healthy but still spoiling for a fight. One of them had some decent assault rifle while we were armed with pistols and shotties. My allies fell fast and when I exhausted my medical supplies, I chose to remember the better part of valour.
I followed the bandit group at a distance throughout the next day, hoping something bad would happen to them. Its the Zone, so in the long term it was inevitable. They decided to take on a military checkpoint. In the confusion of the gunfight, I crept from bush to bush and stabbed the bandit with the assault rifle in the back, grabbed his gear and dashed along the road back to a camp of friendly stalkers. The weapon would go on to get me through the first third of the game.
01/05/2008 at 13:37 James T says:
SPOILERS:
Although I did find the STALKER world sufficiently chaotic in most places, I agree with Joe that the predictability of certain areas, clash-wise, did let that element down.
I’d like to see Clear Skies employ a Tabula Rasa/Battlefield-esque ‘capture the spawn point’ system; it was a bit bler to help the Garbage stalkers overcome that bandit scum, and then never have them press the advantage and seize the bandit camp down the hill. I think it’d be a healthy employment of their ‘A-Life’ to have a constant game of AI Battlefield going on all around you, with frequent reinjections of subjugated parties to keep it active (the course of this ‘background’ game could even trigger side-missions — “Please help us beat back the army/animals/bandits/Duty here, here and here, they’ve been successfully taking most of the Zone”, etc.) AI clashes in STALKER practically never go down the same way twice unless there’s a major imbalance in numbers, so it’d provide a nice ‘randomised’ sprinkling of Zone wanderers to encounter as you traveled. Of course, with the big focus on faction warfare in S:CS, maybe this is what’ll happen. Hooray, good stuff happening! Next thing you know, I’ll have gainful employment!
01/05/2008 at 14:29 akbar says:
The raid on the freedom base?! That sounds fun… I should have hung around doing the faction missions more. The only time I ended up crossing freedom was when their AI suddenly (and for no reason that I can think of) decided I was an enemy. I was just outside their base at the time, so I squatted behind a pillar and waited as wave after wave of them came out of the base after me. It was a bit disappointing how uninventive they were – it was too easy to just pick them off as they came, all the way down to their leader Lukasz. Of course, I then got to wander their base and raid the armoury in peace, which was handy.
01/05/2008 at 15:05 Morph says:
Stalker is highest on my list of games I wish could get into. I’ve tried three times but never managed more than a few hours. I’m constantly put off by little niggles.
I found radiation and anomolies annoying rather than challenging. I got angry when compelted quests didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t understand artefacts (they just seemed to poison me). The interface and quest system was so clumsy. Random crashes to desktop didn’t help.
Sigh. I wish I could love it as much as you lot.
01/05/2008 at 15:09 Cooper says:
I completed Stalker a few months ago, and uninstalled it in order to fit EP2 on. I’m not sure it was worth it.
Stalker has atmosphere coming out of it’s ear ‘oles. After completing it, I went back, and just ignored the main quests. I’d spend hours, doing the same; just working with the side quests and the location-specific ‘save the stalkers from the bandits’ and the like.
The thing that always got me, was that even though they had this most amazing landscape, which was incredibly detailed, there was little in the way of encouragement to explore. There are whole swathes of the map that, if you never do anything but missions and side missions, you’ll never see. Which is a shame.
01/05/2008 at 15:18 Paul Montesanti says:
Man, this really makes me want to play STALKER.
This reminds me of the way I used to play Oblivion. You know, sometimes I think these kinds of experiences, the need to wander in a place both familiar and unfamiliar, point out a glaring flaw in my personality, some psychological hole that needs to be filled. Is this why Ishmael went to sea?
01/05/2008 at 15:23 kadayi says:
@Morph
A lot of the early artifacts are pretty much only worth selling for phat cash. Don’t attach the + radioactive ones unless you have some form of worn radiation protection otherwise they will slowly poison you. Generally there’s little gain to be had from those kind tbh. Worst comes to the worst, hunt down a walkthrough there are plenty online if you need tips.
01/05/2008 at 15:28 Cargo Cult says:
For me, the fact that there was such a desolate, empty world out there was enough of an incentive to go exploring!
01/05/2008 at 15:51 phuzz says:
Something tells me we’re still going to be talking about Stalker for a long while yet, maybe because no one seems to have had the same experiences as anyone else.
Unlike something like “do you remember when you saw the portal open in Minerva?”, one person will mention something and everyone else seemingly had a completely different experience (“I killed some bandits”, “some dogs killed some bandits”, “some bandits killed me”, “it crashed and wiped my harddrive”).
