Stalker: Call of Pripyat

Care to expand on that without any spoilers whatsoever? The thing I loved about SoC was the atmosphere and the setting, to the point where I almost didn’t notice the bugs.

I just started playing today, and I am loving it.

Minor Quest and Exploration Related Spoilers:

The first mission I took was to find the missing Stalker named Tremor, ok, I thought, thats a fine place to start. Find a dude. No big deal. On my way to meet up with Grouse, the guy who’s going to help you find the kid, a voice comes on saying, “Emission imminent.” Well fuck. I remember emissions from AMK, and they are pretty much instant death to anything not under shelter. Grouse is at least 100 feet away, I’d imagine it’s 50/50 whether this quest leads to cover or not.

Either way, the Emission overrides my current quest, with a new quest to “Find some goddamn cover” and point out the nearest cover. Oddly enough, the nearest cover is a 100 long foot chasm in the middle of the goddamn ground. I run over, not knowing how long after the announcement the actual emission occurs. It’s at least 100 feet deep, and there are rock shelves that make a nice little hop down to the bottom. As I descend, I begin to realize, there is no way to leave the same way I came. Balls. When I reach the bottom there is a car with a locked metal box in that gets added to my inventory, next to that, an entrance to a cave. The ground begins to shake and sky is going red. So I make a break for the cave. This is when I hear the familiar growl of a snork.

The cave is tiny. more cramped that most caves you’ll find in this kind of game, and my flash light is mostly pathetic. The forks in the cave could obviously lead you in circles, and I imagine that we’re not dealing with a lone snork. I pulled out the sawed off shotgun, and remembered what it was like to have real tension in a game.

End Spoilers

The atmosphere is exploring an abandoned area. Fairly quiet and sparse. There’s not even much inside some of the locations, but every one felt like a new adventure. The pace is better because there’s always an opportunity to go spelunking, compared to SoC where it’s lots of running through overland areas with an occasional dive deep into a lab or whatever.

Do you remember the bloodsucker village, or Agroprom facility at night, or even the radiated building that had the SEVA suit in Wild Territory? It’s like that times 30.

Just bought this today. So far, I’m really enjoying it. It feels a lot more refined than shadow of chernobyl.
I’m also wondering why steam didn’t give me a CD key, and when I’m going to get it. Guess I can’t play this online for a while.

So Gabe, is a “loan snork” one that you have to give back later? ;-)

So I could not resist and bought the game on steam anyway.
I cranked everything to maximum, 1920*1200, fire it up…
What the hell is with those subtitles being completely different than what that guy says?
Anyway, I get into the game (rather abruptly after intro ends)…what the hell is this uglyass graphics? Seriously. The draw distance on grass it really lame.SoC and CS starting areas looked much much better.

And what is up with the weird FOV or whatever it is? The knife especially - in previous games, I could see the model of hands/knife normally, here I can see just a small part of it - is that normal?

Look at the regression:

Shadow of Chernobyl:

Whoa! (ok, using stalker complete, but still)

Clear Sky:

still looking pretty good

Call of Pripyat:

what the hell is that? And what’s with that knife model?!

Hmm, the graphics don’t look quite like that for me, or maybe it’s just that I’m not seeing the huge differences. It isn’t a graphics superstar, but it seems fine to me. More annoying by far though are the bugs. Most glaringly, there seems to be some issue with spawning NPCs properly. Several times I’ve come back to the base boat and found no one there; saving and then reloading spawns them. On one mission, the other NPCs my group of NPCs was supposed to meet didn’t spawn; I had to reload and try again a bunch of times to get them to spawn (and then I had to survive the fire fight, of course).

Other than that, though, I really like it.

You fuckers are going to make me buy this, and I already don’t have time to be playing the amount of STO that I am.

seconded. For god’s sake, people, I have a life! Let me live!

One of my favorite things about the Stalker games have been the locations throughout the Zone. I’m talking about a small defensive position on a ridge here or a campfire with some tents there. I’m embarrassed to say this but I find these little places fascinating and will often spend long periods of time just running around a location looking at lines of sight, fields of fire, sandbag or crate placements…really geeky shit. I try to imagine what it would be like to hold such a position with, say, 6 Stalkers. How do I get resupplied? Should I clear more firing lanes? Do I send out a four-man patrol and hold the position with just two? The way my living room is set up, one can see my monitor from the couch. My girlfriend was watching tv the other day while I was playing CoP and after about half an hour she asked me what the hell I was doing because she hadn’t heard shoot anything for a long time and as far as she could tell, I was just running around in a circle and crouching every once in a while and looking around.

When Clear Sky was first released, I hesitated in buying it because I didn’t really have the time to play it. Then I saw this screenshot:

I mean, look at the possibilities of that position! I couldn’t buy it quick enough after seeing this.

Haha! Nice catch!

I have no idea what the design team thinks they are doing with the knife model. It is truly terrible, and the swing animation is even worse. The first knife model/animation for SoC was fine. I don’t see where they were going with that.

Yeah, it feels like they messed up the FOV or something and we see just a part of what we should see or something. I am amazed that GSC still manages to shit their otherwise FUCKING AMAZING games with stuff like this.

See, I could pick this up today (and the Steam “loyalty promo” is sweet), but have so much else to play that I think I’ll wait for bugfixes, fan patches, and the year-end Steam sale, where I’m sure it’ll be dropped to 10 bucks or something.

i already played like half of the game and havent found any bug so far and i didnt notice the weird FOV until you guys mentioned it

We talked about the graphical compromises and field of view 4 pages ago. Probably best to use the hack if you have a widescreen monitor.

The game crashes on me pretty much every time I die and have to load a save. I die a lot. This is frustrating.

Zero crashes so far here - though apparently I was also the only person not to get crashes in SOC.

Have to say I am loving this so far. CS disappointed me in a lot of ways, fortunately it seems like sometime between Clear Sly and Call of Pripyat, someone on the team noticed AMK. Only the good ideas (multi-feature bases, upgrades, guides and anomaly detectors) seem to have been brought over from CS, the rest is like an official version of the features AMK unlocked in SOC.

http://stalker.filefront.com/file/Visible_range_mod;108895

Mod to improve visibility range.