S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 dead, team reforming to make F2P shooter

[deject]

UPDATE: RPS Article with some details on Survarium: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/04 ... ore-106031

http://www.shacknews.com/article/73504/ ... -survarium


[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl812VZv9VI[/media]

[Dr. kitteny berk]

[buzzmong]

Well, if they couldn't secure the IP rights as per what Shacknews are reporting, then although sad for the loss of Stalker II, I suspect the team will at least make something rather interesting regardless and carry on the general theme.

[deject]

I hope Survarium is good, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an amazing setting and I wanted more of it.

[Mr. Johnson]

Balls, I wanted more broken Ukranian goodness.
Maybe not so much invisible baby cthulhu's though, those things were right fucking scary.

[spoodie]

On a more positive note the team that did the STALKER Complete 2009 mod are working on a 2012 edition. The Complete mod sounds more like an improving and polishing mod, rather than a game changing one, which sounds good to me. 100+ guitar tracks can't be wrong. Time to revisit the old dog, I think.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Playing through Complete 2009 atm, it's mostly just polishing and tweaking, quite pleasing all told, I recommend the realistic weapons mod to match though, makes it easier to die, but also means bad guys don't need 45 rounds in the chest to die, helps a great deal.

[deject]

Playing through Complete 2009 atm, it's mostly just polishing and tweaking, quite pleasing all told, I recommend the realistic weapons mod to match though, makes it easier to die, but also means bad guys don't need 45 rounds in the chest to die, helps a great deal.

I found that the realistic weapons mod kinda breaks the game because the AI doesn't know how to deal with the changed damages. If you're getting in headshots like you should there shouldn't be a problem.

[spoodie]

I've always been suspicious of realism mods and I can accept videogames being videogames.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

It's less a realism thing, more just stops everything being super hard to kill mod.

[deject]

My problem with it is more that the AI has no way to react to the changed ballistics/damage model in the mod, so if you're outside of the default range the AI starts shooting at, you're a killing machine monster that is untouchable. Once you get close enough for the AI to start shooting then yeah it gets a lot harder, but it throws the difficulty all out of whack.

I never got the complaints about the combat being too hard though. I know the difficulty curve is wrong, especially early on when you just have a pistol, but once you get a scoped assault rifle the game is not that hard and that happens fairly early on. If you can aim, equipping a scope makes getting headshots super easy and unless you're up against the highly armored enemies like Monolith troops, one or two bullets to the face will take most human enemies down. The first fight you get into tends to be the hardest but this is because people ignore using stealth and the environment to methodically eliminate the bad guys. It takes some patience, but it's actually somewhat trivial to do that solo without even getting shot once.

[spoodie]

It's less a realism thing, more just stops everything being super hard to kill mod.

I just shot a dog in the face several times with a pistol and at point blank range, it survived. I see what you mean. Still not using the mod though, I can put up with it, also what deject said.

[deject]

It's less a realism thing, more just stops everything being super hard to kill mod.

I just shot a dog in the face several times with a pistol and at point blank range, it survived. I see what you mean. Still not using the mod though, I can put up with it, also what deject said.

I assert that you probably did not hit it as much as you think. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are very poor at indicating hits, and even at point blank range it is easy to miss if you aren't used to the ballistics model. Shots that you would have expected to hit based on your experience with other FPS games will frequently miss like you're shooting blind.

[spoodie]

I fully accept and endorse your assertion. Also I was probably spazzing in a panic anyway.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I think you're probably right deej, but I still don't really like it, it never felt quite right.

not sure if it's actually the ballistics model as such though, as even non-gamey-games like ARMA feel less wrong.

[deject]

Which is fair enough. If you don't like it, you don't like it. The gunplay isn't really the main focus of the game anyways.

The Complete mod is quite good though.

[spoodie]

I'm not sure I like what they're saying in that video. What I enjoy about the STALKER games is the lonesome open road, in an eerie environment. It sounds to me like there'll be a lot more people around in Survarium.

[deject]

I'm not sure I like what they're saying in that video. What I enjoy about the STALKER games is the lonesome open road, in an eerie environment. It sounds to me like there'll be a lot more people around in Survarium.

I'm not sure I buy the change to a F2P MMOFPS either. There are a few F2P MMO shooters on the way already but I just don't know if I like that. There is something to be said for a well crafted open world containing a great linear narrative campaign. I fear that the single player side will absolutely suffer from MMO-itis and be filled with immersion breaking things unless they go all out with the instancing and just have hub cities and maybe some free-roaming outside areas where people can mix it up with total freedom, fighting monsters, committing bandit genocide, etc.

[FatherJack]

A world full of illiterate dicks screaming in the chat and prancing around the town is just about the last thing the franchise needs, like deject says, immersion: broken.

[buzzmong]

On the mention of Stalker mods, I really enjoyed that mod that Berk posted, Amod or something? Was really good.

I've been hankering to replay SoC, so might try the latest complete mod.