Hey Plumb, did you ever change factions in this game?

:O

They must've added a ton of text in the complete version then because there are hooks for it whenever you speak to the big faction quest givers. I'm in Duty's camp now speaking to the Barkeep and you can ask him about connections to the factions and join a different one.

By far the worst thing about this game is how inconsistent it is with what gets you noticed. I killed a sniper with a silenced shot in a tower earlier and could head out of the same camp without dudes suspecting anything. I put a quicksave just before I killed the sniper and had to load that later on after I cocked up some.

Now it's FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE to repeat that kill without the entire camp coming to rape me. Wtf wtf wtf. I don't even understand what it is that gets me noticed either. It's a silenced gun, there's absolutely zero line of sight and the "something's watching you" meter is empty. God dammit.

Alright I sorted it. I had to stab a few other people that heard the body drop.

I think I'm gonna join Duty. I didn't feel one way or another about most of the factions, but Freedom are a bunch of anarchist hippies who blow things up all terrorist like and Duty want to murder them, so. :)


The game shafted me a bit yesterday. Spent ages clearing out a camp and keeping my squad mates alive. Saved after, but I couldn't talk to the dude for my reward. Loaded the camp fight again and gave it another shot but eventually gave up. Loaded my post camp fight save, and it said "file contains no data". :(

Now I gotta do the camp fight all over again. Argh-ness.

This game keeps shafting me. :(

I snuck into a camp, saved while people hadn't detected me, went on some and eventually was noticed and killed. Loaded quicksave, and then suddenly *everyone* knew where I was immediately and clusterfucked me. :(

Now that save is completely useless.

Things like this are mounting, and I'm having a hard time keeping my enthusiasm up. :(

Almost broke up with the game earlier, but I'm sorta into it again. Encountered a new group called Monolith. Joined Duty. Have been murdering me some Freedom/Monolith dudes and I'm now about to shut off something called the "brain scorcher", which I can't imagine why anyone would wanna have running with a name like that.

Aaand finished. Got an ending that seems like it's "evil" or whatever, but I'm so done with this game at this point I wish I had the boxed version so I could set it on fire and throw it out the window.


The basic.. kinda on paper stuff for this game is all excellent, and the first four or so hours you're still kinda high on playing a game that tries to execute that stuff. Every single component of it is less than perfectly enjoyable though, and it just gets super grating after a while. It's always slow, it's always disjointed, it's always full of small annoying things (like the end stretch where dudes' guns/flashlights kept clipping through walls, allowing them to SHOOT ME FROM A DIFFERENT ROOM) that makes the entire thing feel like you're always taking two steps forward and one step back.

In fact, it's the exact same feeling that eventually made me abandon Far Cry 2. I will give that game another shot though, because based on the issues I have with both games and based on the testimonies of people that have gotten beyond the slowest and most annoyingly janky stretch of FC2 (10 or so hours in, most people reckon) that game does eventually adress the issues I have better than STALKER ultimately ever did.

The setting is very potent in STALKER. Its balance act between free roaming, slow paced, atmospheric RPG stuff, its tunnel/night dwelling horror stuff, and its balls to wall shootout stuff is especially early on extremely impressive. I have Call of Pripyat and will check that out at some point to see if they've been fixing things, but I'll wager the first entry in this series that has a true shot at realising its potential is STALKER 2. I think more often than not, the clunky engine is to blame for almost all of this game's shortcomings, and that's prolly something Call of Pripyat and Clear Skies both inherit.


Ah well! I don't regret playing it. The ending was actually sorta semi surprising and cool, even though it was almost certainly the "bad" one. :) Another one goes in my FIIII-NISHED! steam category. Man I wish I could have it play the Sega Rally sound when I put something in there.

Congrats Simon, I still have to finish the game tbh but I will at some point.

The thing is I'm at the moment hooked on Metro 2033. It's a game that has the same vibe as Stalker (except for the open world stuff) but it's A LOT more polished not to mention amazing graphics.
I would recommend giving Metro a try...

Depends entirely on how long you wanna stomp around in it. I was bored out of my flipping mind eventually and just legged it for the finish, but there was plenty of stuff left to do. Steam says I played it for 32 hours, but there's always some extra loo breaks, phone calls and other distractions thrown in so around 30 I guess I spent with it.

I didn't really take issue with the shooting mechanics at all. I guess the first weapons you get are pretty rubbish, but once you get proper assault rifles and what have you I thought it was fine.

I was more bothered by the CONSTANT walking around which tag teamed with the constant seams/load screens to create a world I really never wanted to run across to juggle different quests. I looked in my log, saw a quest that was about to run out (in twoish days or so) and was like.. no. No way. I'm not gonna walk across this chopped up world and get randomly raped by WHIRLWINDS OF SCIENCE and gollums with gas masks to do that quest.

You do go to pretty cool places with some fairly impressive atmosphere going on, and that's prolly the highlight really. The world needs to be more seamless, though, and some sort of fast travel system or vehicles kinda need to be in there.