S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on GOG

I accidently bought all 3 again. Now to redownload misery 2.1

 

Well, uh... I have Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky in steam. Tried out SOC, didn't really like it to be honest. I mean, it's probably a great game, but I just failed miserably repeatedly very earliy in the game, and it really demotivated me from playing it anymore. I might just try out Clear Sky sometime..

 

I played a bit through SOC as well. Thought the game was interesting, but definitely a bit old-school for my tastes. I also remember a lot of the early weapons being painfully inaccurate, and I just didn't enjoy the general feel of the game's combat, especially when I had much more success trying to simply run up to enemies and hipfire them in the face than using cover and trying to peak out and take careful, aimed shots. It had a lot of cool ideas, and the atmosphere was pretty cool (anomalies made travel interesting, and I was legitimately terrified at a few points in some of the underground facilities), but it just seemed buggy (dear god some of the quest markers just didn't fucking work) and lacking in polish (which is kind of a given with a lot of older, more ambitious games). It reminded me strangely of Arma in that it felt like it tried to be realistic, but just fell short in a lot of ways and I felt like it resulted in a major disconnect between user input and what actually happened in-game.

I do think it's kind of interesting though, and I would like to see a more modern version of the game released. Metro's become a bit easy for my tastes, but these older games are just plain punishing at times, often simply out of nowhere. I'd really like to play a post-apocalyptic survival game that's sufficiently challenging, but enjoyable the first time you play it, instead of just simply forcing you to learn through getting your ass kicked until in playthrough number ten you're an insanely min/maxed OP character with all of the best gear in the first ten minutes (*cough*isometricfallouts*cough*).

 

Graphics... GRAPHICSGRAPHICSGRAPHICS

 

Are these english dubs? Because I'd get these for my channel if that's the case.

 

I played with the "STALKER COMPLETE 2009" mod pack installed, and it didn't look too bad.

I think so. The one I played was dubbed in English, so I know they exist. And it lists English as a language on the site, so I don't know why they wouldn't provide such a version. A lot of the dialogue is still exclusively read, just in case that's what you meant.

 

I guess I'll fork out then.

 

Looking forward to the vids when you get around to them.

And @Bamul, I guess I found it less painfully difficult for the most part (the military outpost you have to try and sneak into gave me a real challenge though, especially with the unpredictable and strange enemy AI), I just didn't find it to be all that fun. The atmosphere was obviously great, but it goes back to that old-fashioned sense of you spending a lot of time having no clue whether or not you're doing something wrong (it took me forever to figure out why I was tap-firing multiple magazines into enemies at pretty short range before they would die), and I just didn't enjoy the mechanics all that much (what's the point of artifacts if all of them seem to have seriously bad side effects?).

I was also kind of seriously freaked out by my encounter with a controller. Like, I'm not usually all that freaked out by games (in turns of atmosphere, jump scares obviously still have an instinctive effect), but I'm legitimately not looking forward to going back underground again.

 

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games arn't actually that difficult. Not trying to sound cocky, but I finished the first game when I was 13 on master difficulty.

@Skaara: As Bamul mentioned, Stalker Clear Sky is very unforgiving; more that Shadow of Chernobyl, actually. The AI was incredibly accurate with grenades that it sometimes made me laughs because it was so ridiculous. I remember one time, I was fighting bandits, about 7, in front of their base. I took cover outside of a tunnel behind some parked train cars.

At the moment, the bandits were not aware of my presence, so I was able to move up little bit close to them before I took a few head shots. I took down two almost simultaneously before the rest began to open fire on me. I took cover behind the train car and waited a bit before sticking my head out again. When I came out from behind cover, I looked to the sky and saw 3 little black dots headed towards me; they were grenades. I had been in that situation so many times (seeing little dots in the sky) that I knew that there was no point in running. Now, the bandits that had throw these grenades to me were standing pretty far away. Somehow, they managed to make the grenades land in this fashion: one directly in front of me, one several paces behind me, and another a slight distance to my right. From the second that I saw the grenades in the air to the moment that they touched down was approximately one second. Even though I said earlier that there was no point of trying to run away (which there still wasn't), I still made an attempt, hoping that at least one time I would manage to escape the blast radius of the grenades. I failed. I only took about one sprint step to my left and the grenades exploded. There is a mod that was put out a couple of years ago that fixes this problem, so I will post it up when I find it.