01/05/2008 at 16:01 ChrisL says:
Great article. Now I’ll have to play Stalker again.
Sigh.
01/05/2008 at 16:11 InVinoVeritas says:
I purchased Stalker after reading about it on RPS, and never managed to sit down and focus enough to get myself hooked. I did the same with Pathologic, and this past Sunday, had the whole day to myself (wife was out of town) to immerse myself in the game world. Now, wild horses couldn’t drag me away from the diseased little village. I just need to get around to doing the same thing with Stalker…
01/05/2008 at 16:32 Robin says:
I found myself approaching Stalker very differently to Oblivion. I barely touched the side-quests and focussed on survival and pushing forward through the Zone, getting by with what I could scavenge rather than seeking out powerful items and tinkering with my inventory. I think I might go back into it just to take pictures next.
I thought it was a bit of a shame that Pripyat was chock full of enemies when you get there, exploring it at leisure would have been nice. Maybe something for Clear Skies.
01/05/2008 at 16:37 Ben Abraham says:
Would stalker run on my geriatric Nvidia 7100 GS? =P Methinks I would go out and buy it otherwise.
01/05/2008 at 16:39 Don says:
Like the author I was in the mood to have another trip into the Zone recently. And with a shiny new CPU/GPU I could now play it with max bling. And it does look really good, specially when lightning flashes in the night and the road ahead lights up and shows the shadows of the trees for as far as you can see.
Sadly the experience usually lasts no longer than a level as it BSODs frequently, often in transit from one level to another. Seems to be a common experience judging from the forums and unfortunately epitomises why PC gaming might go into a big decline. Perhaps there’s some magic combo of game/driver patch level in which it will work ok but I really haven’t got the time. Must be incredibly frustrating for the developers – try as they might there are so many different hardware and software combinations out there that their chances of getting it right for everyone are zero. Throw in widespread piracy and you can see why they’ll prefer to target consoles.
01/05/2008 at 16:42 Jim Rossignol says:
@Robin: Pripryat will not feature in Clear Sky.
01/05/2008 at 16:54 Evan says:
The writing on this site so often convinces me to buy a game.
Anyway, I guess I will give in and buy Stalker tonight. God knows I can’t afford another game right now… especially a good one that will eat up a lot of my time.
01/05/2008 at 17:10 Chaz says:
@Ben: Well it runs on my 6800GT OK with max settings at 1280×1024, in my 3 year old P4 PC. So I don’t think its that much of a heavy duty game as regards kit requirments.
01/05/2008 at 17:15 Jim Rossignol says:
Stalker is pretty scaleable, but you need to have quite a long play with the variables to get it running nicely. Reducing vegetation draw distance is a major one.
01/05/2008 at 17:20 Will Tomas says:
Just out of interest, does anyone (especially Jim, given this piece) play Stalker with any of the realism mods? I say this because I quite liked Stalker (completed it once properly, but saved near the end so did all the endings just to see what would happen…) but haven’t yet got around to playing it again. If some of the mods make the experience more immersive they might be worth looking at.
01/05/2008 at 17:22 Link says:
I totally agree, even though i was slightly put off by the major performance issues i had. Most prominent in my memories was when i first faced one of those psychic guys in the labs… my gf walked in as i’m creeping down the shadowy tunnel, i check behind me only to see the disfigured shape stumble into the light, then he did the super-scary-zoom-into-my-brain move and she screamed and ran out.
Or when i entered pripyat, met up with the super duty soldiers, fighting for a good 10 minutes through the city, then i turn around to take cover and suddenly realize, they’re all dead, i’m alone again…
01/05/2008 at 17:35 SwiftRanger says:
The game is quite scaleable idd but near the end (in Pripryat f.e.) the framerate does drag down a bit (got a PIV 2.66 Ghz, 1GB Ram and a Radeon 9600 Pro, playing in 1024×768 res with Medium detail). I’ll get a new PC shortly, ready for going through the original game again and after that Clear Sky of course (if it makes that August release date).
A list with recommended mods next to the ones already mentioned in the previous comments would be welcome idd. :)
EDIT: oh yeah, the first time you encounter that hypnotising bubble-head is just unforgettable. Such an enemy ‘weapon’ sounds like a cheap trick at first if you read a description about it but it’s really cool in-game.
01/05/2008 at 17:47 James Sterrett says:
The wounded enemies in Stalker sparked a heated discussion with my wife. She was horrified when she saw me executing the wounded, and it took some time to convince her that this was, in fact, an act of mercy, since they were going to either die fast from me, or bleed out in agony.
