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STALKER: Call of Pripyat |OT|

TheExodu5

Banned
The only thing that's making me hesitant is the lack of a 2009 Complete like package for the game.

The first game just looks great and runs amazingly well (no drops below 60fps) with the 2009 Complete mod on my hardware. Clear Sky, on the other hand, looks far worse and runs really badly. :(
 

Doytch

Member
LovingSteam, you got my hopes up, and they were dashed hard on the rocks when I woke up today and saw it wasn't up =(
 
TheExodu5 said:
The only thing that's making me hesitant is the lack of a 2009 Complete like package for the game.

The first game just looks great and runs amazingly well (no drops below 60fps) with the 2009 Complete mod on my hardware. Clear Sky, on the other hand, looks far worse and runs really badly. :(

Didnt setting the Render Type to Full Dynamic Lighting (ShoC's best render type) essentially make it run with the same level of graphics as ShoC ? I know when i went through Clear Sky i set it to that, and the game ran just as good as the original (60+ FPS).
 

Truant

Member
Liquid Helium said:
Were is the setings file located on this game? In game I set it to use dynamic lighting and now the game wont launch.

On Vista it's uder C:\Users\Common\Stalker - CoP\ etc

Same thing happens to me. I'm forced to use the DX10 mode, the other modes just won't work.

Getting some slow performance on my GTX295, which is strange.
 

Daigoro

Member
Danne-Danger said:
I really like it, only played a few hours with it though. Basically what it does (from what I understand) is up the accuracy and damage for all weapons. Most enemies (in the first area, military and thugs) will go down from a single burst to the chest with the first rifle (as opposed to the bullet-sponges in vanilla). If you set the difficulty to Master the same rules will apply to you, making it play more like a simulation in the vein of Rainbow Six/Ghost Recon (the good ones).

Really heightens the tension and immersion, IMO.

cool. ill check it out. i just started a new game with and without the latest 2k9 mod. ill test this one too and see how it changes stuff.

thanks.

TheExodu5 said:
The only thing that's making me hesitant is the lack of a 2009 Complete like package for the game.

The first game just looks great and runs amazingly well (no drops below 60fps) with the 2009 Complete mod on my hardware. Clear Sky, on the other hand, looks far worse and runs really badly. :(


you know the guy who did the 2k9 mod is working on a CS mod now right?

should be awesome.
 

Caspel

Business & Marketing Manager @ GungHo
Visualante said:
Linking to your own stuff on GAF isn't really kosher. Given that you're giving away a copy I guess that makes it a little less bad.

I've already talked to several mods and about a hundred gaf members thru pm. As long as I'm contributing, and not spamming, its all kosher. I usually never provided links but handfuls of pms told me to just post the links instead of making ppl come to me via pm for them. Plus, being around since 2005 helps out too.
 
One thing I love about this game is how dark it gets at night. It's dark done right - where most games just turn the sky purple and lower the contrast.
 
Truant said:
On Vista it's uder C:\Users\Common\Stalker - CoP\ etc

Same thing happens to me. I'm forced to use the DX10 mode, the other modes just won't work.
Cheers, I cant even use DX10 mode, it lets me launch the game, but it crashes when I get past the main menu. So I'm stuck with static lighting on my 4870 1gb, heh.

Still I'm really liking the game, I'm up to the part were
I need to raise 6,000 monies to buy a suit so I can go into the route to Pripyat.
Going through the warehouse (were the 5th helicopter crashed) getting the documents had a real awesome atmosphere, reminded me a lot of shadow of Chernobyl.
 
Lostconfused But am I the only one that things the exoskeleton is the most worthless armor you can get?[/QUOTE said:
Oh, it totally is. I recall only getting it for the first time while battling through the reactor, and the stupid thing didn't even had any rad protection.

So what is the canon ending for SoC then? I've done the 'real' ending, in which you pretty much take care of the goal the military set out to accomplish. Is that the ending CoP follows up on?
 

JoeMartin

Member
Yeah I never used exoskeletons even when they first became available because they had awful rad protection and because you couldn't sprint while wearing them (which is absolutely tortuous and is reason enough to never touch it).

Once I got the Bulat (Military Armored Suit) I never looked back.
 

