My Experience with the S. T. A. L. K. E. R. games

[LinkHero]

This is a long post. No kidding, you might be here for a good while.

I first encountered the Stalker video game series while browsing on the internet. I had just come off a somewhat long FC3 gaming session and wanted a break. And I was bored. FC3 mechanics were a far cry (heh, heh, pun intended) from the mechanics which I had come to love in Far Cry 2. In particular, I had gone through 3 Outposts with nothing but a machine gun, and it was working perfectly. I had grown used to FC2's weapon degradation, and searched for games where guns would degrade with use. I browsed through a few sites, and most of them mentioned GSC Game World's 'Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl (SoC) as one of the best games they had played. I was curious, and decided to look at some gameplay videos, and was impressed. The gunplay was somewhat standard, but the immersion was good. Not FC2 good, but good nonetheless. I got a copy of the game, installed it, and began to play. And I've never looked back since.
The Stalker series of games takes place in the 10 km exclusion zone. It is set chronologically in the early 2010s, and chronicles the story of a man's journey to the CNPP.

To the casual gamer, and to the one who is "L33T" in games like Call of Duty, SoC seems like the highest level of bullshit. Every modern game gives you some sort of tutorial on how to play the game, how the mechanics w0#k, and so on. FC2 is notorious in this regard that while it does have a small tutorial and training section, it does not hold your hand while figuring out the mechanics of the game. You have to discover them for yourself. SoC follows this style. For example the game has a 'bleeding' mechanic, where any injury to the player, along with loss of health, induces bleeding. This has a drain effect on remaining health, until the bleeding stops naturally, is treated, or the player character dies. There is a two line text explanation provided in the player's PDA. Nowhere else is any explanation provided. The first time the player character experiences this mechanic is when they engage in their first firefight, when the player does not have anything to address bleeding effects. Secondly, the difficulty level  selection for this game is a little different. The difficulty level affects the damage done by in game weapons. At higher difficulties, both you and enemy characters deal higher damage to each other.(This style would later be used in the Metro games) It is not uncommon for NPCs to survive a point blank shot to the head with a pistol. The recommended difficulty to play these games is the highest one. Both these facts I learned in hindsight.

Another thing that SoC does is that the player's starting equipment is zero. In the first firefight, you have a Makarov pistol (one of the least damaging pistols, and one that  is only good in extremely close combat) and a simple leather jacket. You (along with a few other friendly NPCs, have to face 7-8 bandits, all of which are armed with sawn-off double barreled shotguns, which are much better in CQB. Adding  the bleeding effect, and enemies surviving a headshot at point blank range, and I was dead before I knew it. And I had no idea what I had done wrong. I tried again a couple of times, with similar results.

Then I went to the Interweb, and I went through a fair few sites, on where I was going wrong, and I discovered my errors. And I went back and tried again. I was successful that time, though all the friendly NPCs died. And thus began my character's story in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

I find SoC's game mechanics to be quite interesting. Weapon slots, weapon degradation, hunger, radiation sickness, all exist in the game. But the mist interesting mechanic I found was carry weight. Everything that the character carries has weight, even ammunition. And each gun uses one of the standard firearm ammunition, e.g. 5.56 x 45 SS190 NATO rounds. Depending on your firearm of choice, you might not find that ammunition while on an excursion, and must plan accordingly. The game's economy is also interesting, with anything that can be found in the field (except mission related items, of course) being salable, and prices depending upon your general reputation, your reputation with the trader's faction, your reputation with the trader himself, and so on. Weapons degrade, and eventually begin to jam frequently. Armour also degrades with damage, and eventually provides less and less protection over time. However, there is no way to repair them in the vanilla SoC game, and new weapons and armour must be purchased from traders from time to time. SoC also introduces attachments, with Warsaw Pact weapons and NATO weapons getting different sets of attachments, which enhance the gameplay even further.

A feature I like in SoC is the A-Life system, which controls all the life in the game world. NPCs and mutated animals roam the land, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups, and ignore/interact with each other completely independently of the player.

The ambience of SoC is different from other mainstream FPS shooters. At its heart, SoC is a survival/horror themed game. Some time in the middle of the game, an entry is added into the player's PDA about a new mutant called a bloodsucker. Immediately after, the player is given a mission to go and kill a bloodsucker. I attempted that mission on my first playthrough, and when I first saw the bloodsucker, it had sneaked up behind my back into 'I can couht the freckles on your face' sort of close range, and I (in the real world) screamed like a little girl.