01/05/2008 at 18:50 eyemessiah says:
I am one of those who wanted to like Stalker but couldn’t quite manage it. Technical problems & odd in game bugs gradually sapped away my will to play – and to be honest I didn’t really feel like the game was offering much in terms of reasons to hang around.
I’ll be glad to try the follow up though, as I always liked the premise of the game, and in terms of tone I liked the angle that the developers took. If it was just a little bit more focused & solidly built I probably could have gotten into it.
Maybe I’ll give it a go after my next upgrade in the hopes that a fresh hardware base renders me immune to the technical glitches too.
01/05/2008 at 19:18 UncleLou says:
“For me, the fact that there was such a desolate, empty world out there was enough of an incentive to go exploring!”
Yes, same here. I didn’t need to find anything special. Exploring for exploring’s sake, just to see the world they built, was rewarding for me.
01/05/2008 at 20:10 Zacmanman says:
I really agree with what you say mostly because I feel the same way with a few games, one being The elder Scrolls 4. I love the idea of being immersed in a world so much different and a complex story and nonsensical inquires (why are there no childern in Mass Effect and Oblivion?). Stalker, although great and appealed to me a lot, bugged the shit out of everything I did. I played around 10-12 hours and then, randomly, the game bugged. The map was flipped upside down and I couldn’t move and I had no life. I couldn’t reload any other game because they all reacted the same way. Unfortunately, some great games are bugged. I love Stalker and I’ll defiantly get back into it sometime soon.
01/05/2008 at 20:30 Geoff says:
I purchased Stalker on the recommendations of RPS and Tom Chick, and am glad I did. Played all the way through, taking my time, and enjoyed it immensely.
I didn’t run into many bugs. Some of the aspects I enjoyed most were:
-The feel of the combat. Guns didn’t feel like toys in a game, they felt like guns. If you shot someone, they were punctured and bled. If you shot someone in the head, they died. Even if you did it with the “weak” or “low level” guns and the bad guy was a powerful enemy. Shoot someone in the head, they die. “Better” guns was more about accuracy, scopes, rate of fire, ammunition availability, etc. rather than “17 damage points instead of 13″
- The inventory limitations. I’m a pack rat by nature, and often feel that half the point of a game is to build a hoard of treasure. Being forced to severely limit my belongings was frustrating at first, but then changed the feel of the game for the better. It was no longer just about picking up everything, it was about planning survival.
About the worst thing I can say for it is that the free-roaming bits in the middle were so great that I kind of lost interest in the linear push to the end. Still did it, and it was interesting. I’ll buy Clear Sky without question.
01/05/2008 at 20:42 Larington says:
Haven’t revisted Stalker so far, mostly because I don’t currently have time to go re-installing games, but I definately enjoyed it when I played it… Theres a flawed genius glimmer to it that always leaves me wanting more (Just as with Startopia, Anachronox, Planetside and others).
01/05/2008 at 21:16 Kadayi says:
“It was no longer just about picking up everything, it was about planning survival.”
QFT. Indeed initially the inventory system was annoying (not helped by the cumbersome interface) but once you got your mind around it added a lot to the game and I actively enjoyed thinking about what equipment I’d take, what I’d leave behind and most importantly how much ammunition/med/rad kits I was prepared to carry. 300 rounds sounds like a lot of bullets, but often proved not to be the case, and being forced to fall back to a crappy pistol in a firefight makes for a tense game ;)
01/05/2008 at 21:25 dhex says:
this is a great piece of stalker evangelism.
my local gamestop told me that it’s coming out in september. steam says august. so…july? december?
01/05/2008 at 21:58 Mike says:
I’ve played STALKER for precisely half an hour, and I think the last game to grip me that fast was probably Half-Life. It has something, certainly, that other games don’t, although I know that part of it is just my attachment to the idea of Chernobyl and exploring the beauty of somewhere so desolate.
It’s on the list for post-upgrade investigating. It’s also on the list for Games To Only Play During The Day.
01/05/2008 at 23:00 Howard says:
To all those who doubt the capacity to scare and amaze that STALKER posseses, you MUST check out a mod called Oblivion Lost (yes, the original name for STALKER).
This mod completely changes the game, bringing it far more in line with how us long time fans imagined it would be. The scope of what it changes is staggering and it is well worth the download (even comes with an idiot proof installer and mod manager).
I guarantee you that this mod will make you play it just once more no matter how many times you have previously completed it.
