tbh these days I'll take broken Ukrainian jankiness over Bethesda any days.

At least the Zone feels alive and terrifying.

EDIT - There's just this sort of feeling of warmth too in walking up to a campfire and listening to a group of STALKERS bullshit. It may all be in Russian, but it feels organic and I haven't heard the same conversation at all. And at the same time you get the one dude sitting there playing on his guitar.



And then you dive screaming into the hostile world of the Zone. Cursing every anomaly, the monsters, and the men you fight. Then you up and cheeki breeki fighting some bandits.

I never did get around to finishing FO4. I can't even say why tbh, except that it just seemed... bland. It was fun for a while, and they had some fun novelty bits, but the writing of both Bethseda Fallouts come off as bland to me, and 4 is the weakest. When the ending for FO4 was spoiled for me, I wasn't even mad at it being spoiled. My reaction was more like "That's the ending they are going to go with?"

I dunno, I guess I tend to prefer writing that makes me feel like my writing is inadequate. With FO4, I feel like I could have written a much better story for that game, and that's offputting to me since I'm some amateur dumbfuck in an RP forum.

Literally Fallout 4:



I've heard a lot of complaints about the game's quest structure too, where people complain about how each one is effectively the same as the other.

When people say Fallout 4 sucks, I get kinda peeved. It's an opinion, sure, but it is by no means a bad game. It's just not up to the same (really high) standard Bethesda set for itself when they made Fallout 3. IMO, and I'll probably get flak for it, but 4 is better than New Vegas by a decent margin.

I'm on the "mods will fix it" bandwagon. I've been having a decent time with it so far even if I wish it had more of FNV's quests/writing/story elements.

How hard is it to do something for me when it literally involves not doing something that'll take 15 minutes and is actually important?

That awkward moment when my friends are giving me a look of horror because I said I haven't watched any TV for a long long time.

Like, the kind of shits they air here in my region are all Korean melodramatic soap operas full of Sue-ish characters, cringe-worthy script, mediocre acting... And they all boil down to the same type of premise over and over again.

How about no thanks.

@tsukune I haven't watched TV in a long time too but don't be hating on K-Dramas those are my actual lifeblood. Yes, they all have the same types of scenarios but dammit they're adorable.

@tsukune I haven't watched TV in a long time too but don't be hating on K-Dramas those are my actual lifeblood. Yes, they all have the same types of scenarios but dammit they're adorable.

I don't want to hate K-dramas but...

I want some diversity - like some Hong Kong crime goodness? Those short Japanese ones? Or the Chinese historical harem insanity? Why only show K-drama?

Those serious historical K-dramas are the only kind I'm willing to give them a shot. No offense, but personally most of those set in modern times feel just like some badly-written mushy shoujo manga or even those unnecessarily long-winded Taiwanese family soap operas with "better"-looking (surgically-made beauty) cast to me, sorry.

(Also, K-pop fangirls in my region are very scary...)

I mean, I'm a fan of J-Dramas and Hong Kong cinema as much as the next person but K-Dramas are just...the romance ones are genuinely sweet, the melodramatic ones even more so with added tears because it's just such a ride. Then of course there are the variety shows which are good fun. But I mean, I'd sooner watch all 50 episodes of Gloria (it's a K Drama about love and lies and family and the working class!) than I would probably anything else. It's my lifeblood. I need them.

@Fabricant451 I do respect that K-drama is your "lifeblood", so don't worry about that. :)

I just wish that the broadcasting channels in my region would diversify the types of shows aired here instead of forcing everyone to watch the mainstreams only (which tends to be similar premises back to back...all the more pointless). Instead of letting me to give K-dramas a chance, it's making me annoyed and more reluctant to watch any, yeah.

Half Life is fucking overrated.

Half Life is fucking overrated.

Pump your brakes, kid.

He's not wrong

He's not wrong

You'd of had to of been there, in the winter of '98. Half Life frickin' blew my mind. I even went back and played it recently, just to see if my nostalgia goggles had fooled me into thinking it was great and not just revolutionary. Turns out, it's still great, and operates a lot better than some of my more modern experiences. It's got everything; survival horror, alien blasting, soldier shooting, teleporters, hapless NPCs, science - everything one needs for a healthy life style.

I could also say the same for Doom 2, once you apply the Brutal Doom mod... although I guess that is kinda cheating. Brutal Doom beats the Hell out of a lot of modern day shooters, even though its sprites and the graphics sometimes make your eyes bleed, the actual game play is more solid than my front door, and that thing is solid oak.

Half Life 2 didn't do so much for me, though. I'll agree that it was overrated, and I assume that's why they're holding back Half Life 3, because they know it'll be the nail on the coffin. They shouldn't have gone down the whole "Earth taken over" and superior alien race road... that was stupid of them, because now their lore is going to have to involve an alien race that beat Earth in 7 hours, but somehow they're gonna have to make it so that Freeman can do what the united military could not...

Anywho, that's my piece on whatever this was.

Good day!

Valve is definitely a victim of the hypetrain that Half Life 3 has created. Remember the hype for Duke Nukem? Remember how that turned out?

On a smaller scale, I definitely think Fallout 4 was a bit of a letdown after that whole hypetrain happened.

If they release Half Life 3 and it isn't the transcendentalist, holy experience that everyone expects it to be, then people are just going to be frustrated and disappointed. So they'll just not do anything. Better than crushing peoples' dreams with a reality that might not be up to par.

TLDR; people are in love with the idea of HL3. Maybe not the reality.