The story of the game itself is very interesting,too. I will not spoil it here, even though the game is nearly14 years old at this point. At the end of the game, depending on the player's actions up till that point, one of several endings is shown, and I had gotten the most common 'bad' ending. SO, six months later, I started a second playthrough, and that time, I achieved the 'good' ending' (which, as I learned later, was also the canon ending.)

GSC Game World made two other Stalker games, 'Stalker: Clear Sky' as a prequel to SoC, and 'Stalker: Call of Pripyat' as a sequel. I had, at that point in time, recommended SoC to my friends, and one day I got a call from one of them about a CD of 'Call of Pripyat' (CoP) available at a second hand game store near us. Needless to say, I purchased that second hand copy of CoP.

CoP, while having the same mechanics as its prequel, seems more like an action game than a horror game. The protagonist of CoP, a different character from the protagonist of SoC, feels like Ukrainian James Bond. The game is great fun though, and is set chronologically after SoC, and provides closure to many of the unsolved mysteries in SoC. CoP adds a weapon upgrade system, along with weapon repairs, allowing for more customizability in the game's guns. CoP also has a game engine improvement, with the newer engine being better than SoC's engine.

All in all, both games have made for a different kind of first person shooter experience, and I would highly recommend them to you guys.

[LowPolyOWG]

Another similar game would be Escape from Tarkov. While it doesn't have the same setting as the Stalker series, it's well-known for it's over the top weapon customization and the realistic survival elements.

Stalker 2 was announced back in 2018 and it will use Unreal 4, unless the devs will port it to UE5 in the future, to take advantage of Xbox Series X and Playstation 5.



Epic showcasing their totally not pre-rendered on PC demo on a PS5 dev kit

Many of the STALKER devs left and formed other smaller studios (notably 4A) behind the Metro franchise, using elements from their Stalker franchise, but different settings.

[fragger]

Nice post, and a good read, LH +1

Some of us OWGers did play at least one of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games (quite some years ago, the posts are probably still on the old site but I haven't looked). I think the one most of us got into was Call Of Pripyat. At least, that was the only one of the series I played - some of the guys might have played the others, I'm not sure. I quite enjoyed it and as you said, I found it quite immersive, but I didn't play a heck of a lot of it because something else came along that sucked me in instead (may have been Civilization V) and I never got back around to CoP.

One thing I remember about CoP was how dark the nights were. I mean, DARK - like not be able to see your hand in front of your face dark. As I recall, if you didn't use your flashlight you couldn't see anything on the ground, and something like a building on the skyline would only be visible because the sky was slightly less dark than it and the ground were. Realistic nights, in other words - not like nights in most games which are more like very late afternoons.

I'm pretty sure I've still got the game on disk somewhere in the black hole I call my closet I might just dust it off one day and have another go at it. Question, though - does it have widescreen monitor support? I believe it's about a ten-year-old title now.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I skipped the Stalker games for exactly the reasons you guys liked them, the weapon degradation, the need to manage hunger, thirst and radiation protection (better hope you have enough filters for your gas mask or you're dead) and all that. One of those mechanics would be fine, but all of them piled on top of each other just seems like you're managing stuff in menus all the time, better stop & drink, better stop & eat, OK now I gotta check my filters, OK back to walking ten feet, ok better stop & drink, etc.....

But that's how it goes, different games for different folks, which makes things interesting.

[Art Blade]

From what I remember, on PC, the first game was notorious for not running on most machines. So I stayed away from it. Then, later, a friend got it and kept talking about it. I wasn't interested in the game any more, having heard quite a few details.

But when STALKER Clear Sky popped up, I went for it, it was a cool game.I played it excessively I think there was a follow-up in the timeline of that franchise and I think that I also played that.

[LinkHero]

I had fun playing both the games, and did make a Reddit post regarding my experiments with Call of Pripyat. Link can be found over

from r/stalker

.

All this was before I discovered the modding community. Turns out that series has at least 3 major mods, and a host of other gameplay modifying mods. The 3 major ones are Call of Chernobyl, a sandbox game, which combines the assets of all three games; Lost Alpha, a remake of SoC with the CoP engine, and various other additions and enhancements, and Misery, a CoP remake which, as its name suggests, is designed to make your life miserable. Seriously, if Benthos thought the vanilla game was bad for managing stuff, then Misery would be his worst nightmare. There are even mods custom made for each of these mods, and ports of these mods to fit into each other.

I believe that all 3 are standalone mods i.e. you do not require a retail copy of the game to play them. I hope to try Call of Chernobyl, (when I finish my FC2 playthrough, or when I get bored of FC2, whichever comes first) and will post my impressions at a later date.