3/20/07 S.T.A.L.K.E.R (PC)

[NowhereMan]

Radiation inducing artifacts in my experience aren't worth bothering with unless you've got another one that cancels them out. Wait till you get artifacts that don't actually kill you.

[Amarr HM]

The endurance ones are a must later on.

[Sairon]

Also, I've started finding prototype weapons. Is there some sort of diabloesque thing going on? Oh, and is there a way to raise stats besides armor and various artifacts? Am I missing a character screen or something.

This what was I was hoping for, but sadly there didn't seem to be anything diabloish about it.

[schild]

Some of the mutants are goddamn creepy and really well done.

[Amarr HM]

Yeh they are sweet, this is one of the few games that made me jump off my chair at times realy atmospheric. Saw a good documentary on Chernobyl the other week and actually they got the feel of the place to a tee. I love the whole backdrop it's very embedded in an European 80's kid's psyche, not so sure if Americans would feel the same.

[schild]

So, is there any way to fast travel? at all?

[Amarr HM]

No it's the one thing the game totally lacks stops me from going back to complete it. There are some endurance artifacts that let you run permanently that's about it.

[Aez]

It's a great game but I was unable to finish it because it turns into a grind at the end (at the highest difficulty at least).  I almost broke my quicksave and quickload on that one.  The arena and defending the scientist were especially hard.  It was like Half Life 1 where fight with other human is a blast but some mutants are impossible.  You reload until you get lucky...

[Rasix]

This game sounds way too fucking hard for someone that isn't very good at FPS games.  So tempting at the current price point.   

[rk47]

uh there's the difficulty level and instant heal items you can hoard a bit like diablo potions. Then most of ppl who reloads didn't really 'lose' they just failed at accomplishing some side objectives. I didn't read anyone saying they die too easy or anything.

[NowhereMan]

There are the odd annoying bits, occasionally you die just because you can't take all that much damage but that's usually because some enemy managed to sneak up very close to you. I just got to one fun bit where I tried to do a mission for the Freedom faction, the guy I had to talk to had managed to clip through the wall of the compound and when I got to him he aggroed on me. The difficulty of the game isn't that awful though provided you keep enemies at a distance keeping enough healing items around isn't too hard.

[schild]

Ok. I'm bout or a little more than halfway through. The walking has become annoying.

[Amarr HM]

Are you walking or running? cause if your only walking means you don't have the endurance artifacts equipped.

[schild]

I'm running. That was a syntactical misunderstanding.

[Amarr HM]

Cool was just checking, still a grind though I know been there.

[UnSub]

I think there was a mod that unlocked the cars they didn't quite put into STALKER. No idea if they work or not.

[NowhereMan]

Heh, I just found "Gordon's PDA" off a dead scientist somewhere, I'm guessing it was a nice little touch. I also hate fucking non-ammo dropping mutants with a vengeance, slightly more than zombies who refuse to carry the right kind of ammo.

[MahrinSkel]

Is there any way to buy this by digital download?

--Dave

[lesion]

http://www.direct2drive.com/2/3285/product/Buy-STALKER:-Shadow-of-Chernobyl-Download

I AM LONG, STEAMY

[UnSub]

Heh, I just found "Gordon's PDA" off a dead scientist somewhere, I'm guessing it was a nice little touch. I also hate fucking non-ammo dropping mutants with a vengeance, slightly more than zombies who refuse to carry the right kind of ammo.

Finding Gordon was a nice easter egg.

If you are in the big I think you are, you should be coming up to taking on other military / trained stalkers, so getting the right ammo should be no longer a big problem.

Also: if someone playing though now gets to the bit where they have to steal a suitcase from the military base and manage to do it using stealth, I'd love to know how. I tried for hours, eventually ended up shooting my way in when the guards were searching in another part of the map (based on my destraction in that area) and then having to blow holy hell on the way out.

[schild]

I am not even remotely stealthy in this game. I have a gun with a scope and a happy trigger finger.

[UnSub]

From memory, the mission text related to doing it quietly.

I laid waste to every soldier in the base with automatic weapon fire and grenades. Fortunately I was inside the base behind a door that gave good cover and the soliders had to run across open ground.

The contact didn't seem to mind when I gave him the suitcase, so I guess it was a valid method.

[lesion]

Stealth in this game is balls-ass. Assballs. Rotund fart-dispensing craphole.

[NiX]

At any point was this game supposed to be an MMO? My roomie and I were talking about how this game would be perfect for a PVP (I know schild, I know) MMO with the factions and monsters for PVE.

[NowhereMan]

I think that might just be the general bias of this message board but yeah it could make a nice setting for a PvP central MMO.

I've managed to discover a tremendous bug, I used a mod to up my max carry weight by 10kg and now trying to load any save files other than autosave causes the game to CTD. I've undone the change but had no luck in fixing this. Haven't found any info about it anywhere else and frankly it's really fucking annoying.

[Grand Design]

I've managed to discover a tremendous bug, I used a mod ...

As a software developer, I reject that statement with extreme prejudice.

[NowhereMan]

In fairness the "mod" changed one value in a system file, literally just changed the weight limit value from 50 to 60. Yeah it may well be my own fault but having undone what I changed it still CTDs, just not on autosaves. I'm somewhat at a loss as to why that's happening 

[NiX]

It's happening to me too. I just stop playing after I zone so I can use the Autosave when I want to play again.

[NiX]

Aaaannnnddd the game crashed AGAIN after shooting while the scope was coming up. I give up. Just lost an hour or more of stash hunting. Uninstalled.

[NowhereMan]

I managed to fix the CTD on loading, the program I used to adjust weights created system.tlx file and I'm not sure if it's meant to be around in the version I'm using so I deleted it. I also went into My Documents and deleted the quicksave file that was there and it seemed to fix it.

NiX I'm going to assume you patched it all up, were you running it in Vista? Patching it managed to fix the random crash problem I had at first but I've read that it doesn't get along too well with Vista.

[NiX]

Patched all the way up and I'm running XP SP2.

[UnSub]

At any point was this game supposed to be an MMO? My roomie and I were talking about how this game would be perfect for a PVP (I know schild, I know) MMO with the factions and monsters for PVE.

It was in development long enough, so it probably was considered.

[MahrinSkel]

Well, I'm definitely liking this game (went ahead and bought it from the D2D link above).  At first it was running like crap, even at reduced resolution (native on my screen is 1680x1050, and nothing looks right on an LCD if you aren't running at the native resolution).  Found out that when I updated my drivers a few weeks ago, it switched off my SLI (realized this when I fired up NVMonitor and only one GPU was getting hot).  Fixed that, bumped the resolution, and it works perfectly.

Doesn't seem quite as pretty as it did when I saw it in Kentia Hall at E3 2004, but part of that is raised standards, what looked incredible then is standard now.  However, your *do* want this weight allowance mod.  Having to shuffle different weapons in an out of inventory based on what ammo was going to be available where I was going was driving me insane before I put that on.

Stealth is a bad joke, though, almost any mission that says you should sneak in, expect to blow your way through.

--Dave

[NiX]

Kentia Hall at E3 2004

You sure it was in Kentia? I remember them having it setup across from Ubi.

[MahrinSkel]

Kentia Hall at E3 2004

You sure it was in Kentia? I remember them having it setup across from Ubi.

Might have been 2003, but I'm absolutely positive it was Kentia.

--Dave