01/05/2008 at 23:08 Kadayi says:
“It’s on the list for post-upgrade investigating. It’s also on the list for Games To Only Play During The Day.”
You might want to add ‘Games to only be played with other people in near proximity’ and ‘Games to be only played whilst wearing rubber underpants’ as well to that list when you have down into the labs…
02/05/2008 at 00:05 internisus says:
Some of the commentators here have asked about mods–I’ve been playing with the “Rebalanced” mod, which combines and tweaks many other mods while attempting to remain true to the spirit of the game. I recommend it.
I am looking forward to Clear Sky chiefly for the revamped factional elements. One of the promised features is global warfare in which you can lead your own faction to victory. Something that makes me sad about Stalker is that my loner friends refuse to take over a compound that I’ve emptied of bandits, for example. They don’t progress forward, and the bandits come back less than 12 game hours later (way too quickly; I don’t like this). So I’m looking forward to having the opposite occur in Clear Sky.
It would also be nice if I could say, “Hey you, go and patch up that wall. You there, fix this ladder so we can use the tower as a sniping and watch post. Okay, I want men at these positions with six hour rotation.” or whatever. The environments are so incredible that it makes me a little crazy to see NPCs ignoring possibilities for fortification. I’m not expecting to see this kind of thing in Clear Sky, of course.
Anyway, for a totally different vision of what Stalker could have been like, check this thread on the GSC forums: http://www.gsc-game.com/main.php?t=community&s=forums&s_game_type=xr&thm_page=1&thm_id=8866&sec_id=14 Personally, I love this direction and would kill for that kind of game. Lonesomely roughing it out there in the zone, searching for rare opportunities, making long-term decisions based on economy and safety, etc.
Oh, hey Dhex. Clear Sky is coming out at the very end of August, which is why the retailer told you September.
02/05/2008 at 00:56 Justin says:
I found that the closer I got to the end of the game, the more occasional pauses I’d have as my video card and CPU tried to catch up. This made the end of the game a bit of a slog. The exploration part was wonderful, though.
I have to admit: at first, I didn’t realize you had to activate artifacts by putting them in a special (unlabeled) part of the inventory.
I also didn’t realize how easy it was to damage your reputation; I went through the game helping when it was obvious, but I avoided firefights, which killed my reputation and I suspect raised prices. If I had bought a better gun, sooner, my game would have been somewhat easier.
This game is one of the things that makes me want to build a newer, stronger gaming machine, just to experience the atmosphere.
02/05/2008 at 01:41 BarkingDog says:
I found that the way bandits or whatever would respawn in a couple of game-hours was incredibly frustrating- partly because I had to loot everything I could, but mostly because I found myself fighting the same bandits over and over in exactly the same way to get anywhere. And, the guns I found (maybe because I could never get into it) always felt ridiculously weak; they didn’t *feel*.. solid, for want of a better word.
02/05/2008 at 09:39 Kadayi says:
I’m not sure I agree on that, certainly the early guns are a tad weak, but later ones like the TR301, GP 37 and Tunder are all pretty robust, and have good put down.
Again though, Stalker is more about putting them down before they see you at distance rather than trading gunshots up close and personal John Woo style.
02/05/2008 at 09:50 meatpeople says:
Turns out that Oblivion Lost mod implements the Freeplay at the end of the game I asked for above! Drivable vehicles! Roaming mutants and soldiers! Sounds great.
Now I’ll never get round to finishing BioShock.
Anyone any other mod recommendations? Regarding which mods work well with others etc?
02/05/2008 at 11:03 Yhancik says:
Mods don’t work well together, except if they’re very specific (like the Less Generic Bandits that only changes some meshes and textures).
If 2 mods modify the same .ltx files, it won’t work.. but I hear you can merge them, if you have the time and the knowledge.
02/05/2008 at 11:23 Irish Al says:
STALKER can throw up some unparalleled atmosphere. I remember crawling and sneaking through a cornfield in the pitch dark on a stormy night, just about able to see the vegetation. Suddenly, a flash of lighting and all around me is a pack of mutant dogs, just sitting there and watching me …
02/05/2008 at 11:36 muggins says:
I just remember looking down that grey road into the forest, just outside the village at the start, with the guitar from the stalker at the campfire floating over.
I felt cold and very alone, what a brilliant game.
02/05/2008 at 11:37 Malibu Stacey says:
I ordered it from Amazon last night after reading this yesterday. It’s less than £10 now.
