marelooke
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Posts posted by marelooke
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On 6/8/2025 at 2:16 PM, Mamoulian War said:
They removed it from everywhere. Thankfully I bought all of the games on GOG, before they pulled this stunt. Unfortunatelly U3 was never released there, so I am missing that one in my collection
Missing out on UT3 is not that big of a loss, I'd argue. Though I see they added achievements at some point, so maybe I'll play through the campaign again eventually.
I bought that game on DVD unless I'm very mistaken, though I think it was one of those "have disc, need Steam anyway"-releases that were so popular at the time. But there may be some new-old-stock out there still if you really, really want to complete the collection...
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Been putting some hours into Soulmask recently. It has very similar vibes to Conan Exiles, a game I sunk a fair few hours into (and that I still occasionally play, but more as a building game
), so I'll mostly be comparing against that.
At a high level they are very similar, end up in some weird place due to weird reasons and have to build/craft your way out of things, you bonk natives on the head to add them to your tribe, etc.
From where I stand there's two major differences:
The first one being that your main character is weaker than everyone else (stats are hard-capped below those of other NPCs), and you are, in fact, not expected to use it most of the time. This is where the titular "soulmask" comes in, you can use it to "Control" other tribesmen that you recruit, taking over their skills, inventory, gear, etc. The one downside tribesmen have is that they can die permanently (at least initially), while your PC will just respawn.
The second one is that Tribe management is much more involved than in Conan. Tribesmen are much more active, and in fact much more along the lines of what I wished Conan Exiles had when I started playing it: you can assign them various tasks and they'll go out and do them. If you assign them to logging they'll go out to the area you assigned them to chop wood, grabbing an axe from storage if they don't have one, for crafting they'll run around collecting materials from chests to then craft the things you queued up.
The downside of this situation is that you have to rely on AI pathing, so being creative with base placement/interior may not be the best of ideas. I had the great idea to build up on a cliff, with the result that my tribesmen often get stuck at the base of said cliff instead of pathing around.
There's still some limitations I wish there weren't, for example they won't repair their gear when it breaks, instead they'll toss it and grab new stuff from chests if they can, otherwise they'll just start idling.
Overall having a good time and probably worth checking out if you enjoy(ed) Conan Exiles.
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Well, there's a fun bug where occasionally a VLRT (Very Low Risk Target) space-combat mission sends you to go kill someone on foot at a Hathor location, which is rather a big PvP event.
Managed to take out my target (space ship vs guy with an AR on a rooftop kinda went the way you'd expect it to go...), but I also managed to get caught on a pole and crash
Dying in a crash is kinda rare nowadays, so I ended up stranded in a not-so-friendly location with hostile NPC and shoot-first-ask-questions-never players. I had noticed there were vehicles parked. Some seemed to be part of the location so they weren't locked, so I grabbed an MTC and started driving around trying to find a ship that could get me off-moon.
Unfortunately all the "non-player" ships turned out to be Furies, and those don't have a Quantum Drive, so they can't really get me much of anywhere.
I also got second thoughts about grabbing the MTC over the Fury as the driving physics aren't great, to put it mildly.
Eventually I found an abandoned (if not, sorry) Reliant (Tana, I think). I picked it's door lock by shooting it with a LMG (as you do
) and flew back to Lorville on Hurston as that was the closest major city. I tried to find the city gates so I could park outside and walk in, as I wasn't quite sure how security would react to me flying a stolen ship (I'm not really in the habit of stealing ships...), but I couldn't find them despite flying the whole circumference of Lorville, so I ended up trying my luck at the spaceport after all. And lo-and-behold, after hailing them and asking for a hangar I was just granted landing rights, no questions asked. Seems a bit broken, but I'm taking it...
Landed the girl, but alas, you can't keep stolen ships so when I called up another ship she went "poof".
(fun fact, the Reliant-series "transforms" into a vertical configuration in flight, very reminiscent of certain recent Star Wars ships, like this:
This shouldn't be too surprising as the person who created the concepts for many of these early ships, David Hobbins, ended up doing concepts for Star Wars as well)
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Been bouncing around a bit, there were some events in Warframe, so went through those and hit Legendary Rank 4 now.
