Any other mods you’d recommend?
I still don’t recommend any mod. Because i still haven’t began the game :P. I just saw the link in another forum, seemed interesting and wanted to have it somewhere for when i start the game in a few days. This forum is like my personal notebook :D.
edit - but i heard again and again two mods for this game: S.M.R.T.E.R and AmostFear.
The distant view mod isn’t really important, you can see pretty far already and might not want the Elder Scrolls effect where seeing everything all at once makes you realize how crammed it all is.
I don’t think they’re quite done with the English subtitles mod (to go along with the Russian audio). The absurd voice work is part of the cult charm, and remember you only hear it occasionally when back at camp. You’re not going to be inching through a 30-year-old Ukranian factory at dusk only to have a stalker wish you a “howwwdy ho!”
I am curious to play with Russian audio sometime though to see if it increases immersion further. Never did that with the old games.
The gun audio for your weapons is kind of flat, I think there are tweaks to change that. And headbob is still bad. You can pick and choose parts of mods if you don’t want to deal with all the stupid rebalance and altered textures these mod authors throw in there for personal taste.
i kind of like the strange out of touch colloquialisms that the other stalkers spout. it adds to the surreal vibe for me
Well… picked it up. Christ it starts out ugly. Paul’s picture above is spot on for me. I stumble upon a ship in the swamp, am struggling to find a way to holster my weapon - there is no holster weapon key listed in the controls… someone one from the ship harangues me to put my weapon away. Angry dog sounds surround me… not quite where the angry dogs are as far as I can tell… I die. Yay. Another Stalker game.
Now that is ironic. They finally start you out with an acceptable weapon, and someone finds a funny way to make a new problem out of it!
You can put it away by pressing the same number key again. I almost forgot that myself.
I thought for sure this game would be so much easier to get into for unseasoned players, but I guess there’s still 3 minutes where a newbie might go wrong and then crash and burn.
I have to honestly say that I haven’t played a more newbie unfriendly game in a long time. You literally start the game staring at wilderness with no clue what to do or how to accomplish anything. At least the original game started you off in a safe area.
Oh well.
Do they even tell you how to use your map without reading the manual? Probably would’ve made sense to do a tutorial section with your character walking down a path to get into the zone. You could also learn things like move forward, jump, and SUPER CROUCH.
I share this sentiment. I actually liked the beginning of SoC a lot, more than this. It also had a tutorial for PDA and everything (though I understand why it is not here anymore of course).But I would not call CoP newb friendly.
Just press the same key assigned to the weapon (i.e. if you have your pistol drawn press 2 to holster it).
EDIT: Beaten by Tim James ^
As for me, I’m finally getting to the STALKER moments I liked. Minor spoilers follow, regarding side quests.
I wasn’t liking the first area too much, partly because I liked the old weapon progression better, but also because I really like human vs human encounters, and most enemies in the first area are mutants, and as much as I like the fact that they exist and fighting them once in a while, it’s not as intense as some firefights.
Then I got the Jupiter area, and one of my first mission is to rescue a stalker from a bandit camp. Finally! I don’t ask my quest giver to help me because he’ll probably be more trouble than help.
I survey the camp assess how many enemies there are and all. Then I take out as many enemies as I can with the Vintar BC sniper rifle, I go to the entrance with my assault rifle, get a few more bandits and then when I’m inside the camp I get my silenced pistol. The few remaining bandits don’t know where I am, I finish them off silently, and rescue the stalker.
I’ve always liked planning attacks in different ways the series, and this is the first chance I get to do it in CoP. What still annoys me is that most of the time the enemies have a sixth sense and stealth tends to be useless. There’s a mission in the first area that consists in stealing info from a mercenary camp, and you are encouraged by the quest giver to use stealth. Obviously, when I get to their building (through the secret entrance in the pipe), as soon as I move close to the laptop I get spotted. I end up having to get the intel and running away, but alerting everyone. This is even worse because the game gives you silenced weapons, and you want to use them.
I also think the whole Jupiter area has better buildings and a better environment than the first area.