I have next week off & am now forced to choose between far too many games (This, MINERVA, FEAR expansions, Overlord, UFO: Extraterrestrials or finishing Prey to name but a few).
Damn you RPS! /me shakes fist angrily at the sky
02/05/2008 at 12:29 Inglorion says:
I haven’t read all the other replies, so I might repeat what others have already said.
I think STALKER is a great game, and it epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of PC games in that it’s more complex and detailed than console games, but along with that comes the buggy, unpolished gameplay we sadly have gotten used to.
Just a few days ago I started my second “serious” STALKER adventure, and yesterday I got past Bar, on my way to kill “Master Stalker”. Before long I came upon a few Duty members who offered me a job: they wanted me to help them massacre the Freedom’s camp. Sure, count me in. So, I’m suppose to take out the snipers, but then there’s also something about killing a person – L-something – and as hell breaks loose I get “voice messages” from the Duty guy – Skull, i think it was – but someone else is talking over his voice, so it’s virtually impossible to understand what I’m really suppose to do. I eventually take out the snipers and L-something. I had to reload several times to make it, because of the confusion and my shoddy rifle, and every single time there were multiple voices mingled, so that I couldn’t understand anything. But now the job was done, and I go on a savory scavenge spree. I then head back to complete the mission – but what the hell?! Skull isn’t there! I go back to the Freedom base, and among the heaps of bodies I find Skull. So I’m not able to complete the mission, and the game doesn’t seem to understand that it was botched. There’s an element of realism in that Skull could die, obviously, but it feels very unsatisfying within the game, and I contemplate reloading once more, but quickly think, “No way – too much work.”
This is just one of many examples of how the game is unpolished. If we should toss realism into the game, like I mentioned, then one of the surviving Duty members should have taken the lead and given me my reward – whatever that was. All of this makes the game feel very unpredictable. It’s like whenever I’m about to complete a mission or something, I have a queasy feeling that the whole thing might blow up in my face, or that when I quick-save, my machine will reboot.
About “No women in STALKER”: I thought about that myself just recently, and came to the conclusion that in a truly realistic and mature version of the game – the way it should be if video games should be taken seriously, compared to for example movies — then there would be a brothel in Bar. The world of STALKER is a hard place, and in a hard place women must do what is necessary in order to survive, just like men would. Sex, drugs (or alcohol) and violence is an integral part of human life, even when you have a government that tries its best to restrict those things. If you take heterosexual relationship out of the equation, like you would in prison, then people would have to adapt. This goes for the world of STALKER as well.
STALKER is very cool, but it’s such an unpolished game, and many of those damn annyong things – “I said come in, don’t just stand there!” – have not been fixed in any of the patches. Whenever something happened, or is about to happen, I can’t help but wonder if the developers intended it that way or if it’s just another bug I’ve stumbled across.
02/05/2008 at 12:55 John P (Katsumoto) says:
Weirdly I just did that mission with Skull and he also died for me, but it simply transferred command to another surviving Duty member and I could hand in the quest with him. Patched all the way to 1.004?
02/05/2008 at 13:23 AndrewC says:
Muggins: ‘I felt cold and very alone, what a brilliant game.’
I agree completely, that sentence is really very strange from an outside perspective. ‘It made me feel like shit. Best game ever!’
Maybe games have failed to be genuinely immersive for so long that any sort of palpable atmosphere is regarded as glorious for those of us who are hopelessly addicted. Or maybe it says something about the maturity of games that the ‘best’ ones roll around in adolescant emotional spaces of isolation and the linking of ‘darkness’ with maturity. Buggered if I know, but I couldn’t stop playing the final section once it becomes linear as i knew I was near the end and *had* to get there. Finished at 2am, shivering, tense and utterly unable to sleep for the rest of the night. An extraordinary experience but, you know. Where’s the happy?
02/05/2008 at 13:27 AndrewC says:
Oh, and I walked in to the Freedom base and told the leader about the Duty raid and he told me to kill the Duty people, which I did, as I thought they were big dicks. Then Duty hated me for the rest of the game, making the bar area really interesting.
02/05/2008 at 14:23 Down Rodeo says:
Damn, like many others this article and its comments really make me want to buy STALKER. I have exams, but, I could be playing this awesome game. But I have exams. But STALKER…
I’ll settle it for now by saying that I probably wouldn’t be able to run it.
02/05/2008 at 14:42 Kangarootoo says:
Consider me duly inspired. I just downloaded a bunch of flaw fixing mods and am going to have another run through of STALKER.