Haven't really played much KC:D after the horrible broken "spy on the camp" situation, but I did finally kick off the Theresa romance.
Been playing some Stellaris, ran into some interesting situations, like when the Crisis spawned right next to a Fallen Empire and got absolutely crushed (600k strength fleets, wowzie). Didn't manage to win that game as I wasn't able to reach the Fallen Empire's score in time. Sad times.
Kinda starting to "get" some of the 4.0 changes so I might try and play one of the Crisis paths for my next game, probably the tech rush one as "wide turtle tech rush" is my default playstyle anyway...Went through my gamelog to see what unfinished business I still had and turns out I stopped playing DOOM 2016 on the last boss, so cleared that so I can finally cross that one off the list (and free up some disk space).
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Just made it past "Nest of Vipers" In Kingdom Come Deliverance, and holy hell, is this one of the worst quests I've experienced in a long while. If your quests secondary objectives don't work at a basic level, maybe don't put it in.
Older game, but spoiler alert anyway:
SpoilerYou're supposed to poison a bandit/Cuman camp's food and destroy their arrows. The idea is to do this stealthily, either by, well, stealth, or by using a disguise (which I did), but this is simply impossible as far as the bandits are concerned. For starters, they don't sleep. Ever. And to make matters rose they literally have night vision eyes in their backs. I've had bandits that were sitting with their backs to me charge at me from across the camp when I pour poison in their food. Or from beyond the pallisade (guess they can see through solid matter too) Sleeping bandits instantly wake up. The works.
The Cumans, on the other hand, do sleep, though their guards will chase you incessantly to "question" you, forcing Speech checks every single time (until they become unpassable), or turning the whole thing in some sort of Benny Hill situation.
Anyway, I ended up giving up on doing this the immersive way by just poisoning the Cuman food, then charging through the bandit camp burning their arrows and poisoning their food, to then do the same in the Cuman camp after which I jumped the palisade, ran across the bridge and jumped onto my horse and got the hell out of dodge. The obnoxious lock-on system didn't make it easy to just run away either, but after a few tries I did finally manage.
Dunno what's still coming, but if someone were to ask me what is that quest that makes you reconsider replaying the game in the future, well this one sure qualifies.
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Soulframe (pre-alpha: Prelude 9)
Lots of animal saving
Spoiler
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On 3/24/2025 at 11:42 AM, Wormerine said:
edit: Finally started to getting around to giving Kingdom Come: Deliverance a go. I like it so far, though the game works really hard to reinforce how much of a dufus Henry is. What I like less is how little agency I had so far. Henry seems to get into scrapes and challenges his betters and leaves me to deal with the aftermath. I hope the game will let go of the reins soon. I really enjoy the setting though.
I shall join this club. After originally backing it I finally started a play through.
On 3/26/2025 at 1:52 PM, Wormerine said:Thanks. Yeah, I decided to leave Ginger be for a while, and spent couple days doing other work, including(@BruceVC) taking lovely Theresa for two dates (2nd one in Tavern gave me strong Mafia "walk lady home" flashback). I got better in fighting, gained some gold, bought an actual sword, collected some bandit ears (BTW. How do they now it's a bandit ear and not someone elses? Could I slaughter a random village and collect their ears? Does it always have to be same ear, so I won't double dip with two ears per single bandit? It feels like a shaky system). I think I am ready to go back to the main story.
Hah, this is the last part i completed, I've been doing every single side quest I could find so far, slowly getting Henry from being totally useless to being less totally useless. I might even venture outside of Rattay soon
On 3/26/2025 at 5:40 PM, majestic said:So, I, like, never having played Kingdom Come: Unwoked Incline, just went and looked up Theresa, because @BruceVC has kept mentioning her for a while now. I had certain expectations going into this image search, mostly because the aforementioned poster said that Veilguard did not cater enough to the horny incel core audience of these games.
Now, to make this comparison properly, here's one of these character models from Veilguard that doesn't cater to the horny incel core audience. Probably because of her rack size, but that I do not know for sure, because said poster refused to actually tell what it was about that game that made it unappealing for horny incels.