It’s pretty jarring. I haven’t played the original game for a long time and I skipped the sequel, so I jumped on this deal when everyone said that it improves on the previous games’ flaws and tightens up the experience. I can’t comment on later game stuff, but the beginning is really hostile. Sure, you get a rifle to start, but you are given no hand-holding at all.
The people that recommend a newcomer to the series start with this one are way off base. The beginning of this game is clearly meant for STALKER pros and seasoned vets that just want to jump into the experience.
Good point. I would still say it’s the friendliest of the three – and only in a relative sense here, since it’s nowhere near the ease of a modern AAA game with tutorials, reminders, and tooltips – for the particular brand of player who has tried the original but got stuck after an hour. You can still die to a pack of dogs but there’s enough freedom that you can explore and try something else without getting stuck handling tricky situations or places you shouldn’t go right away.
For the people who have never played (or forgot the controls), I’ll have to remember about the lack of direction and help in those first 3 minutes.
There’s a secret entrance to that compound in a pipe? I was using my knife to take out all the perimeter guards at night and was trying to figure out how to get inside without being seen.
I agree. This is not a STALKER game for people new to the series.
Yes, circle around the compound and you’ll find a ladder attached to a cement column supporting the big pipes. It’s quite visible in the map. But as it happened to me, as soon as I jumped out at the other end (which is right besides the laptop) I get spotted. You need to super-crouch to get out of the pipe, took me a while to figure that out.
It’s not that simple. None of them are, really.
CoP is the worst in the first 5 minutes but easier pretty much everywhere else. If it’s a friend you can warn beforehand, they’re better off with that game.
SoC teaches you extremely basic mechanics but throws you into an absurd situation after that. So many ridiculous problems to run into for hours. The learning curves are different.
[EDIT] And I apologize if I gave anyone false expectations because I hadn’t thought about that subtlety much. I think I mentioned how it drops you right into the game but didn’t consider the implications.
Gah, I’d better make another post to clarify for anyone lurking.
Even though CoP cleans a lot of stuff up, this is not Grand Theft Gears of Warfare. It is nowhere close to what we expect out of a modern videogame experience. You still need to turn your patience up and your crankiness down. I know you shouldn’t have to, it’s just fair warning about the reality of the situation. The enjoyment curve is different too. The game is a bit of a slow burn, and the tension has to hit you just right.
It still withers under nagging nitpicks and criticism if you are that personality type, though it’s usually less glaring.
Yeah, this. I had the same experience as Alistair, and it seems you. I had set the game up with MAX GFX YO, and suffered through the intro with unsynchronised voice and subtitles (and dates) and then was dropped into what is probably the most visually unstunning opening scene in gaming’s history. Drab colours, sparse vegetation and shiny ground textures from 2002. It just looks shit.
The first Stalkers you meet, who are walking in your direction as you start, tell you to holster your gun, but you don’t know how. I checked the keymapping screen and it doesn’t say. I eventually get it by accident as it turns up as a random hint on the loading screen after I get killed by a boar approximately two minutes after starting the game, then get killed by dogs outside the rusty boat bar. The game has no tutorial whatsoever. At first I thought they were trying to be clever by showing the player how harsh the world is before starting the game properly and giving you the tutorial, but it never comes.
God you people wouldn’t last five minutes in the zone even with all the weaponry in the world. Anomalies are distortions; the front is never the best entrance; dogs hate shotguns; always holster your gun around neutrals; oral sex with a bloodsucker is ill-advised.
Actually that last one isn’t in many FAQs.
And to be fair to Tim, I have no idea how the rest of the game plays out. It may be a more player-friendly game in the long run because it encourages the kind of freeform sandbox stuff that STALKER fans have always been clamouring about.
All I know is that the beginning is extremely off-putting and hostile. It’s almost a joke. I actually had to replay the start of Shadow of Chernobyl to relearn how to do basic stuff. That’s the damndest thing I’ve ever had to do to play a game. I had a more auspicious starting experience in X3.