@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-peopleYou 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.