This is Neve in her civilian attire, i.e. in non-combat locations. Take not of the lack of anime style giant boobies.Now, before looking up Theresa, here's what I thought I would get:
That's how Neve should look, I guess, to make the incels happy?And this is Theresa, apparently. At least according to a quick googling.
Imagine my surprise when Theresa turned out to be a plain country bumpkin, completely unremarkable. Normal, one might say. Certainly less catered to horny incels than Neve was.
This is so confusing.
I mean, given the game it makes sense, though the DLC made me appreciate her a whole lot more. The Theresa part of A Woman's Lot was absolutely great and I'm confident has something to do with people liking her so much.
Oh yeah, and someone posted a (I presume) edited picture with her hair loose...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Falikwyhz24l61.jpgOn 3/27/2025 at 1:50 AM, Zoraptor said:On KCD romances..
The map in KCD has quest markers and Henry shows up on it, same as any modernish game. It also has fast travel and the rest of the modcons.
It only doesn't show Henry's location (or have fast travel) in hardcore mode. Which is what I'm playing. No matter how much of a crusty boomer gamer you are you wouldn't have much fun playing KCD in hardcore mode first time through.
A Women's Lot overall is a great DLC, might actually be the 2nd best I've played.
Just completed the Theresa part of the DLC yesterday and it was fantastic. Think it really set the tone better than the same part done as Henry, because you get to experience more of the Skalitz part, and Theresa just starts of as a much more ... engaging(?) character than Herny (imho).
Of course being more competent at the game's systems helped (still can't hit much of anything with a bow though). There were some minor niggles, like the nightly herb picking being more about fighting the terrain and the dog AI than the actual quest, as well as what happened to Tinker, which felt like more of a gameplay thing than something that really made sense.
Still came away really liking Theresa a whole lot more than I did before.
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I promised a more comprehensive review once I completed my playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and since I recently finished the game for the first time, siding with the Ward, here we go. Of note, it took me 191hours and when the credits rolled the game was on patch 1.1.4 (1.2 came out very recently)
To get this out of the way early: I still would not recommend this game to anyone who has not already played the previous entries, and even to those who have I'd wait for some major patches. At the rate patches are coming this game may be in somewhat of a finished state by the end of the year (well, I started writing this before 1.2 dropped, so some of these may end up finally being fixed...).
The first, and biggest issue is that the game is still a buggy mess. Early parts are mostly fine, but once past SIRCAA things started falling apart rapidly. For one there were regular CTDs, for another there's issues with NPC literally blocking your ability to enter areas. I quite literally had to rely on a mod enabling the Unreal Engine console so I could noclip into the safe area in Pripyat because NPCs body-blocked me out for 90% of my time spent in Pripyat (from my arrival until the very final missions start).
Being a packrat I also managed to break my Stash: items started overlapping, sections appeared empty but weren't, etc. Looks like some sort of overflow issue. Thankfully it didn't actually seem to corrupt the contents, but it made using the thing a right pain.
Then there's the gameplay issues.
For starters, equipment maintenance and upgrading is prohibitively expensive. This expense has a rather negative impact on gameplay; for one you end up dragging everything you can back to a vendor, which gets old rather fast, for another getting into a fight is less of a "Oh no, I may die!" type of deal and more of a "Oh no, this may bankrupt me." One of the results is that I stuck to "known good" items rather than experimenting, and that I stuck to lower tier items rather than upgrading to the best gear available to me. Throughout the entire game I used four sets of armour, including the starting one, and the majority of the time I used the standard Ward armour. Only once I hit the "point of no return" I started using an Exoskeleton as upgrading/repairing them is just so ridiculously expensive.
Exacerbating this is the whole enemy spawning situation. Unlike in earlier games most enemies don't exist in the world and wander around (there's some now, since the first major patch 1.1), the vast majority gets spawned onto you by the game if it thinks you haven't been fighting enough recently. Additionally there are spawn triggers in the world that will (re)spawn enemies once you get too far from them (or too close to them), which in a lot of cases means you get to fight the same enemies multiple times while you're exploring an area. This is extremely aggravating when it concerns tougher/more annoying enemies, like Poltergeists ("I'm three floors up/down but still trying to murder you by throwing furniture at you"), Psuedogiants (aka "Bullet Sponge Prime"), or Burers ("Hope you like getting shot with your own gun") especially when you're trying to figure out some puzzle.
