Current Events > About to beat STALKER SOC (spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

If I physically can. I opened up the door to this 'secret lab' and the radar gives THIRTY exoskeleton'd enemies just in the starting radius, and they're firing from all three sides. I don't have enough healz or ammo for this after the huge trek starting from red forest and cultivating here. Despite getting exo-skele armor their late game guns punch holes right through me and sometimes there's just radiation in the area just cuz
---

So I refused the C-Consciousness and now shit is just downright fucked outside and if I go too far the screen goes white and I take damage

I'm trying to go to the thing emitting blue stuff into the sky but going that way does the white screen
---

Uh well okay

2 hour mass shootout through portals and then killing tube people

huh
---

Well

It was a fun game, but it kind of disappointed me.

When it first starts and you're just some loser in this town of losers, the atmosphere is fantastic. The rain is heavy and you can hear the barks and howls of rabid wolves in the distance. It's absolutely oppressive and makes the world feel extremely dangerous. When you fight the first bandit camp I felt like you had to use every wit and trick available to you to beat out the situation.

However, I think the game loses that feeling around once you go past the bar and fight Borov's lackeys. It gets to a point where your guns and armor are good enough and your resources plentiful enough that the game isn't scary anymore, and that really sucked because it didn't feel like I was that far into the game. There's a point imo where it changes from being a terrifying survival game to a really 'meh' resource-management FPS. Perhaps that's just me having set my expectations incorrectly. I mean I got like 250k at one point through normal gameplay.

It also maybe just didn't go far enough. There's not exactly THAT many anomalies in the game and once you know what they look like, that's that. Enemy variety isn't fantastic either. So after a while the game just isn't able to surprise you anymore.

The 'Stalker List' was also disappointing, I didn't know if it was gonna be some interactive thing or what with a ton of 'Stalker' NPCs roaming around in the game but it seems like it ended up being pretty static and you fly past the top through normal gameplay. It's basically just an indication of your progression but since it had its own slot in the PDA I thought it would be a gameplay mechanic.

It was also surprisingly short, the huge map is very misleading especially since you spend about 10 minutes a piece in Red Forest and Pripyat. There is a point where you suddenly realize the game is actually much smaller than it looks (you thought Vvardenfell was misleading!), especially since all the open space between loading zones gets skipped.

The plot is just bizarre honestly and meeting the C-Consciousness didnt really do much for me since it comes out of nowhere. I wonder if it's more satisfying to speak to the Wish Granter.

Still liked the game overall. I think I'd give it a 6-7/10. My instincts say this game was an ambitious undertaking from the start and the devs probably didn't get to do everything they wanted to do I mean you literally go through random portals at the end, that's like a bad anime shonen trope. I did like you dropping into the starting trader's office tho

I also own Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat. Which should I play? I haven't looked up much about them but I've gleamed that people don't like Clear Sky for some reason, but also that mods might make it more playable.
---

Damn it CE! Discuss this vidya game with me!
---

Very good game, I liked clear sky but a game breaking bug kept me from beating it. I think you'll really like call of pripyat, definitely the best of the three. I highly recommend playing it with mods, some tweak the game to up the atmosphere and also make the game harder.
---

At least you liked it. SoC does get better with mods, but for vanilla it's a pretty accurate assessment of about 6/7. It's a good game considering the development time and flaws.

As for what to play next, do chronological order, play Clear Sky with some patches. It's the weakest in the trilogy, but it does tie into SoC as a prequel. However, I'd say CoP is the least buggiest and way more friendly for modern audiences, so I'd imagine you'll enjoy that. So try to breeze through CS, and go into CoP.
---

Yeah, I'd say if you want more difficulty, try an overhaul mod. I'd recommend AMK. Everything is more deadly, much more mutants. NPCs move across the Zone, one area may have friendlies, but next day they might be bandits. More guns. Plus random Blowouts. Fun stuff.

I'd recommend not playing Clear Sky. It's a prequel and not that good. Call of Pripyat is good. I personally prefer SoC, but Pripyat is still excellent.

Okay what was the deal with Blowouts? I know one happened when you're with the Krulger guy in Yantar taking measurements, but it wasn't very clear. It never happened at any unscripted time so I was pretty confused as to what was actually going on. Was it just a discharge of energy from the Brain Scorcher or something?
---

A blowout is a radiation storm. The Chernobyl Powerplant occasionally emits mass amounts of Radiation. Flooding the entire Zone with radiation and psy effects. When they happen you have to be in a building or somewhere safe from rads. The only ones in SoC are scripted. In CoP, they randomly happen. Mods for SoC add them.

What made me lose interest was lack of polish and glitches. There some small glitches and few bad ones. Smaller ones like that it shows incorrect amount of killed Stalkers and enemies, and bad ones are possible save file corruptions and crashing. It doesn't happen to everyone though.

What killed the game for me when some missions were glitched like that garbage area defence, where even after killing the enemies they just keep on fucking attacking after certain time has passed, and i hate it when i save some people they still die because the enemies keeps coming.

The point where i said fuck it, was that infiltration mission where tou needed to steal stuff. It was fucking impossible for me and i died literally 30 times in row. The game was either super hard or very easy all the time, and never felt like balanced difficulty wise.

In my opinion the game was crap, and i'd give it 3.5\10 for what little i had played it.
---

Yeah stealth is a joke. I stole the stuff from the military by buying a silenced pistol and continuously popping people very slowly. Super hard part of the game.

Doing some research, it looks like the company that made the series is dead :(
---

Stealth works, it just takes a lot of effort to pull off. There was another overhaul mod that did a lot of work with stealth. I believe LURK was the name. It was pretty fun one.

I think I need a change of pace after binging this game. Perhaps I will start Gothic 2 now
---