Ruuppa

Member
The exoskeleton is actually useful this time around, since you can get an upgrade that allows you to sprint in it. The extra carryweight, the huge damage protection and the 4 Artefact slots make it a bit overpowered. Anomaly protection isn't the best, but you can offset a lot of it with Artefacts, and anomalies are never your primary worry this time(Chimeras, gerbils and headshots are).
 

JoeMartin

Member
panda21 said:
found this on the steam forums

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

goes on for like a billion pages of incredible pictures D:


Oh wow. That's some straight unbelievable stuff in there. A lot of great insights into the disaster, such a good read in general.



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Elenta Filatova said:
Each time I pass into the zone, I feel that I have entered an unreal world. In the dead zone, the silence of the villages, roads, and woods seem to tell something at me....something that I strain to hear....something that attracts and repels me both at the same time. It is divinely eerie - like stepping into that Salvador Dali painting with the dripping clocks.

...

It is hard for me to describe what I feel, when I come in a village with no people, but I will try- first is a feeling, like I got deaf. The silence is tremendous. No birds singing, no wind, nothing that can break this silence. Villages more picturesque then towns, houses and sheds do not look real. All look painted and I feel, like I walk inside of this painting.




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Elena Filatova said:
Radiactive burrials are traces of our civilization. Several hundred of them make the desert of atomic wasteland, where radiation still measured in roentgens. These are radioactive technics as far as the eye can see. They are a type of army truck. Most of these vehicles were full of troops on that days.

How many people died of radiation? No one knows - not even approximately. The officials still keep the death toll at around 30 people, while unofficial sources already put the figure of 300,000 and sometimes over 400,000.

The final toll will not be known in our lifetime, and not in our childrens either.




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Elena Filatova said:
Usually, on this leg of the journey, a beeping geiger counter inspires to shift into high gear and streak through the area with great haste. The patch of trees in front of me is called red - or 'magic" wood. In 1986, this wood glowed red with radiation. They cut them down and buried them under 1 meter of earth.

The readings on the asphalt paving is 500 -3000 microroentgens, depending upon where you stand. That is 50 to 300 times the radiation of a normal environment. If I step 10 meters forward, geiger counter will run off the scale. If I walk a few hundred meters towards the reactor, the radiation is 3 roentgens per hour - which is 300,000 times normal. If I was to keep walking all the way to the reactor, I would glow in the dark tonight. Maybe this is why they call it magic wood. It is sort of magical when one walks in with biker's leather and walks out like a knight in a shining armor




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Elena Filatova said:
The day after the accident, this place on the bridge provided a good view of the gaping crack in the nuclear containment vessel that was ruptured by the explosion. Many curious people came here to have a look and were bathed in a flood of deadly x-rays emanating directly from the glowing nuclear core.




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Elena Filatova said:
Work on the roof was the shortest job of all, and lasted only two minutes. Many soldiers were offered a choice of how to fulfill the tour of duty requirement that was necessary for their retirement from Army. One lasted two years in a hellish rain of bullets, rockets and bombs in Afghanistan, and the other lasted two minutes in a tranquil, silent and invisible rain of gamma rays on the roof of Unit # 3.




The whole thing is much longer and there are hundreds of pictures, and it's well worth the read.
 

panda21

Member
so i looked around and apparently that ^^^ is faked :S

i'm guessing theres no way she could have faked the pictures and she did indeed go there but supposedly only as a tour member, rather than on her motorbike, so take the surrounding text with a pinch of salt. i think the stuff about chernobyl is factually correct though and the pictures are still amazing. the pictures of the school and the 2 minute tour of duty thing is especially disturbing.
 
So I'm not sure what the point of artifacts are. Whenever I equip one the radiation effects cause my health to drop steadily and my radiation enters the red within seconds. Am I using these things right?
 
PoweredBySoy said:
So I'm not sure what the point of artifacts are. Whenever I equip one the radiation effects cause my health to drop steadily and my radiation enters the red within seconds. Am I using these things right?
You need to balance them out by equipping items that increase your resistance to radiation (armor, other artifacts). If you only equip radioactive artifacts with no protection they will kill you after a while.
 

luka

Loves Robotech S1
PoweredBySoy said:
So I'm not sure what the point of artifacts are. Whenever I equip one the radiation effects cause my health to drop steadily and my radiation enters the red within seconds. Am I using these things right?