Not to mention that getting attacked at times or places when reasonably speaking you couldn't be is rather immersion breaking (eg. when going back outside right after an emission)
Then there's weapon balance, or what passes for it. The tl;dr is that choice of weapon quickly boils down to how common the ammo is, how much "penetration" it has, and how expensive it is to repair, aka cost per kill quickly becomes the defining characteristic given the repair costs. There's more here, like weapon balance being rather out of wack (one of the best guns in the game isn't a modern AR, those mostly suck, comparatively, but a variant of the AK...). What each weapon state, or upgrade does, is also very hard to measure and very badly explained.
Personally I never liked the upgrade system that got introduced in Clear Sky and Stalker 2 hasn't changed my opinion on it, rather the contrary.The world also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, enemies barely carry ammunition, yet never run out, but there's so much common loot spread around the world that it's absolutely ridiculous. Additionally each time you go into a situation that seems like it'd be a tough one you get thrown so much stuff at you that preparing for anything is just a waste of time. The endgame missions are a prime example: in SoC you'd prepare by picking your favourite loadout, making sure you bring enough ammunition or healing items etc. etc. In Stalker 2 the endgame areas are full of stocker armouries and they toss a couple of some of the best armours in the game at you to boot.
Stashes are often intricate puzzles with more often than not extremely disappointing contents for how difficult they were to access. There's also the issue that some of them are literally impossible to get unless you picked a specific side for certain parts of the story.
Mutants are overused, quickly eroding any sense of fear they may have instilled otherwise. Meeting your first Bloodsucker in SoC was a memorable experience. Alas, not quite the case in this entry.
The anomalies overall were great, I liked how they made them more interactive by having the bolt disable certain ones for a limited amount of time. I will say I strongly dislike the (new) "bog poppers" anomaly though (aka "the flashbang"...)
Story wise the game is good, that is, the overarching story, though it pretty much explains everything so I'm not quite sure how they're going to continue this franchise because there doesn't seem a whole lot of mystery left.
But the storytelling, I'm very much not as much of a fan. For one you're forced into joining a faction, there's no option to go at it alone at all. To make matters worse, neither option is particularly appealing and while I initially ended up with Spark as I tried to play "independent" I quickly flipped my allegiance to the Ward once I met
SpoilerScar, who is entirely unhinged
and realized it'd be a binary choice between Ward and Spark.
You're also forced into various dumb decisions, I mentioned being forced to kill friendly faction soldiers after having talked to a returning character that the PC doesn't know at al before. The game goes out of its way to not give you any other options, and even if you finagle it so you don't actually kill anyone, it still assumes you did. To me it seems as if this mission was written for Spark and just lazily recycled for the Ward because they ran out of time.
Another peeve of mine is the use of cinematics, which, while well done, absolutely take away your sense of agency, often forcing situations that I guess they couldn't figure out how to create in a more organic. In the same vein the game likes to cut off your way back by locking doors behind you during story missions, which feels kinda cheap and/or immersion breaking.
Another thing I personally wish they'd never bring back are the bossfights, they feel extremely out of place for the type of game Stalker used to be, and I can't say I enjoyed any of them as they're almost all bullet spongey gimmick fights. Hell, sometimes you literally drop into an "arena" that's so obviously an arena that you might get some Borderlands flashbacks.
All in all my conclusion is still that this is a game that tries to look and feel like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and initially succeeds, until you get further in and all the cracks start becoming apparent. It's a decent open world game, and may even become a good one once it's less of a buggy mess, but as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel it's a frustrating experience as it's so easy to see how great this could have been. As it stands it's not clear to me whether the game is even fixable as some of the limitations may just be due to the engine choice (eg. night vision is apparently hard(er) to do with RT, and well, fancy graphics were more important, apparently. Similarly draw distance may be a console or UE5 limitation).
Once they start making structural fixes to the game (spawning, night vision, etc.) I may revisit it, but as it stands one playthrough was quite enough.
Earlier I gave this game a 6/10 and I stand by that.
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On 2/14/2025 at 1:20 PM, Lexx said:
Seems there's only two kind of reviews for Avowed: "Super awesome!!" and "worst game ever" -- will probably play it via GamePass once it is out.
