No cover for you and Gauss rifles everywhere, especially in the final kill room where you're forced to walk into a space that has little cover and enemies with Gauss rifles above you and with heavy cover for those shitfucks. I think there's even some fuckers with shielded exos in Granite Squad.
I also thought to myself "Wow, this game isn't so bad!", then went through SIRCAA and my opinion on the game went straight into dogshit territory. It's as if they made the few hours of the game fun and engaging on purpose, leaving the remaining 75-80% of the game a boring slopfest.
I've never understood this particular complaint. Sure, I understand that the loss of uniqueness for the Bloodsuckers was a terrible design choice, but their increase in numbers makes perfect sense considering that Call of Pripyat canonically established their reproductive capabilities. Bloodsuckers are the only lab-created mutants we know for a fact can reproduce, so them becoming more common was inevitable, specially without a natural predator around.
Considering that the Monolith is gone between CoP and S2, Stalkers probably have more time to hunt them off. That could be used as an explanation as to why their numbers remain roughly the same.
Thank you for that write-up. I was debating on pirating it even despite the some issues I've read of it I haven't looked to deep into it, but I knew it wasn't worth the price. But this saved my bandwidth.
I think cars would ruin the world building. The zone doesn't maintain roads, there are anomalies all over the roads. The military patrols the skies and the military shoots stalkers on sight. If they saw a car on the road, they would probably investigate and kill anyone they find. It would make sense you could bribe military patrol cars or trucks to ferry you places or maybe have a mission to steal a truck full of supplies but as a game travel mechanic it doesn't fit the lore.
I got bored playing Call of Pripyat and wasn't aware of that. What they could of done is have their gestation periods and time to puberty be similar to a human so they weren't so numerous and the fighting mechanics could be tweaked that they still remain an uncommon, yet a very dangerous threat. Look at the Zone and look at how big these things are, they need a lot of calories to sustain that mass for an individual alone let alone a group collective. How many stalkers and bandits are they going to eat on a weekly basis? There is a reason why in nature apex predators aren't numerous and need a lot of acreage to cover their hunting ground. It doesn't make sense to have them all over the place and respawn them three days later in game.
This raises the question on how some of these mutants reproduce. The animal mutants blind dogs, psy dogs, bayun, fleshes, rats, boars, bloodsuckers and chimeras, probably reproduce normally. But how do the human mutants Snorks, Controllers, Burers, Poltergeists and Pseudogiants reproduce?
Content being cut is not always a bad thing. Even the works that inspired the games (The Roadside Picnic and Stalker) were about people traversing the Zone on foot. It adds to the sense of danger and adventure. Exploring the Zone from behind the wheel sounds very lame.
When papa bloodsucker and mama bloodsucker love each other very much...
then let me craft a Flesh Saddle
I mean, they will get those calories one way or another...
Sure, the thing is, this side content and the lore it provides are MUCH more interesting than the main story. There are gold nuggets hidden around for those who pay attention and like to search. And that's pretty much on-brand at this point, remember the good ending of SoC? It was behind a side quest that many players didn't bother to complete, so they didn't realize they got one of the game's multiple bad endings until they researched it online.
When you get Ghost's PDA in one of mandatory X-16 lab, it tells you find Guide to advance the sub plot about Strelok since you where looking for Ghost to get information about Strelok. From there you can get information from Guide in Cordon about Doc hiding out at Strelok's hideout in the Agroprom Underground. So then you then detour to Agroprom to go to the underground and meet Doc for a small cutscene where you get to key to a building in Pripyat to get the door decoder. It's optional but its not like a one off side quest if you are engaged in the story because it is directly related to Strelok, the person your PDA tells you to kill and at that point there is a question on who Strelok really is because the character goes after Ghost looking for Strelok.
I'm not making a comparison, I'm just trying to exemplify my point.
Iirc there were a spinoff book or two released talking about other zones in the world
Yeah, Northern Passage and Southern Comfort. They aren't bad.
I don't see the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. inspiration beyond a few superficial elements like inventory management, thirst and hunger meters, the PDA and the emissions. To me, the game looks more like a bare-bones faction warfare mod, where you simply have to survive in a hostile environment surrounded by warring factions. It's not a concept I hate; on the contrary, mods like The Faction Wars and Global War are some of my favorites, but this one seems so far removed from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that it doesn't even seem appropriate to discuss in this thread.
I have been noticing 2000s Nostalgia becoming a thing in Indie gaming. Stalker and Metro are Slavic soviet era throwback games. Iraq war being tackled in Indie gaming.