It's got everything; survival horror, alien blasting, soldier shooting, teleporters, hapless NPCs, science - everything one needs for a healthy life style.

"Oruzhie ubral! Spasibo."

@Dinh AaronMk After 2 minutes of Googling, which is my attention cap for obscure stuff, I've only decoded half of what you said. Holster your weapon *something*. Holster your weapon, stalker?

I never played the Stalker series, I have an aversion towards Russian developers for some reason I've never really grasped. It's probably a deep rooted, very buried xenophobic response to them as a people in general. You can all thank DOTA for making me this way. I still have nightmares.

If one day I overcome my anti-Russian demons, is the Stalker stuff worth it? I think I watched a review on one of them, and it was a "so-so" kinda vibe, but I know it is supposedly an established franchise, which means there must be fire with that smoke.

Of course, this might be the moment you tell me they're not Russian, but Ukranian, and I get to feel silly. I could wiki it... but, I already wasted my two minutes on that Englishised version of whatever country east of Poland that was.

@TheEvanCatWas anyone ever really hyped for Duke Nukem Forever beyond the whole "Oh wow they actually finished it?" angle? Like who honestly expected that game to be anything?

@Dinh AaronMk After 2 minutes of Googling, which is my attention cap for obscure stuff, I've only decoded half of what you said. Holster your weapon *something*. Holster your weapon, stalker?

anuuu

I never played the Stalker series, I have an aversion towards Russian developers for some reason I've never really grasped. It's probably a deep rooted, very buried xenophobic response to them as a people in general. You can all thank DOTA for making me this way. I still have nightmares.

>Being this terrified of the meme-people

You haven't met angry Germans yet.

If one day I overcome my anti-Russian demons, is the Stalker stuff worth it? I think I watched a review on one of them, and it was a "so-so" kinda vibe, but I know it is supposedly an established franchise, which means there must be fire with that smoke.

You can find the value of STALKER on at least two levels. The lowest, it's memetic value:




But that goes without saying for something as big as STALKER.

As a rule of thumb the games - or at least Shadow of Chernobyl, the first one - is notorious for it's "Slavshit" programming. It and Clear Skies (the second in the series and prequel) have a notorious reputation as being broken. You're honestly probably going to have a hard time playing it unmodded (STALKER Complete is usually the go-to mod to fix it). And a lot of the humor around the game an the franchise honestly comes from embracing the cruel comedy of its "500-475 + 5 Features"



There was also a comparison thing between Western and Slavic game design which I'm having a hard time locating.

That said, after divulging the horrors of the game: time to praise it.

It's alive and organic as fuck. I don't think I encountered a game with as alive and human an atmosphere as STALKER. And the Zone is wonderfully rendered as it is terrifying. It plays a hard and good survival-horror theme enacting a lot of stuff that Bethesda never bothered to do until later. You get hungry, you bleed out, you have to manage the weight of everything, and sound is even a factor of sneaking. It is in most ways close to touching on a lot of genres at once.

The horrors of the The Zone can also be terrifying. Snorks can make you piss your pants with how fast and sudden they'll lunge. Bloodsuckers you may not literally see until they're on top of you, and you have to keep testing the ground at times for the randomly generated anomalies that infest The Zone, lest you got blown up, set on fire, or torn to shreds in a gravitational field. And there's still the radiation.

Faction politics are also considerably tight and it's easy to piss one faction off. As a friend of mine described it, dealing with the factions of The Zone is like walking on eggshells.

Well, except for Bandits, the Ukrainian Military, and the Monolithians who are straight-up hostile to you on default.

And fuck Monolithian gauss snipers.

The nights are also pitch-black which makes it all the more scarier. More so than Fallout where there's no visible difference between night and day except a color filter. But being trapped out in the wilderness in the middle of the night is a test of bravery in its own way. Either the bandits hear you before you see them and your night is filled with the cheekiest of breekis, or you're forced to sprint the fuck away from a horde of dogs.

Call of Pripyat steps it up too by introducing emissions. Or the aforementioned blowouts.

And at the end of the day, I always remember this comment about the series:

Sitting by campfires, listening to other stalkers talk and play guitar, getting mauled by the group of bloodsuckers behind hunting us.

games like these make me wonder why ppl bother with DayZ and any game these days that try to be survival horror.

Of course, this might be the moment you tell me they're not Russian, but Ukranian, and I get to feel silly. I could wiki it... but, I already wasted my two minutes on that Englishised version of whatever country east of Poland that was.

Game was produced in Ukraine but using Russian for secondary or tertiary NPC dialog since that means they can sell it on a larger Eastern European market. In-world too it's more likely all the STALKERS that travel to the zone will know more Russian than Ukrainian, so everyone from Poles to Russians and Belarussians to Russians will communicate in Russian.

All-in-all the STALKER franchise is really more a cult franchise than it is a mainstream pop-hit like Half Life or Fallout.

@Dinh AaronMk Well, I thank you kind sir (or madam?) for that straight from the gut review. I've since watched a few Let's Play youtube videos (no commentary) and am now fully convinced I am far too much of a pussy for that shit. The screams and stuff are bad enough, but the way they come at you like that... URGH, no way.

I'm going to crawl back to my Half Life, where everything is always bright, and where the scariest thing you come across is a rotating propeller that you need to jump over or face decapitation.

Seriously though, that game's night environment is balls deep in the spooky atmosphere. I'll go ahead and give this a visit if I ever feel like I'm man enough for it.