Eh, I've seen a few that are far more neutral and they're like "Meh", here's one:
Game seems to have turned out kind of how I expected. Will probably play it, but for 70EUR it's definitely on the "wait for a discount"-list.
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On 2/11/2025 at 5:50 PM, Majek said:
Right steps, wrong feeling. :S just not enough enemies to slaughter.
Doesn't seem to be loading for me...
There's an event going on so I grabbed some patience and bugspray and finally headed to Pyro...
Undocking with the jump gate in the background...
On approach...
Here we gooooooo...
You can see some of the inside of the jump tunnel, those "pillars" you actually have to navigate around.
Aaaand we made it!
Some atmosphere shots from inside the Pyro system:
Spoiler
First encounter with space cows
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Forcing myself through the story in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, they clearly ran out of time and just half-assed the latter half once you start making "ending choices". Instead of having multiple missions depending on earlier choices there's only the single one that makes absolutely no sense for 50% of the choices you may have made before. Things got so on my nerves I actually put the game down for a few weeks.
I'm talking about "Dangerous Liaisons":
SpoilerIf you sided with the Ward up to that point the game does it damnedest to force you to just kill Ward members without any proper reason. You *can* avoid killing anyone if you sneak in (trying to use your authority just results in a straight shootout, which probably wasn't intended either) and do some creative jumping to get past people. All that effort is just RP purposes anyway as the game acts as if you had a grand shootout regardless.
That's ignoring the fact that you've just broken into a facility operated by a friendly faction on the word of someone you've talked to all of 5 minutes (I'm being generous here) and of whom you have no idea at all what their end goal is.
The lore is intriguing, but the storytelling is abysmal. I'd have taken less cinematics (that have lots of issues on their own) and better storytelling over what we got. If you're going to give players choice, better make it makes sense or it's just going to feel even worse than getting no choice at all (much more to say there, but will reserve that for when I get to the end)
No patches since the last one, so AI and spawning issues are still the same as they were after the first big patch.
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On 1/1/2025 at 1:09 AM, Sarex said:
For an example, Elon Muskovic.
Not sure anyone would really want to claim that one at this point...
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On 12/20/2024 at 12:07 AM, LadyCrimson said:
If I buy a 50xx gpu it'll be the 5090, because with all the vram, even if a couple generations later it won't be able to utilize "frame generation limitlessv99" and "UberHot-DLSS v3659", only on 70xx" or something, it would at least run the darn game because of vram and general power. If it doesn't blow a house circuit, or catch on fire, anyway.
I currently have this weird desire to see how far I could get the Indy game to run with middle path tracing at 1080p. The thing about PT (for me) is not simply that fps drops to 30-35 - it's that the fps is not stable/smooth, like 30fps in old games. It's an utter stutter/lag fest. Since I like the first half of the game best, I could start a new save...AAA games these days are mostly good for benchmarking/testing your rig. Heheh
It will probably be a few more generations before hardware path tracing is at the level we need for it to be usable everywhere without tanking performance and/or quality at any resolution higher than Full HD. Just fingers crossed my RX 6800 XT can last me that long (and more fingers crossed Intel will be able to provide some higher end competition by the time this card starts falling off)
On the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 front I can say the big 1.1 patch definitely improved the Zone's feeling. Enemies no longer pop up behind you fully aware of your location and they do seem to wander around on their own. That being said, the game still clearly spawns NPCs based on triggers (I had to kill the same pack of Blind Dogs three times while exploring a location...) or, at least to my feeling, "activity" (if you are jogging around too long, per the game's estimation, without a fight the game will spawn you a fight)
Apparently the major showstopper I ran into was fixed, but it's hard to say as I managed to get past it before the patch dropped. I did run into major performance issues during the
SpoilerFaust
boss fight though, fps dropping to the single digits each time I targeted the boss.
Feels like I'm nearing the end of the playthrough, so far it's clocking in at 100 hours, which puts me at about 1death/hour (though I'd say about 70% of those are probably attributable to the game being in a "state"...)
At this point I'd say I'd score it like a 6/10. It's decently playable at this point, and you probably won't want to uninstall within the Steam refund window if you're not a hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan (but assuming this type of game is your jam, of course...)