@Potarto: Graphics aren’t everything. You can have the most advanced graphics playing game in the world and you will get board quickly if the story line is total shit. Like, literally.... shit . Then again, I can't speak for everyone . If you want updated graphics, there are a few mods out there that do a good job; one of them you already mentioned (Stalker Complete). The other is Misery mod. Unfortunately, there are some major pros and cons to these mods. One of them I can tell you from experience and the other from what I have read. Stalker Complete:

As you said, the graphics didn't look bad. I actually enjoyed them to some degree. There were times, such as the morning, when the sky look magnificent. The sky was just beautifully post-apocalyptic. Then there were other times that the sky looked like I was playing a happy game. Everything was extremely crisp and bright, taking out of atmosphere. Another bad thing that I noticed about the daytime and nighttime was that the day lasted for frigin ever and so did the night. I got through half of the game with the sun still out (keep in mind, this was my second play through, so I am not a master at this game...(a second play through that I did not finish because of this issue and other reasons)). In the vanilla version of the game, the day and night cycles were balanced. Sometimes, the daytime would drag on, and the nights would feel very short; but other times it was vice versa and you couldn't wait until the sun rose. I know that the mod comes with a sleeping bag that allows you to sleep through a selected number of hours, but what's the fun of that. People that are afraid of playing while it's nighttime in the game are able to fast-forward through it and miss out of that creepy experience that made stalker so great. If the stalker team had wanted you to play their game with the skies nice and bright and without scary animals coming out at you from the dark, they would have done so. And that's another reason why I love the original version of stalker so much. You were forced to go through the daytime and night whether you liked it or not. You were not allowed to fast forward through it at your own will. :shocked:
One more major flaw in this mod. The AI sucks. Those of you who say that you would want a version of stalker that is not too difficult, this isn't for you. If you thought the AI in Metro Last Light were stupid, then wait until you play with this mod. The AI here are incredibly stupid. They are slow and have horrible aim. It's even worse when you put into consideration that your weapons are balanced (no more spitfire bullets) and theirs are not. It makes the game too easy and boring.

On the Plus side, there are some really good aspects of the mod. The weather cycles (rain) is excellent. It's like you are there. The sound of the thunder, the way the lighting lights up the sky... everything; It's very impressive during the night. Weapons skins are just as good. I really enjoyed the new look. Gun/explosives/ambient sounds. This was just great. Gun shots sounded real, explosives were explosive, and the ambient sound just added to those few moments that the time of day was right to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. If you want something that's visually impressive, especially for a game that's so old, then I recommend this mod to you.

Now, missery mod. I'll make this short. Everything I said about Stalker complete, but the opposite. The graphics are a bit better than the original but it's difficult as hell. There's even a difficulty level called hell .

@Komodo: Chances are that it is dubbed in English, both verbally and in text. Though, there is not that much talking in this game. Most of the NPCs that you talk to don't speak to you, verbally, but in text. A giant text box, similar to that of fallout, appears in front of you. You are aloud to choose different dialogue options and have the opportunity to trade like this. One thing about this is that as you're talking to an NPC, the rest of the game is still operative. Meaning: your conversation with the NPC means squat to every other NPC/animal/mutant in the game. While you are talking to somebody that you meet out in the road, a mutant dog might come out from the bushes and begin to attack you. The NPC cuts off the conversation and begins to fight. You have the decision to help out, if you'd like, or you could see if the NPC dies and drops all of his gear .

