How good is this game actually? Been thinking about getting it

It does, but you are either going to have to do a downgrade, or use the (kinda crappy) 1.0005 compatibility patch.

Then again, since the original developers are long gone, you might just as well pirate the entire trilogy, and patch them to what ever you want.

Give Misery 1.0 a try. It easily made call of pripyat my favorite.

one of the best FPS series I have played

You can try the compatibility patch but when I used it the shit wouldnt work. It would always crash on the title screen.

you played the previous two at any point?

I still prefer SoC over the sequels.

It's pretty good.

oh it's fucking good

Kind of hit and miss for me but it's one of those games you should definitely try, because there's nothing else like it.

I played SoC and beat it and got the shit ending
I started Clear Sky twice and haven't gotten past the military outpost. I need to get on that.

proptip: just take the entrance at the top right of the swamps instead

I'm kinda getting the itch to play again, what's a good mod that changes the base game up? I already played all of them vanilla and SoC again with autumn aurora

You should check it out OP.

see slap Starter Pack's graphics on top if you wish.

Any good torrents for this game?

yes

Link

Master difficulty increases damage right? But for both the player and enemies like headshots are basically gonna one shot anyone. Why dont more games do this? I fucking hate when I increase the difficulty and it just makes enemies bullet sponges and me a wet paper bag

Its effing awesome the first one is good the second one is also good the third one looks better than the first two is a prequel, but has very shallow gameplay and storyline.

I've played all 3, only one I played to completion was the 3rd one but that's because I had alot of fun just surviving. I recommend the misery mod. Adds a ton of shit to the ton the game had.

If you want to experience the hell of being a poor motherfucker trying to survive in the zone, fighting constant hunger, thirst and exhaustion, doing missions to only use the reward money for food, get call of pripyat with misery mod and start it with the highest difficulty.

go with misery mod for COP for a really good gaming experience.

So what makes this game so good exactly

because lazy ass AAA devs are lazy and stupid, and don't care about balancing.

You got that order wrong.
SoC is the first game, CS the second and the prequel title, and CoP the latest one and ending of the trilogy.

They're scarier than many "true" horror games released in past few years.

They look prettier than some much later released multiplat titles.

They make games like Far Cry 3-4 feel like horribly dumbed down, handholding kiddie games.

They are fairly realistic, but not simulator-level. There's real bullet physics and stuff like bleeding and hunger, and one shot to the head can kill anyone.

They are VERY long lasting games. One playthrough in vanilla can last well over 25 hours at calm pace, but I've spent a good two WEEKS in all three of them on my first playthroughs. And later a lot more with numerous mods.

They're not perfect games and have their few issues, but in the end they are like "rough diamonds": totally worth investing time and effort in. They are just not afraid to kick you in the groin and call you a bitch - which is quite rare in modern games.

...also, god-tier AI.

I drank a soda and my game crashed

For me it's the ALife. Gunplay is bearable, world and lore is interesting but not never fleshed out properly, quests are pretty generic outside of a few incredible outliers.

But the reason I keep coming back is because of how alive the world feels. Stalkers, mutants, bandits, all going around and doing their own thing independently of your own existence. Sure, it's buggy, you'll find AI just walking over cliffs and dying, walking into anomalies and dying, walking into a tree and getting stuck, walking around in a circle indefinitely, even crashing your game because it tries to do something it isn't able to do, but the crazy situations the AI gets itself into, and sometimes drags you into, make for an extremely emergent experience rivaled by nothing outside of multiplayer games.

I think I've heard of this series once, but your description makes it sound fucking awesome.

Where do I start?

Better than Fallout 3

>I think I've heard of this series once
...seriously? You are on fucking Cred Forums!

>where do I start?
by reading this fucking thread?? :

hideous looking game with terrible animations and boring gameplay.

What all does the A-life system do? Like I know it makes the AI do certain things, but what does that entail exactly

Lmao, I usually just go on Cred Forums and Cred Forums like the tumor I am, but I was bored so I gave this board a check.

Appreciate the reply

still alive? that's great

A-life is just a fancy word for the AI. It's everything the NPC does from deciding to go and get some artifacts, to shoot up a few bandits, etc.

fuck off now.

Keeps ALL the NPCs (humans and mutants) active and interacting with the world and each other in the Zone, everywhere at once. NPCs far away it sets to "offline" mode, which reduces their actions and movements to mere rough estimate simulations, but up close, they are fully rendered, animated and dynamic, as seen in webms like With some bigger mods like AMK1.4, that "unleash" the A-Life for good, you can actually get news from other STALKERS about sightings of events that really do happen in real time somewhere. Plus end up in totally unpredictable encounters, with everything freeroaming as they please.

So like the AI can actually go out and collect items I could collect?

Friendly reminder that STALKER is literally nothing without A-Life and the man behind it all is was kicked in the balls by Sergay and is now working on a shitty f2p TDM shooter.

STALKER 2 was dead before it even had a chance.

During the early alpha builds the NPCs could potentially finish the main quest before you did, the ranking system still in the PDA at release actually meant something.

People tend to forget it's not the little logo on the corner of the box that makes the games, it's a group of actual people, sometimes the people go, but the little logo stays the same.

To some extend, yes.

The original idea for STALKER was much more ambitious than what we ended up getting in the end. Originally, the AI STALKERS were literally doing the exact same things as you did, taking on similar and exact same tasks, and everyone was literally racing towards the center of the Zone. If you would have fooled around too long, an AI STALKER could have reached the end before you, and literally ended the game with a mere notice!
There were also other hi-end stuff, like every STALKER having hunger and fatigue stats, and every single ammo and supply they carried actually depleting in real time, affecting their behavior depending their gear and status.

Alas, the THQ, the original publisher of the series, rushed SoC out almost prematurely, resulting tons of content cuts and shrinking before release. The AI is still capable of amazing feats, but for example never runs out of ammo, and do not take on missions. They can still pick up items and freeroam tho'.

Fuck that sounds awesome. Why dont more games do this? Like where the game world basically just acts independently of the player.

>Alas, the THQ, the original publisher of the series, rushed SoC out almost prematurely

You're being a little unfair. The game was in development for a very long time and they needed something to show for it. Countless different builds with different premises were being made but a final product wasn't anywhere in sight. If THQ (and sergay) didn't force their hand we might not have gotten anything at all.

It's more of a story of being overly ambitious. GSC had some great ideas but they lacked cohesion, talent, and resources.

-Consoles.
-AAA devs.
-LAZY devs.

The unholy trilogy of all things bad in modern vidya since 7th generation.

STALKER games have always been PC exclusives from the start, and their development actually started very early 00s.

Even in games sort-of inspired by STALKER, namely these shitty new FarCry games, merely spawn and de-spawn set AI mobs as you approach and leave specific areas. It's all make believe, all "good enough" for the devs and casual players. And that "eh, good enough" mentality is the exact thing why modern vidya usually sucks.

STALKER 2 was apparently finally trying to finalize many of those old Alpha-build plans, being powered by new tech and way larger budget thanks to the first games being explosive hits, especially in eastern Europe.

>tfw vaporware since forever
>time between videos increasing drastically
youtube.com/watch?v=bM83p4-OJfQ&list=PL08A1C7C4AD0D2B91

I miss grafics.

It's the equivalent of Bloudbourne on pc.

Wpuld rather have stalker than bloodbourne