Caltrops - Article Submissions - Stalker draft portion (I posted about the other 2 already)

Forum Overview :: Article Submissions

by Grumah 09/15/2007, 11:09am PDT

I didn't beat the game yet.

I remember joh hoping that Half Life 2 would be an EMERGENT game before it was released, so you run around a fully realized world with no load times where you take missions in and around City 17 with realtime dynamic fuckin loading whatever things.

Stalker is a good example of just this sort of thing... and why I will probably stop playing Stalker after I beat it. Tons of running around without vehicles, a very limited carrying weight, a money system which you spend the first 10 hours gathering only to find out all you can spend money on is healing, ammo, and suits. You can talk to the game's 2 vender characters to get an infinite amount of randomized missions to earn some extra cash items (ammo/health), but there's only like 5 unique kinds of these "grindan" missions, all involving running to an area, killing a set number of enemies, and walking back.

There's also faction reputation with 2 seperate armies, "Duty" and "Freedom." Gaining rep with one makes the other hate you, so I'm just gonna avoid them both and stay neutral. The factions and some individuals do get a thick backstory and some personality, so that is an added bonus to someone who wanted to replay this game a few billion times.

The developers did a surprisingly good job delivering more than just the "tech demo" videos we saw just before Doom 3's shitty release. I guess they saw that their tech wasn't so groundbreaking anymore and decided to add actual gameplay instead of just permadark monster closets. The game has so much depth I won't be able to spare as much time between it and the 50 dozen billion games I recently reinstalled and purchased. But that's not the game's fault.