I only equip artifacts with no drawbacks, like -3 rad and no negatives, or ones with really awesome bonuses that make dealing with the negatives worthwhile, like +12kg carry weight with +3 rad. I sell the rest and use the money to upgrade and buy equipment. It's a nice hefty bit of supplemental income and it's much more worthwhile to hunt them down than in the previous games.
 

Blizzard

Banned
panda21 said:
so i looked around and apparently that ^^^ is faked :S

i'm guessing theres no way she could have faked the pictures and she did indeed go there but supposedly only as a tour member, rather than on her motorbike, so take the surrounding text with a pinch of salt. i think the stuff about chernobyl is factually correct though and the pictures are still amazing. the pictures of the school and the 2 minute tour of duty thing is especially disturbing.
That's sad, though yeah, the pictures are definitely interesting even if the story is not true. :(

*edit* The pictures with the motorbike at NIGHT though...that may not be inside the forbidden zone itself, but yikes that would be scary.

*edit 2.0* That site is awesome, thanks. I had watched the BBC documentary and seen other pictures about Chernobyl and the area, but I don't think I had ever seen these. I am almost considering ordering the book if she is still shipping it.
 
Hmmm this is definitely different and maybe better than SoC. Certainly seems to have more western influence to it. You start off with some decent equipment and now weapons/armor have upgrade paths so you don't immediately ditch them when something better comes along. A central town or place with npcs that will repair/give quests/heal also with a place to store items. Artifacts no longer just float around the place, you actually have to search them out now. Money matters because you can do more with it than just buy a new weapon now, and you cant sell all your worthless shit to some npc.

In SoC you were a babe in the woods told to make his own way. This time around everything seems to be part of a game mechanic. All the important locations on the map are highlighted, every location has an item or something you can find and there will always be some enemy to fight. Its more obvious about being a game and meets your expectations.

Edit: Of course this is only after playing through the first game. Its still weird and inaccessible to anyone playing for the first time.
 
Lostconfused said:
This time around everything seems to be part of a game mechanic. All the important locations on the map are highlighted, every location has an item or something you can find and there will always be some enemy to fight. Its more obvious about being a game and meets your expectations.
Spot on. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It's definitely a good game, but I'm not sure if it's what I want a STALKER game to be.
 

Toby

Member
Is there a file I can mod to increase the max carry weight? I just can't let some of these weapons go
 
So whats the census on this game? I truly enjoyed the first one but was disappointed with how the second one turned out.

What makes this one better, gameplay wise?
 
Toby said:
Is there a file I can mod to increase the max carry weight? I just can't let some of these weapons go
Well there are chests now in camps where you can store your stuff apparently.

That's part of the game though, got to make sacrifices. How many weapons do you carry, how much ammo do you keep on hand or how many med kits do you take with you. Although I love that now you can put anything from a handgun to an assault rifle in the first slot, not just a hand gun. So now I am constantly rolling with a shotgun and a rifle with a scope. Head shot zombies and humans, shotgun to face of every mutant and animal that dares to come my way.
 
Labombadog said:
So whats the census on this game? I truly enjoyed the first one but was disappointed with how the second one turned out.

What makes this one better, gameplay wise?
I love it, the game is what made the first one so good, then improved.
 
Im really loving the larger areas now. The feeling of having travelled from a "hub" of sorts filled with people, to the outskirts of the map where nobody ventures is brilliant, you truely feel alone out there, unlike the previous games where you nearly always could see someone, friend or foe, in the distance.

So far this is becoming my favourite STALKER yet ......
 

chespace

It's not actually trolling if you don't admit it
Graphically, COP lacks the warm lushness of the sun from Clear Sky but it's clearly the better paced/designed game.

Even in the initial stages, I'm having fun just wandering the Zone and doing missions. Lots of emergent gameplay here happening. I just got a bunch of better weapons going up against a well-armed merc group with nothing but my slightly upgraded MP5. It was nerve-wracking but the loot was well-worth the quick loads (playing on Veteran).

AI seems better this time around but not by much. You can still game them by camping, popping out and taking shots. They mostly deal with it by spamming grenades so this technique obviously won't work indoors.