If, by chance, the Stalker games don't come dubbed in English, you can find mods that will change that. Though for me, at least with SCS and SCP, the English dubbing was pretty bad so I had to change it to Russian. The only one that seems to do a good job in the Russian English accents is SCO. It's just as good as Metro 2033 Russian English accent.


All in all, I recommend that everybody here plays this game.

P.S. I will put a list up of these mods that I've included here as long as websites that have long list of mods for all three games.

Edit: More text with a lot of pictures. Only open spoiler tag if you would like to learn how to make the stalker games run on two cores instead of one. If not, then don't open it or you will have a lot up in yo face!!

Spoiler

 

I know, I have all three of them. The problem is the versions I have are just like the original Metro 2033. Russian dub and text only, which sucks because less than 5% of my viewers speak Russian.

 

I just did a little bit of research on your problem. I looked for a fix but I failed to find one :sad:. The mod websites that I was talking about only have English dub overs for mods such as Misery mod, but not the original game. The only fix that I could find is for changing the russian text only. If for some reason this file on this forum is corrupt, I can try to upload mine and send it to you. Sorry if I raised your hopes up. I'll contine to look for a fix on the dub overs. I should have done a bit more research before posting what I did. As for everything else, I know that the information is correct because I did research on that stuff!

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2802369

Edit: perhaps there is a file that has the english voices that I can extract and post it up. I'll see what I can do, but don't expect quick results because I'm not good at finding files of this sort. But I'll try.

Double Edit: I just tired looking. I have no clue where it might be, Komodo. Might you have the idea where the language file might be for any of the games? If so, it might be set up the same way for me and I would be able to post it up for you. If not, then I am sorry. Though, it seems like the versions on GOG are in English

 

The version I got through, uh, other means, was in English. That means the version exists already, which is probably why there isn't much in the way of mods to fix a problem that not very many people have.

And I never said the graphics were a big deal, I was just responding to Skaara. Low resolution can get pretty annoying after a while, but being on PC means that's never really an issue unless you don't have the proper hardware to run the game.

And while the game is more difficult than most modern titles, like I said, I still managed to obviously make progress, and only one area really made me reload my saves multiple times (the military outpost with the documents after going through the sewer). I've played through difficult games like Dark Souls and Super Meat boy, I just didn't find it to mechanically be all that fun; enemies constantly respawn in multiple areas, AI causes enemies to often shoot at you even when you're nowhere near their line of sight, and like a lot of open-world post apocalyptic games, they just really didn't find a way to make combat with humans very fun. You have this weird contrast between really dull, overdrawn gunfights with human enemies and really interesting, creepy fights with mutants.

But I digress, I'm sure I'm just playing it the wrong way or something and it's really an amazing game that I'm not worthy to appreciate. I'll probably go back to it again some time and hope that I can get through without accidentally saving in a hopeless area and having to restart all over again.

And that's an interesting tutorial, although the fact that simply messing with CPU affinity would cause both cores to be utilized means that the game is multi-threaded in its programming already, in which case I don't know why your computer wouldn't be properly utilizing multiple cores. AMD CPUs would be much more popular if that fix worked for normal games.

 

Komodo couldnt you uh cough cough the game in english seeing as you bought the game? i may have when call of pripyat was in german,

In general about the STALKER series i find it to be a MEH series for every positive i can think of a negative

 

I could cough it, but I really don't want to deal with a pirated version.

And yeah, they suck for the most part, but at least the story is fun. There are fun mods too like the old AMK and the ballistics addon. I killed a bloodsucker from 2000 meters with a headshot with an SVD once.

 

I, uh....I mean, you're obviously a stellar player and all, and it's possible in theory, but an invisible enemy at over a mile away?

 

Maybe I need to go through a second play through. I was young when I first played them and everything was games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. were new to me; so perhaps I will view it differently now that I am older hwell:. I wish ClearSkyStalker was here right now so he could partake in this conversation. I sold him some extra copies that I had stored away (just in case) and he ended up loving them!

 

They are only invisible when they are actively attacking a player.

You can see them just fine when they are idle.