S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2

Indeed. If linear path worked for Exodus i dont think it will work for Stalker, it needs to be open world. One thing that also defines the series is atmosphere that pulls you in and hopefully second game improves on it if even possible.

 

Make me sh*t myself?

Yup I agree, it's key to the look and feel of the Stalker games. Many games have day night cycles, but Stalker (all of them) were the only ones that raised a genuine level of fear in me as a player when I actually went out in to the zone at night. Even tooled up with weapons and armour (assuming you weren't using night vision) there was always a sense that that sound or noise you just heard could leap out at you and end you in a few hits and all that would be left is you looking at a dead body with an open mouth and shorts filled with the remains of last nights dinner. The next game has to get that sense of being vulnerable just right.

 

I sometimes feel like this too, what I hate with a passion is fps games that have a different ADS sensitivity to just normal hip firing sensitivity. And a lot of the times when you try and match these with to be the same sense the programmers thought it would be a great idea to make their sliders be completely different so for instance 5 sensitivity hip firing would actually be 10 sensitivity when using ADS. Drives me up the wall this does. Took me a while to get my sense correct in RAGE 2, which has a horribly low default ADS sense. Sure this is good for sniping but not when you wanna just spray down a few enemies by spray transferring between them in ADS.

 

Clear Sky - Red Forest, play it with a good set of headphones at a night cycle. i dare any of you. i had some rare moments from this goddamn place... scary was not even a word to describe it. i remember this specific place in Clear Sky because i had some problems\bugs and at some point
game was crashing, a patch or a driver later on fixed it for me so i kept going.. and the tension was unreal. some* moments in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series are difficult to describe, they made me uncomfortable but i couldn't stop playing because the tension and atmosphere were believable unlike any other game in this genre.

 

Shadow of chernobyl and call of pripyat are pretty much bugfree @ least not game breaking.
Clear sky got some serious factions bugs, Was a good game but really buggy.

 

i remember bugs in SoC. i played it very early on release, played several times later on and i don't remember if everything was fixed. it was an amazing game, so i probably didn't care at that time. but yes, Clear Sky had issues.. it was also very heavy on the GPU's if everything was enabled ( sun rays and more stuff ).

another important factor at least in the way i see S.T.A.L.K.ER as a pioneer in it's genre, is the way the inventory\character management is going to look, and il explain some points.

many current games tend to make the UI\inventory looks stylish and well.. modern. the "minimalist style" will work best in my eyes for a S.T.A.L.K.E.R game. i don't want to see or even be bothered with skins, expensive looking menus, stylish menus, colorful animations in my inventory.. or even smooth looking items like in Deus Ex for example ( its fine because it fits a futuristic game ).

so in short, some things better left simple. im not saying don't touch the menus\inventory\ui - im saying make it minimalistic and effective, so the player will know its there and it's important to manage your cra* before you go out at night to search for artifacts, but don't make it anything other than that. the old-school inventory\ui works in this specific game. i sure hope they think about it.

 

This time I want to carry around a huge Santa Claus bag as my inventory. When I want something from it, I have to put the bag down carefully, open it up and rifle through the dozens of rusty weapons inside. Also, I want to have to load every bullet in a magazine one by one. There should be a random chance that you drop a bullet on the ground while loading the magazines too. Just kidding, I don't want any of that.

 

SoC was buggs free? Get out of here stalker!

 

I've never been very interested in Horror themed movies or games in general, but STALKER grabbed me and held my utmost interest and attention from start to finish. The atmosphere just gripped me like no other game has. The only game I can really compare it to atmosphere wise is Morrowind (my favorite ever). Those are the only two games that I actually dreamed about for weeks. (I don't usually remember dreams at all, but I did/do for those games)

 

never found stalker scary at all creepy at times the immersion was top notch.

 

A new version of this released recently, it's pretty darn freaking good, even vsync works which I'm amazed by... it's using a custom x64 build of the xray engine https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly

Btw, will S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 have the A-Life AI system? with it using unreal is it possible to even use that?

It just wouldn't feel like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. without it...

 

Same as with the emissions they made stalker i tell u.

 

Its a mystery how a game with so much success and fanbase never got more sequels.

 

I seriously hope they wont mess up s.t.a.l.k.e.r 2 because its coming to consoles aswell. If its like the first three games in freedom its perfect, but if they dumb down that freedom then its not stalker anymore.

 

Correct me if im wrong but first three games are pc only and thats how it was supposed to be. All this its coming to consoles makes me cringe.

 

I feel u but its all about $$$ these days no quality control or whatsoever.

 

I still think it may be because it was quite a niche title that had two things that helped stand in it's way

1). It was janky AF,
2). It had a really odd difficulty curve, for new players it was b*lls hard but once you got some of the weapons, a decent set of armour, equipment and other bits and pieces the game became quite easy. The bad guys could still tag you and get a lucky kill but it wasn't as frustrating later in the game as it was when you first started.

 

You have a point. It´s reputation grow with time, but the market dint stop, so other games ended up filling the space.
It was difficult true, but challenging, not the kind of senseless difficulty.
And again, you're right, it was and i guess still is a niche game, and niches tend to be small.

 

Yeah, I do look at these through the lens of the vanilla mods that are basically bug fixes. I just replayed Clear Sky recently... Red Forest is no joke.

 

Absolutely no joke... I have no idea how someone could use a controller to even get through the red forest after spending a few hours trying to do the same today using keyboard and mouse.... it's just crazy hard, and this was during the day... to try it at night time... impossible.