I had a great moment in the above mission when I had gunned down everyone but one last final guy in an exo-suit. My armor was basically in tatters, I was down to a few bandages and health kits left, and ran out of ammo on my MP5 so I had to resort to the pump action shottie. I was too scared to loot bodies for weapons mostly because the game doesn't pause and I've been shot in the back while going through inventory menus before.

So with a flashlight and a shotgun, I wandered this empty factory looking for this merc and every once in a while I'd hear his footsteps shuffle and spin around to see nothing. Finally after probably circling each other for 5 minutes, I round a doorway and practically run into him. Before he could fire, I put 3 buckshots into his face and chest, sending him flying and crumpling against the wall.

The violence there only lasted for seconds but the built-up tension felt like hours.

So yeah, atmosphere is still here in spades. Graphics still look dated but anyone who likes a good sandbox shooter should give this a try.
 

kamspy

Member
I did good on the benchmark tool, but Clear Sky runs like shit on my system.

Does the game generally run as good as the benchmark for people? If so it would be a pretty big optimization improvement over Clear Sky.
 

luka

Loves Robotech S1
kamspy said:
I did good on the benchmark tool, but Clear Sky runs like shit on my system.

Does the game generally run as good as the benchmark for people? If so it would be a pretty big optimization improvement over Clear Sky.

The game runs FAR better for me than clear sky did. Take that as you will.
 
More screens -



Things are getting interesting now, im getting a group together (past acquaintances) to head into Pripyat through and underground tunnel, should be good :D
 

luka

Loves Robotech S1
chespace said:
I don't get it. Why does Clear Sky look better? WHY?

It does? News to me. This 'warm lushness' you're talking about is probably just the overuse of sunrays. I think they tweaked Clear Sky to have more "clear weather" to show it off. CoP has a much more somber atmosphere and I've noticed it's more frequently overcast and dreary.

Don't worry, CoP still has pretty morning rays:

xrengine2010-02-0615-5rsri.jpg


It's just less pronounced and overdone than before.
 

chespace

It's not actually trolling if you don't admit it
I'll take some pics of CS when I get home.

I didn't play it that long ago that I have rose-tinted memories.

At least I don't think so.
 
I don't know, it's not the softness but overall I think Clear Skies was a more visually impressive game for some reason. This seems to be a step backwards.
 

hamchan

Member
Technosteve said:
will this game come out on steam?
I'm waiting for it too. Considering SoC and CS both did well during the holiday sale I think they're missing out on a large amount of sales by not placing it on Steam as fast as possible.
 

luka

Loves Robotech S1
BattleMonkey said:
I don't know, it's not the softness but overall I think Clear Skies was a more visually impressive game for some reason. This seems to be a step backwards.

Assuming CS actually does look better, this game runs several times more smoothly, so it's one step backwards, two steps forward in my book. CS' sunrays and depth of field were extremely overdone anyway, and I'm betting the bank those are the big factors that are making people believe it's the prettier game.
 
Just finished it. Is it me or did the last 1/3rd of the game feel rushed? The plot keeps you on rails much more, and I never even got to explore most of Pripyat.

Good game overall.
 

Ikuu

Had his dog run over by Blizzard's CEO
Couldn't be bothered waiting for this to appear on Steam so just ordered it from Play, was only £18 so not bad. Might play Clear Sky before it arrives, any essential mods for that?
 
PoweredBySoy said:
Just finished it. Is it me or did the last 1/3rd of the game feel rushed? The plot keeps you on rails much more, and I never even got to explore most of Pripyat.

Good game overall.
hehe, just like the other two games
 

JoeMartin

Member
:lol WHAT I walked up to a friended stalker to talk to him (still had my gun out, but you can talk to friended stalkers with your gun out right?) and he straight punched me in the face and stole my fully upgraded Tide (special Vintorez from Nimble) like it was no big deal.
 

Dennis

Banned
JoeMartin said:
:lol WHAT I walked up to a friended stalker to talk to him (still had my gun out, but you can talk to friended stalkers with your gun out right?) and he straight punched me in the face and stole my fully upgraded Tide (special Vintorez from Nimble) like it was no big deal.
:lol
 
I'm buying Clear Sky and COP for 30 :lol :lol

Will COP work with mods? I own Direct 2 Drive version of stalker and that worked fine with mods.
 
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