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4 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:
Fair. It doesn't really "feel" like a serious AAA game to warrant that "full AAA" price. Also, zero replayability for probably 99% of those who play it.
Also, the cats are weird looking and are not cute.
AAA went up 20EUR in only a few years as well, first trying to convince us that the console prices that were 10EUR above normal PC pricing of 50EUR were "standard" for PC as well, and then tacking on another 10EUR for inflation...
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4 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:
Why 99.5% of players still don't care about full ray tracing. At least not for the 30-50fps cost. The RT-global illumination alone is decent and even that is a performance hit, but I could see it being a standard eventually. Can't compare with non-RT GI since there is none.
Shadows/reflections etc aren't maxed and I'm sure it would all look "crisper" or something on a new $7k PC w/"supreme" settings, but you get the point.Pathtracing Off:
Full pathtracing on: a little change in colortone of those wall plates and the pedestal is better backlit?
No pathtracing:
Full pathtracing: whiter/brighter building/foliage lighting, water is a tad less brown, the bamboo railing is more top-lit/whiter?
Does it make a difference you can see? Yes. Is it worth the performance cost (and hardware cost/upkeep) or make some giant immersion difference?
Me: Heck no.It also has an image quality impact per the folks at Hardware Unboxed:
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl patch 1.1 is out with an enormous amount of fixes, but, most importantly for me (aside from the bugfixes) major improvements to the spawning system
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On 12/4/2024 at 7:28 PM, Azdeus said:
My gog galaxy says I'm only 100 hours into Stalker 2, but that is most definetly a lie, I suspect that the crash I had a few days ago messed up the galaxy logging, I've spent atleast 12 hours a day in the zone on average, so about 150 hours in. Still haven't gone to finish the game or do much of the main story line, I've just been exploring every nook and cranny, parkouring my way into places I really shouldn't be.
If GSC Gameworld continues this frenzy of dropped patches, we will be at stalker 2 2.0 in just a few months
Eh, they're not exactly releasing them often enough for how broken the game is.
The longer I've been playing the more major bugs I've been encountering, from quick items not working (animation plays, nothing happens), to outright crashes to desktop, my 2nd weapon magically getting swapped out by something I didn't even have in my inventory, and now a progression stopper bug that's been there since release. So guess I'm setting the game aside, because I'm not exactly left with any other choice.
On top of that as time went on general design issues are just becoming more and more apparent, from weapon balance (such as it is) to just mission, world, and progression design.
The game may look like a duck, but whether it quacks like one...
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2 hours ago, Sven_ said:
Still in Pripyat. Despite being on the 2nd big map already, I've only killed like 10 stalkers. All the kills else were mutants, mostly small dogs.
The maps seem less detailed than in Shadow Of Chernobyl, but this makes the zone more believable as well as more creepy, of kinds. In particular if you're out at night. (I usually go to bed at night). In SoC, you walk to the left from the beginning area and aready run into a camp of banditd. To the right is the military. And generally, there seem humans out to get you everywhere.
That was apparently a requirement from their publisher, they were afraid the game would feel too empty if not enough was happening so they dialled the number of enemies way up.
Kinda ironic that they're doing the same, in a worse way, in HoC, though it seems like after the first patches it's less obnoxious now, but I haven't gone back to any of the egregiously obvious areas to verify. It may just be that Garbage is less affected.
Ran into my first major bug, you're tasked with "finding" one of two items in Garbage, but when I return with only the one they just take it and act like I didn't complete the mission, so I gotta do both, and hope it works I guess, if not I guess I'll just kill everyone. I'll find out in the evening what it's going to be.
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Well, I've completed my part of the Save Stanton event, and the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo has come and (mostly) gone, so I've got more to share from my favourite screenshot generator (alas, I forgot to turn off the debug overlay way too often, ruined some really nice shots
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12 hours ago, Gorth said:
I had actually considered getting STALKER 2, but... my favourite game reviewer gave some damning feedback. Maybe in a year or two, after a dozen patches?
Yeah, not sure it can easily be fixed, if at all. The review touches on one of the core problems: the game immerses you and then brutally shatters that immersion in quite a lot of ways.