02/05/2008 at 14:52 Kadayi says:
It’s possible to avoid making enemies of Duty, just inform Freedom and they will send a large team to attack the guys at the barn. As long as you personally don’t initially interfere/leave any Duty survivors alive,you should be in the clear and still be able to go to the bar unmolested.
That’s certainly my experience of things fully patched.
02/05/2008 at 16:41 Inglorion says:
John P.: I’m playing v1.006. There were only three surviving Duty members left, plus Master Stalker.
02/05/2008 at 16:42 Irish Al says:
I only really got into it after applying the hacks that removed the weight restrictions, and finding a decent scoped rifle. It’s a pain in the swiss until you find a decent gun.
02/05/2008 at 18:22 James T says:
Yeah, I kinda feel bad for using a trainer to abandon the quite reasonable weight restriction/endurance ‘thing’, but if I’ve got a long straight-line slog ahead of me, I wanna be able to run it; I’m probably gonna die when I get there, after all.
02/05/2008 at 19:54 Kadayi says:
There are a couple of artifacts that help out on the stamina side of things and pretty much ensure you can run anywhere and never really tire tbh. For the life of me I can’t remember their names, but some walk through somewhere will name check them.
02/05/2008 at 21:22 Muzman says:
Sparkler, Flash and Moonlight are the endurance helpers in ascending order of potency (They have costs though. I think they all make you more vulnerable to electric shock to some extent)
02/05/2008 at 22:34 spd from Russia says:
One of my fave games. best shooter `07 (for single player that is). Cod4 and Bioshock dont come even close for atmosphere, gameplay and world immersiveness
Too bad people anticipated too much from it (something like oblivion mixed with hl2). And even with all the flaws and some bugs its great. Iv played it lots, but didnt bother to complete for the second time cause the ending levels are just ‘realistic fps’ which is not what I love about Stalker.
And Iv dreamt so many times of doing something like Stalker. Maybe a mod for quake or even Doom3… Even have some concepts (ofcourse I wont ever make it, cause the ammount of work required is huge)
Clear Sky? I will play it for sure. But there is another game that will occupy all my time – Fallout 3 ofcourse!
03/05/2008 at 00:20 Kadayi says:
What excites me about stalker is that at it’s very heart it’s an RPG, but one that doesn’t conform to the kind of stats driven, turn based (b)anality from 10 years ago that the traditional RPG community still continue to lust after and revere (See Fallout, Baldurs gate ). The early cRPGs took their lead from and aped the old P&P RPGs in terms of mechanics but that was more down to the technological constraints of hardware capability at the time as it was about actual design decisions. With the advent of true 3D engines, the computer game space has changed to the extent that it’s possible to almost completely externalize and remove the statistical nature of the traditional cRPG experience, and Stalker is a great example of that, in the same way that GTA IV is. It’s not about hit points anymore, it’s about using your wits and the differing and varied equipment/environments available to you to resolve the problems you encounter in a game space. This is the future, and I welcome it.
03/05/2008 at 05:14 CryingTheAnnualKingo says:
“STALKER definitely ruined Bioshock for me”
How is that? They are two very different games that excel in very different ways. Bioshock achieved things that Stalker didn’t and vice versa. They do not need to compete.
03/05/2008 at 09:40 John P (Katsumoto) says:
@ INglorion – I didn’t even realise it the patches went that far!
Oh well, i’ll put it down to Stalker being random, as ever.
03/05/2008 at 13:04 meatpeople says:
@CryingTheAnnualKingo:
You quoted James T, but I brought BioShock up first simply because I recently started playing it for the first time. My abiding memory of System Shock 2 is the immersiveness of it, as people said with Bladerunner, the feeling that you want to crawl inside it (Thief too).
Stalker brought that feeling back completely, and seemed to draw a lot on SS2s’ free-playing RPG aspects. So even if in fairness they’re rather different games, given BioShocks lineage, I was expecting something that I, so far, haven’t found. To some degree Stalker did deliver it. And to be clear, it’s less about game mechanics or the intention as that immersiveness others have being discussing. The staticness of the BioShock environment, the high-specularity plasticy graphics… so much of it doesn’t sit well with me. I’m not yet finished though, I’ll see it through though.
I dunno, I don’t think about these things quite enough to be able to get across what I mean. Quality Without A Name, that’s what Stalkers got, and BioShock doesn’t seem to.
03/05/2008 at 13:17 James T says:
CTAK: Them both being horror-leaning, action-oriented FPSes with RPG elements definitely had me thinking about one while playing the other. They both succeed very distinctly from each other in aesthetics, but on the game level, I thought STALKER was a step in the right direction in regards to flexibility and the integration of RPG elements into an action heavy game, and Bioshock was… Doom 3.
