What is the deal with this game constantly getting praised as one of the best games ever?
The story is dull and borderline non-existant, gunplay is garbage, enemy AI is shit, areas are repetitive and on top of that it's so buggy and broken that's it's unplayable without mod patches.
Wrong
You're right, you should never play it
> unironically thinking Yea Forums's shitposting contrarianism means anything
Nobody ever talks about STALKER outside this board
Obviously it's not a technical masterpiece, no one is going to argue that. The real charm in stalker is the general aesthetic and mood to the game. The ambience is truly next level, and the slow drip of the lore is very soulsborne-esque.
It has it's weak points, but especially with a good mod overhaul it's a great example of the shit consolefags will never have.
oh and also I always hear about muh immersion but this game literally kills all immersion by placing a fucking loading screen between every little area
get an ssd poorfag shit literally takes like 2 seconds. quicksave/quickload is damn near instant on SoC complete overhaul.
SHUT
UP
DELETE THIS
I NEED CONSOLEKEKS TO BELIEVE THAT MY SHITTY FALLOUT CLONE IS GOOD
i will beat you to death
He's not wrong about the gunplay, the enemy AI or the bugs. Nothing like having an AI turn a corner in the long ass dark hallways of the Chernobyl reactor and blow you away with 1 shot from the Gauss Rifle.
I'm sorry that you need 30 second cutscenes every 4 minutes to keep you interested, OP. I'm sure reading books is a struggle for you, too.
The game has some mechanical issues, but it has non-linear story, difficulty that requires player ingenuity, interesting atmospheric effects, fun characters, and a genuine need for exploration.
BOTW has many of the same "flaws." It doesnt tell you what to do, how to do it, or who to go seek. You, the player, get all that control.
You're just dense, OP. Probably depressed. Probably living with your parents. Probably some kissless zoomer NEET.
Or stop being bad at games
/k/ worships the game. Even have larp threads
This is an embarassing response. I thought it was pretty well known that that Chernobyl section, while thematically cool is really shitty for combat. Not to mention the absolutely abysmal teleporter section behind the code door.
Holy kek that spacing and that last sentence, yikes, take a good look at what you wrote whenever you decide to remove the nostalgia goggles. Even that piece of garbage named Pathologic is less clunky than this trash, not OP btw tee hee.
Mostly Eastern Yuros are into this game, because of its atmosphere, familiar themes and locations and its insane moddability.
I often find Westerners unable to get into it, especially they have no idea of its cultural background and doesn't have much handholding.
I think it's a good game
Since when do you need to know a game's "cultural background" to enjoy it? The fact STALKER needs this kind of pampering to enjoy it in the first place proves it's pretty overrated to start with.
Since It's a niche game.
>I don't understand something
>therefore it's overrated
You are partially right. It was great to see familiar buildings, cars and weapons. However it wasn't just that. It had a good story and the location was something new and the atmosphere was great.
Of course it had it's issues, but still for that time it was a great game. Not just some generic trash.
>The story is dull and borderline non-existant
Hell no, it has a pretty good story.
I fell in love with it the moment they had me go out and find weird rocks getting tossed around in little nodes of random shit.
The game has some of the best environmental design ever featured in an FPS.
The shooting is pretty damn good too. A.I. was very advanced for it's time - still is, but as with most A.I. that is rich in behavioral patterns, it also tends to be buggy or silly.
The atmosphere is absolutely amazing.
The gameplay is tight and challenging.
Replay value is excellent.
Atmosphere is absolutely amazing and captivating. Sometimes it's scarier than many "real" horror games.
The huge and hot modding community is just the cream on the top, and extends the games' lifespan by years.
>Nobody ever talks about STALKER outside this board
You clearly never go outside, neet.
>recommending COMPLETE
>2009 + 10
>STALKER
>Fallout clone
Man I’m probably falling for some shit bait here, but god damn son
LE OPEN WORLD
A billion mods. It's also based on a really good moobie and short story
Im almost done SoC. Are clear skies and pripyat as good?
I didn't really like Clear Sky, but you have to play that at least once, it also has faction wars and reimplemented some alpha level designs.
Call of Pripyat was excellent, if you want to play hardcore, install Misery mod.
CoP is nearly as good and some like it the best but Clear Sky is a clear step down from SoC. Have fun fighting a billion fucking bandits ad nauseam, retarded faction AI and non-existent monsters and labs.
CS is a flawed gem, and on a hindsight a necessary mid-step between SoC and CoP.
CoP is the most tested and finetuned gameplay-wise, but suffers of relatively low difficulty and poor outdoor visuals.
I personally would not jump straight to the sequels. SoC especially has not only multiple endings to discover, but also tons of great mods to enhance the experience.
Played all 3, liked all 3 (2 was worst, 3 best gameplay, 1 best story). Never felt they were over-rated.
t. American
Stalker is a one-of-a-kind game, it has a unique setting, the gameplay is tense, and basically what says. Not many shooters can brag about such things besides maybe F.E.A.R. so its definetly worth a try if you're a fan of shooters.
>story is dull and borderline non-existant
The story in ShoC adheres to the setting and general plot. You're an adventurer, scoundrel, rogue, nobody; just like thousands and thousands other stalkers that roam around in the exclusion zone. Just like all of them, you're heading forward, following either a vision, or a mission. The only real difference is, you're determined to go beyond the limits of reason and self-preservation, since you don't have anything else
The story ain't flashy, it ain't all that expositional, it isn't all that complex, it is pretty much linear in its form. But it suits the game in its whole; in formal and abstract matters
>gunplay is garbage
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has decent balistics mechanics, armour & armour penetration mechanics, stopping power mechanics, plethora of ammo calibres and ammo types, different guns utilising particular kind of ammo differently ...