I've been going off the beaten path now that I'm out of the starting area, just sightseeing, finding, and revisiting areas from the previous games (mostly SoC, which I have easily the most hours in) and this Reddit thread kinda sums up the experience.
Just to add a few stories of my own:
Ended up in the Chemical Plant, walked right in without issues, no word from the guards, no hostility either, until I got to the other side, where the gate guard told me Stalkers weren't allowed in. Of course I already was "in" and wanted "out"... The game just didn't anticipate players coming from that direction (and both sides have roads, not like I jumped a wall or did anything else "weird", like jumping over a fence)
Another one happened today. I found the Military Warehouses and started exploring. Got ambushed by what I believe is a Pseudodog (the one that create clones) and a few Snorks (at least they fought each-other as well). Deal with them and start exploring the otherwise entirely empty place. After checking for hostiles outside I start going inside buildings to start looting. I come across stuff that's clearly intended for later use (doors requiring keycards), so I loot what I can and go back outside.
Only to find three bandits waiting for me that came out of nowhere. So I shoot them, only to get blasted by a bunch of other NPCs from some military faction that also suddenly appeared (presumably alongside the bandits, which they entirely ignored...). So after I deal with those, barely, and I start looting I get a bullet through the head. Turns out snipers had also magically spawned on top of the guard towers...
So I re-load, take out the snipers, and get back to looting, only to get jumped by four Snorks... Kite them into an anomaly, and I finally get to loot without interruption, only to discover that one of the towers that had a sniper doesn't have a way to get up at all, just to shatter any illusion of them getting there organically somehow. (also: bye bye to that loot)
5 hours ago, Sven_ said:My PC needs an upgrade (waiting for benchmarks of Kingdom Come II). So I started another, last time was on a GeForce 8600GT maybe a year or two after launch. So basically, first time maxed out details.
Surprised what kind of images this old engine on occasion still produces... the foliage, textures, dynamic lighting, sky boxes and shadows on occasion still hold up. This is vanilla, without mods. The original release didn't have anti-aliasing though. (Also bought Call Of Pripyat on GOG, which I'd never played).
Best thing, this remains far from a brain dead run and gun experience. In particularly in the beginning, where you've just got a weak pistol and no armor / gear, that's bloody tense. I shudder to think what where to happen if this IP would ever get into the hands of the usual suspects. "Boss you around" markers and "yellow paint" everywhere. Even with technical issues, I'd rather see twenty Stalker 2s being in production than but a single.. youknowwhatImean. Really sick and tired of M-rated games pushing you around more than anything ever done by Nintendo. (Or the biggest control freak of a boss in existence, for that matter). I'm here to ESCAPE life at its most mundane, not be reminded of it, thanks.
When I did my 1.000 experiment and installed from DVD I couldn't turn everything all the way up without things stuttering (there's some additional sliders under "Advanced" that aren't maxed out even on the highest quality profile). Curious to know whether you managed to max those out without issues (always possible later patches fixed performance)
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15 hours ago, Azdeus said:
They sort of did, atleast from what I remember reading on the gamma server, i.e. easy everyone including you does 75% damage, and then scales up with difficulty to 100%.
There was also the issue where (human) enemies wouldn't take damage while in an animation (like stagger from getting hit). Not sure if the newer games also had that, but after the first one I just went for one-bullet-one-kill headshot-only sniper-type builds with a side of shotgun for dealing with mutants.
Anyway, played some more and made it to Cordon (not where I was supposed to go, but nostalgia!). Once again ran into an issue where I almost got murdered by enemies spawning where I just came from.
On the graphics side, and this became really obvious after playing some SoC for comparison's sake, shadows are not working properly, which is one of those things that blows my mind given that dynamic shadows and tessellation were the two things that set SoC apart from its contemporaries, graphics-wise.
Not sure where to put this, but I also changed the voice acting to, what I assume is, Ukrainian, because the English voice acting is just terrible to the point I couldn't stand it anymore (especially the player character).
At this point I have no idea why this game gets such high praise/scores when none of the things that made the originals stand out are there, and that is on top of all the technical issues people appear to be having. Cyberpunk 2077 got panned hard for, arguably, less.