03/05/2008 at 17:06 spd from Russia says:
James T says: and Bioshock was… Doom 3.
__
my thoughts exactly ;/
and tactical combat vs good ai in Stalker is so much better than a mess of bioshock fights
04/05/2008 at 02:20 Snofeld says:
This is the second game this website’s convinced me to buy this week. I hate you…not really.
And Bioshock isn’t Doom 3, it’s System Shock 2, without the spiders. God I hated those.
04/05/2008 at 06:24 matte_k says:
Damn. So vexing, that on the second install, Stalker killed my PC, so everytime I try to play it, I get about 20 mins of play and then a Bluescreen of Death appears and my system resets. Not sure if it’s the mods i’m using (i’m not fussed about most, but there’s a crackingly good one that allows better weapon trade with NPCs, thus making them a bit hardier), so i’m gonna have to try it vanilla first because I REALLY want to play this again before Clear Sky.
04/05/2008 at 20:48 cpt.whistlepants says:
Oblivion Lost and AMK makes stalker even better if you guys havent tried them yet.
06/05/2008 at 10:45 Cargo Cult says:
matte_k: BSODs are usually more indicative of a hardware or driver problem – technically it should be impossible for user-level software to kill a modern operating system like that.
Make sure your graphics card has adequate ventilation, and you’re running updated drivers on everything. The fact that it’s time-related and not connected to a particular game event does hint towards a thermal problem…
06/05/2008 at 17:01 Duoae says:
@ Chaz – yeah i hear you on that Stalking Point: Road to Chernobyl.
I really need to get BP back from my dad. He borrowed it after seeing me play it and subsequently left it on his shelf collecting dust while i was only a short way through the game… I really liked the ability to improve your stats and it was something i thought was missing in stalker – starting off with a limited weight capacity but being able to carry more later on after your strength increases over time would be very useful without having to install a static weight increase mod.
06/05/2008 at 19:50 charlie says:
Wow. I never read that article before but its absolutely spot on. You captured the feeling of STALKER perfectly. They should give you a job! You understand why STALKER is good probably better than the developers.
07/05/2008 at 23:34 Brendan says:
Really I have a love hate relationship with STALKER. There are times when I am simply in awe of the games atmosphere. But these times are quickly overshadowed by the sight of 3 “Experienced” stalkers walking into an electrical anomaly. Or the pile of carnage around every camp bonfire, where hapless NPCs spawn directly to their doom. Or the fact that bandits attack the garbage stalkers every 5 seconds. Or the fact that my AK-47 is incapable of putting a 3 inch group on a wall which is 10 feet away. Or the fact that military stalkers can take 1.5 magazines of 7.62mm in the face without flinching.
And then I see a dog dragging some bandits corpse into the woods, and I think “Damn thats cool”.
11/05/2008 at 23:32 Pestoolio says:
I highly recommend the Oblivion Lost mod for STALKER. If you’ve grown bored with the game, or just want a different experience, you need to check out this mod.
Off the top of my head, it adds:
-Larger areas
-New enemies (zombies, mutant cats, dwarfs, etc…)
-Tweaked weapons (and a few new weapons)
-New skins, voices, and songs for some NPCs
-Completely random events that occur, such as zombies attacking the freedom base
-Better weather, darker nights
-Improved HUD
-Random blowouts that repopulate the area with mutants and anomalies
-Vehicles
-Sleeping
-And much more
http://forums.filefront.com/s-t-l-k-e-r-modding-editing/340033-s-t-l-k-e-r-oblivion-lost-kanyhalos.html
Try it out, you won’t be disappointed.
12/05/2008 at 04:20 Trousers says:
This has to be my favorite article on this site, thank you RPS for getting me to fire up STALKER again. Sadly I got a BSOD every time I got to a 2nd load point, but disabling SLI somehow fixed this.
Here’s to hoping Clear Sky is that much better.
16/05/2008 at 06:48 friday says:
I started playing this game again, i have gotten a lot farther. Its such a cool game. I really like the missions I was doing for Duty, especially when they were preparing for the attack on the freedom base, but it was too short. The story line is cool but I wish there was more stuff to do with the factions and such. Tonight I did the quest to turn off the brain scrambler, it was so creepy going down into that place. I think the horror elements are done really well, not constant but just every once in a while.