And while all of that is happening ingame, it can be boiled down pretty easily to "use AP against armoured opponents, buckshot or hollowpoints against soft targets", etc.
One of the prominent key points of why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is how it "feels". And now I don't mean it in atmosphere and how the game is stylised and represented. It's how the engine handles
I don't know about you, but the game feels like "having weight to it" and some sort of "density" and "touchability", if it makes sense. It's like how Quake engine derived games feel; most of the CoD games or Source games
>areas are repetitive
That's just not true. It's just the commie/Eastern European aesthetics, when it comes to urban areas
>AI is shit
That's questionable field; more prone to ...
>it's so buggy and broken that's it's unplayable without mod patches
And that's a single point I can't really refute, though personally, from solely my experience, I've never had excessive problems with X-Ray and how it behaved. But empirically, holy fuck, it can do some utter bullshit faggotry sometimes
>... key points of why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is how it "feels".
>why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is how
>???
Seems like I've had a bit of a brainlag. To express my statement without me being daft cunt:
>One of the prominent key points of why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. *is enjoying its cultural status* is how it "feels".
I don't know but it is one of the few games that I never uninstall and play consistently no matter what I feel like playing.
Granted I play with mods and all that but in general the game hits all the sweet spots for me. It has its flaws but somehow they seem minimal compared to the good things it has.
Gunplay is great, but I mostly love the atmosphere. Stalker just has that unique feeling in it I've never seen in any other game. The fact that it's so unpolished just adds to the atmosphere. Everything works just barely and everything is ugly, just like in the Soviet Union.
To be fair with STALKER, no one exactly praises it for the story, and nobody said it's 100% stable.
CS is actually pretty good when you mod it and fix all the shit flinging grenades, but it suffers from a shit linear story and the retarded faction war system.
CoP is meh to be fair. Its by far the easiest game in the series, starting you out with SoC mid game gear at the beggining and having very easy quests. Not to mention that outside of mutants you wont find much opposition, the bandits are neutral for some reason.
Plus, the locations while being a bit more grounded in reality all look like they were ripped straight out of Fallout 3 because every location except pripyat looks like a desert.
Get SRP and Absolute Nature with the green setting on to get an actual Chernobyl experience.
zoom zoom
SoC is by far the best one. CS is just the same as SoC but less fun. CoP has better mechanics, but it ends just when it starts to get interesting.
Thanks for the bump
Soc>CS>>>CoP
CoP is severely overrated. There are like 2 or 3 good gunfights in the entire game and the atmosphere is nowhere near as good as the other two
Look at these casuals ruining the industry
this
Aside from being the most stable CoP is extremely casualized
It's true that the story is uninteresting and sucked out of their fingers.
Beside that OP is dead wrong about every other aspect of the game.
Inb4 CS retard who takes phone pics of his screen
I've been playing COP with masochistic mods for so long that I forgot how easy it was. One day I installed CoC, played for 5 minutes and installed CoM, lmao
It's not for you. Go play the next cinematic experience on your console
World is very immersive. With mods that game is a wasteland simulator with deep mechanics.
It would be a perfect game if not for the constant crashing.
I think you replied a wrong cunt
>The story is borderline non-existant
I mean, most of your points are at least debatable but that's just incorrect
Does OP even know what the story is?
Can OP name two factions of the game off the top of his head?
why can't you start a thread without a bait?
why you have to be such a massive faggot?
>Obviously it's not a technical masterpiece
Actually, despite being kinda spite and twine, the game is pushing some very impressive tech for 2007. The lighting is excellent, it uses parallax mapping, stuff like that.
The updated engine has some of the best lighting effects still to date
The Story is crap but it's the atmosphere of the game is superb. It really captures the essence of everyday life in post soviet Ukraine accurately.
I can smell the turd marks in your pants even from here, little Zoomer
>The Story is crap
Why? It's surprisingly complex and you actually have to pursue the story as it's not spoon-fed to you
>/k/
>/vg/ general still going strong
>still a massive active modding community
Dilate have sex etc.
I fuckin love the series but the games are generally weird, janky pieces of trash and I can't really blame anyone for not liking them, but I'll always recommend they at least try them because if you have the specific strain of autism required to appreciate it, it's going to instantly shoot up into your top 10 list and leave you feeling slightly depressed that are no games quite as trash and also jank as it is.
stalker is my favorite game series of all time
Dunno what game you played, but there is literally at most 5 loading screens in call of pripyat. Excluding when you start up the game. Because there is only three big zones.
STALKER is like Operation Flashpoint. Janky shit but the modding community is god tier making the game in return also extremely great. The game is like 12 years old now and mods are still coming out. You don't play STALKER for the story but for the world you are playing in. You basically need to have self-insert autism (self-inserting as the character you are playing as) to enjoy the game
>shoot gun while pointed directly at a mans head and standing directly next to him
>bullets disappear into thin air and I die
Enjoying your shit fucking taste?
literally made up lies, that doesn't happen
user your problem is that you're a zoomer trash. The game continues to receive praise from anyone with an actual taste who tried it. It's a cult classic for a good reason
When you have no other excuse for a bad game.
oh yes it does happen
For westerners the aesthetic is exotic and they haven't followed the development, so they didn't have any expectations.