Hell, the gaslighting on Reddit is through the roof, so many people claiming things weren't in the originals, when they were, or were added by mods, when they were in the base game (like hunting mutants for body parts), that it's not even funny any more, just sad. Not sure if they're just idiots that never played the originals, or hardcore fanboys with a severe case of toxic denial.
As a sequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I'd be giving it a 4/10 with what I've seen so far, with an option to decrease that even further (eg. I've heard night vision isn't even in, which would probably result in me docking more points if it turns out to be true). Disappointed doesn't even come close to summing up my thoughts on Heart of Chornobyl. More of the same was all I wanted, ffs.
Anyway, since the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo is on in Star Citizen, and Stalker 2 is a bust, I've gone back to that mess of an alpha (which at least doesn't pretend to be anything more) to check out some of the new ships and participate in the "Save Stanton" event. Shame they decided to ruin flight, combat with a capital ship should've been epic, now it just felt very "meh". Oh well, maybe I'll end up finishing Baldur's Gate 3 after all...
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18 hours ago, Lexx said:
looks like some things just don't change.
Eh, it worked fine in Shadow of Chernobyl on release, maybe didn't do everything they promised but it didn't spawn enemies around you out of thin air (only places I recall NPCs just "popping in" was on zone transition points, specifically Garbage -> Cordon, which I attributed to enemies moving across zone boundaries).
To confirm I dug up my Shadow of Chernobyl discs and played through the intro missions in unpatched 1.000 SoC, including some side missions (until you get sent to retrieve the papers for Sidorovitch) and what I found kinda confirmed my memories. Enemies do interact with each-other, they don't spawn out of thin air, and places you just cleared stay cleared until NPCs eventually wander in, not until you either turn around, or pass an arbitrary spawn trigger.
Hell, human enemies spawning in like that would've been extremely noticeable in SoC as the PDA tells you how many NPCs are present in your immediate surroundings (guess there's a reason that functionality is gone...).
Didn't try the higher difficulties (played on "normal" aka "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." difficulty, and playing on middle difficulty option in Stalker 2) but mutants felt far less bullet spongy as well, three, or so, pistol rounds to the head, or two shotgun blasts, take down a Boar . I'm actually curious about Bloodsuckers now, as in Stalker2 those are extreme bullet sponges.
Hmm, maybe I should do another SoC playthrough until they sort out the new game...
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14 hours ago, Lexx said:
Funny, this literally sounds like how I remember the first game.
Heh, the release version had completely borked spawn timers. That map transition point from the beginning to the next zone was a literal bandits genocide spot. They wouldn't stop spawning. It's like the developers had no trust at all in their game and decided last minute to turn it into an actual shooter game where you are blasting stuff every minute.
Like this?
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. The tl;dr: cannot recommend at this time unless you're a hardcore fan.
Game is just plain broken, and no, I don't mean all the complaints about performance or crashes (haven't experienced any of that, the game runs just fine for me).
It turns out the system that makes The Zone come alive ("A Life 2") is just not functioning properly (as confirmed by the devs), so NPCs just spawn out of thin air, often pretty much on top of the character, rather than organically wandering in and interacting with each-other, and the player. Given that this is the system that makes S.T.A.L.K.E.R., well, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that's kind of a big deal... (not to mention that a military patrol spawning on top of you is ... not a good time early in the game)
There's some other things I'm not too fond of, but nothing that's a deal-breaker, at least that I've found so far.
The game very much feels like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so when they eventually get The Zone working as it should I'm expecting to put in many, many hours.
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), so I'll mostly be comparing against that.
) and flew back to Lorville on Hurston as that was the closest major city. I tried to find the city gates so I could park outside and walk in, as I wasn't quite sure how security would react to me flying a stolen ship (I'm not really in the habit of stealing ships...), but I couldn't find them despite flying the whole circumference of Lorville, so I ended up trying my luck at the spaceport after all. And lo-and-behold, after hailing them and asking for a hangar I was just granted landing rights, no questions asked. Seems a bit broken, but I'm taking it...
What are you Playing Now? - the man sez Video games are bad for you - fight the man!
in Computer and Console
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(no, I don't actually think using that long term is a good idea, but it's neat
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