20/05/2008 at 18:01 Xerxes says:
Having kept up hope throughout development that this game would eventually see the light of day, on release I played it through twice, several unfinished playthroughs, and overall enjoyed it a great deal.
It wasn’t perfect; there were bugs, and gameplay issues that detracted from the experience. It wasn’t as open and freeform as I’d hoped it would be but there was a great game buried under there.
After reading this article I went back to the game (it had never been uninstalled, and I still had the 1.0001 version) checked the oblivion lost forums for new mods, and picked out the AMK mod.
Which made some entertaining changes to the game balance, added the proper blow outs, and a number of guns , armour and various items that made the game a more tangible, realistic and deadly experience.
It’s great to be back crawling through the wastelands of Chernobyl, getting back into the mindset for Clear Sky, and still finding something new and unexpected after all this time.
If only I could resist the urge to drag my overburdened body at walking pace across half the zone to sell 15 AK’s to the barman.
I’m a STALKER, not a pack mule.
I’m a STALKER, not a pack mule.
I’m a STALKER, not a pack mu…. ooh, another AK
21/05/2008 at 05:53 Syntaxus says:
Probably my favorite game of all time…
About to start a new play-through with the new big release of the oblivion lost mod, hardest difficulty, etc. Should be fun as hell. :D
I love the amount of random there is, even in just the stock game. For example, hard to match the sight of a Dutyer squad on the edges of Rostok after fighting through a gigantic pack of dogs and the usual Mercs in the construction site, not to mention snorks and bloodsuckers creeping around… A feeling unlike any other game.
And the first time I did the carpark run in pripyat certainly topped the experience of AI teamwork in the CoD series. Nice to see friendlies that can dish it out too. Reminds me of good times playing Ghost Recon 1 or Rainbow Six duo coop with my brother on a LAN.
The question is: What would you do for Stalker co-op multiplayer? (And/Or a magical patch fixing all the performance glitches)
21/05/2008 at 17:54 Deuteronomy says:
First of all Doom 3 is a much better game than Bioshock. Secondly Stalker is my favourite game of all time. Yes it had bugs, but it never once crashed on me, and the atmosphere, combat, story, everything was simply spectacular. Along with Crysis it’s the only game that I’ve ever finished end to end more than once.
Combining an Armed Assault sized map and freedom with Stalker level detail would be the ne plus ultra of gaming.
28/06/2008 at 05:31 nobody says:
GET OUT OF HERE STALKER
18/08/2008 at 07:58 Lord_EvilPepper says:
Stalker was introduced to me by a friend showing me a trailer about 1.5 years before its launch, I thought it loked neat.. then forgot all about it. The next time i saw stalker was on said friends PC, I was very inpressed with game play, and thought the graphics were ok. So i went out and bought a copy myself.
With my vastly better computer, the ok graphics look outstanding, and i quickly got imerssed in the game, it took 2 weeks to beat the game the first time with the “i want to be rich” ending…. yeah just about through the game out after that…
finding out there was other endings, i played through again. and again and again… i have beaten the game about 6 times now, and i still play it because its a good creapy game that sucks you in for about 50 hours of play. all i have left now is to go to the CNPP to finish the game on the hardest setting.
For all the glitches in the game, i still find it very emersive, and it will still be a favriote in my collection for years to come
29/08/2008 at 16:44 Pegasus says:
Stalker really is a great game, and for the reasons many of you have said. One that that I liked very much was the fact you din’t have to have your gun out all the time. This seperated ‘combat’ and ‘exploration’ I only pulled my trusty rifle (that stayed with me all of the game and somewhat became a friend) when I felt danger. Looking forward to clear skys with should be out now.
18/10/2008 at 20:01 Darren says:
Jim, I really enjoyed reading your perspective, I’ve not had the fortune of trying stalker Chernobyl yet, but I am presently engrossed in clearsky.
I rarely play the plots in any game of this nature, much preferring my own rules, right now I’m outside what looks like an old railway station picking of bandits one at a time with an AC96/2 in double shot mode, I’m behind an old crate, for some reason they cannot make out my position, don’t know if this is a bug or intentional, one thing that is definitely a bug in my opinion, is that while out of gun range they still managed to lob a grenade that got close enough to cause considerable damage!, a bullet from a rifle cannot reach me but a grenade can?, anyway, it’s now getting dark and soon they will switch on their head lamps, this will give me a good target for head shots(AIs can be so stupid).
Anyway as you can see I’m totally engrossed in the game(some might even say obsessed), thank you for the read, I know it was a while back you posted but I only just found this site, hope you tell us about your adventures in clearsky.