I didn't try Clear Sky because I heard many bad things and I didn't want to spoil my image of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Yeah,thanks Matrix 2....) When the modders have had a couple of years to sort out CoP I'll buy that though. I heard they have listened to the fans and taken S.T.A.L.K.E.R. back to it's roots.
Hm, I really don't know, if you have stalker 1 or 2 on steam you can get it for 19 €, it hasn't that many changes though: Particle effects, sound and vid sequenzes are far better now ... Textures are nearly the same like in stalker 1 Map layout, from what I've seen so far, worse, but due to more and funnier anomalies it isnt that bad, AA and AF doest help a bit, I've DX 10 and don't see the point in it beside for better particle effects, weapons are as far as I played the same, only few got added, new hazards and a partly new story makes it a bit better ... If you have dx11 (with tessellation) you might get other results If you like STALKER much it's fine to buy it i guess... (Mod are for pussies ;P)
How can you claim that CS is barely any more beautiful than SoC? Have you taken a look at the awesome fire and moving shadows, along with the godrays and awesome landscape textures? The only thing that was worse in CS was the gameplay, but DAMN it was beautiful. It even had volumetric smoke! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5RMxO5DsPA)
My bad i misheared this, btw, hearing ... the subtitel differs from the spoken stuff, especially the years in the first vid ...
The translation is awful, even in the official press releases. Count the number of mistakes in the Steam description Another reason to wait for the modders to fix CoP before I buy it
I played it in english, (ofc it's made in russian speech then got translated) but it's not that bad, you can understand everything and there are only a few (but obvious) bugs, there are f.e. small rat monsters, their KI is completly screwed, they run in the third lvl against doors and stop there running on the spot ... rather annoying is that you've to repair your armor after any monster attack/anomaly (non bullet attack) and that's around a third of the costs for the armor itself (I played it on easyl, lol), and the bullets for the monster are expensive like hell, too, not to mention that they have too much HP, well i enjoyed it anyway and I will play it on hard later ...
I still don't get why people who live in a horrible shitty looking country would want to play games that are set in horrible shitty looking countries. I certainly don't, the main problem with stalker is that it reminds me of britain too much, except everyone's russian. Beyond that it looks exactly the same. It has that certain 'everything is made of wet cardboard and covered in dust' look to it that britain does most of the time. Guess maybe people in ukraine might like it because it's actually set there so you have recognisability, but I'd still have thought they'd want to play a game with more colour in it.
Radio activity made the landscape and villages in STALKER decayed ofc it looks crappy, additionally the weird anomalies, how should that all look like Happy Town? I never played CS ... and on the contrary I said that particle effects are great in CoP, textures aren't, and from the look of this video they aren't great in CS either ...
Actuallly the real chernobyl is quite verdant and gets the full range of weather, blue sky and sun to snow and ice. It's been abandonded for ages so it's naturally growing a lot of vegetation now. Plants don't care about radiation poisoning or cancer, they propogate enough to ignore it. The buildings can look dilapadated but the entire universe should not be permanently overcast and made entirely out of off-grey cardboard. Fallout 3 even with its orange filter looks better than stalker, despite the latter's attention to geometric and texture detail, it loses it in the lighting and colour saturation.
I thought Fallout 3 looked pretty awful. It was entirely grey. Every environment I saw. Grey. Fallout 1+2 are 90% brown, but that's a warm color. I defense of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the weather and stuff is so fucked up for a reason...all the crazy psychic shit that started going down a few years after the explosion. Nothing to do with radiation. Oh, and while I'm on the topic: the mutants are not caused by the radiation, despite popular misunderstanding. I don't know how many of you found the true ending for SoC, but it explains everything. Even when I knew all about the secrets of the Zone, I still found it creepy and pregnant with mystery...S.T.A.L.K.E.R. rocks :D
Modders fix everything I found Oblivion sucked at first, couldn't get into it even though I wanted to. I loved Morrowind. Ditto Fallout 3. I found it just didn't feel right. I'm hoping a few years from now someone will have overhauled F3 too.
MMM And some other stuff have been made for FO3. My favourite mod though, is the weapon attachment mod. For every weapon you can attach (depending on weapon) up to 4 attachments. A scope A laser sight Autofiring mechanism Extended clip And I mean wow, it made your weapons so much more badass, chinese rifle with scope and ammo upgrade became a box mag with an epic scope. Every attachment changed the model, ammo upgrade switched to a bigger mag, or a box mag, or two batteries, or my favourite, the combat shotgun, gained TWO BOX MAGS ATTACHED TO EACHOTHER. Scopes too, laser sights as well, it was awesome. Oh, and you didn't think you could make a missile launcher with a 2 round clip? You can, it's lulzy. Automatic laser pistol is win. Scoped hunting rifle made me the happiest man alive. And it removed the scout from the 44 by default, so you found realistic 44s, and the sniper rifle was the best choice of scoped weapon, sicne you dont need to fork out 700 caps for a scope mod kit. Was cash.
This is what I think of most Bethesda games...neat looking, yes....fun over a period of time? No. I only keep Oblivion around to fire up on new systems with all the mods on for newer textures, better trees, better player models and textures....etc. Modded, it looks awesome, with a videocard that has unified shaders firing on all cylinders keeping both HDR and AA going simultaneously. But the plot is...lacking. Ride horsey to here, see bandits on the way...or wolves. Or a random gate...kill stuff, move on. I got so bored I turned on god mode, giving my inf everything...including mana, and just started nuking people for shits and giggles. I may try the game again one day...just like I may actually give FO3 a real try at some point. I keep meaning to nab STALKER, but already have a list of games to be playing...:p
FO3 was definitely an improvement on Oblivion, but it still had just something wrong with it, that removed the long term gameplay.
I played both oblivion and fallout repeatedly without mods no problem. Mods add to the gameplay yes but I don't require them. There is a faction warfare mod for clear sky that makes it slightly more fun because it makes it more like fallout but the levels are still boring as hell and there's still nothing to explore.
I dunno...the Elder Scrolls games aren't really about the plot or characters for me, Oblivion is fun just exploring pretty environments. But Fallout 1+2 ooozed personality. Fallout 3 was just really, really, really dull I found. One quest I spent about an hour killing giant ants in an empty, repetitive environment, and the combat consisted entirely of me running backwards shooting my pistol at them while they pointlessly chased me. I quit after that. I gave it a chance, I wasn't one of the NMA haters, but I think it should have stuck to turn-based combat. Preferably in 2D.
2d is like going "hey, lets make a great game that is totally awesome but will not be commercially successful" for a developer
