I've always wanted a game like this to exist; I played SOC for more than a year, but this is a lot better. The ability to upgrade your weapons is highly welcome, so for now I'm carrying an accurised M4 carbine "clone" and an AK74 converted for rapid fire (nothing like firing several magazines on full auto with the volume set very high) and I upgraded my armour to be nearly bullet proof. I did have to do some grinding to afford these things, by hanging around in areas where there were constant gun fights and then selling the dropped equipment. Many of the monsters have been improved, I particularly like the changes to the "bloodsucker" creatures, which are now easier to kill when they attack, but cannot be harmed when they cloak. They also improved the method of finding "artifacts", and made the artifacts rarer, more valuable, and more effective. On the down side, the game occasionally breaks, with triggers not firing, and this has caused me to go back by 3 days worth of gameplay after a game-critical script in the military warehouses didn't exexcute. There are some balancing issues which are annoying, such as the continued inaccuracy of assault rifles, but the problems are not as bad as the first game. If this had not occurred, and if the assault rifles were not so inaccurate, I would have to give this game 10/10. I've never rated a game this highly before. Anybody else play this game, and if so what do you think of it? I wish there were more open ended games like this in an FPS format, since I really don't like tolkeinesque RPG's. [Edited by - speciesUnknown on April 1, 2009 5:19:54 AM]

! Warning: small SPOILERS !
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I liked it but was really frustrated by it, and stopped playing after a week.

My experience with bugs and scripts working has been worse than SOC so far. I wasn't able to finish the game due to that (scripts and triggers didn't work).

Like in SOC, the end game feels rushed and linear, while the first 90% of the game are non-linear. It's really strange. It doesn't help that you get tons of good stuff and new weapons but have no way to come back on the first maps to sell them.

At half game, all your equipment gets stolen with no chance to get it back. What kind of game design is that ?

There's a sequence in the end game where you have to take over a bridge with a crane, and snippers standing on a hill. I ran out of ammo in this area. All ennemies you kill are on the other side of the river, so you can't cross it to get some new ammo, and the scripts are blocked until you kill the snippers. I was stuck there for a long time. Again, horrible game design.

On the very first map (swamp) there are two exits to the right map. The southern one leads to a military base with a gun that sees you through rocks and will shred you to pieces dozens of times until you realize you have to have to pass through the northern exit. I wouldn't mind if the game didn't instruct me to go through the southern one in the first place..

The loading times are extremely long.

There are tons of examples like that. Overall it's a good game and I had tons of fun with it, but it was so frustrating..

Y.

Quote: Original post by Ysaneya
! Warning: small SPOILERS !
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I liked it but was really frustrated by it, and stopped playing after a week.

My experience with bugs and scripts working has been worse than SOC so far. I wasn't able to finish the game due to that (scripts and triggers didn't work).

Like in SOC, the end game feels rushed and linear, while the first 90% of the game are non-linear. It's really strange. It doesn't help that you get tons of good stuff and new weapons but have no way to come back on the first maps to sell them.

I've been able to get back to all the earlier maps. How far through the game does this happen?

Quote:
At half game, all your equipment gets stolen with no chance to get it back. What kind of game design is that ?

Perhaps the script broke for you, but for me a mission appeared to get my stuff back. I proceeded to one of my stashes, grabbing an MP5 and some ammo, and then went to get my stuff back.

Quote:
There's a sequence in the end game where you have to take over a bridge with a crane, and snippers standing on a hill. I ran out of ammo in this area. All ennemies you kill are on the other side of the river, so you can't cross it to get some new ammo, and the scripts are blocked until you kill the snippers. I was stuck there for a long time. Again, horrible game design.

On the very first map (swamp) there are two exits to the right map. The southern one leads to a military base with a gun that sees you through rocks and will shred you to pieces dozens of times until you realize you have to have to pass through the northern exit. I wouldn't mind if the game didn't instruct me to go through the southern one in the first place..

wait, there was another way in? darn... I got past by running between cover.
[update] Wait, Sidorivich actually TELLS YOU to take a different route. How could I be so dumb... It took me about 10 medkits to get past that damn machinegun.

Quote:
The loading times are extremely long.

There are tons of examples like that. Overall it's a good game and I had tons of fun with it, but it was so frustrating..

Y.

[Edited by - speciesUnknown on April 1, 2009 5:23:05 AM]

I was looking forward to how the whole faction system would play out, and ended up utterly disappointed to find that it was pretty much broken. The only place it worked well was in the swamp area, where your guys actually attempted repeatedly to take over and hold checkpoints and defend them from enemy counteracts. It actually seemed like a faction war was going on and you were just thrown in the mix. Clearly GSC GameWorld spent a lot of time tuning that map since it was the player's first impression of the system. But beyond that it barely worked. After the first few hours of gameplay, things would stabilize and none of the factions would do anything. What's worse was that the player couldn't even jump-start the action by attempting to go ahead and take out checkpoints on his own. I remember when I was playing and I took out all the bandits in Garbage, except for their main warehouse base. No matter what I did, I couldn't get ANYONE from any of the factions I was friendly with (all of them except Military and Bandits) to help me out. I mean for Christ's sake, the main objective of all these factions was to take out the bandit base, yet none of them were doing anything about it. I finally went ahead and took out the base by myself, and guess what happened? Nothing. Cleared out the bandits, but the faction screen didn't update indicating my success, and neither did any of the Stalker factions move in. In the end I went off to do a quest mission, and came back to find the base repopulated with bandits. It felt like I didn't even make a dent. There's nothing more unfulfilling than an "open world" game where your actions feel as if they have no impact on the world. Kind of like in Far Cry 2 where enemy outposts would repopulate only minutes after you wiped them out. Not even something reasonable like a 24 game-hour delay. You drive down the road, turn around, and there they are again.

To be honest, I liked SoC a lot better. Clear Sky added a few nice touches like the hidden artifacts and weapon upgrades, but play SoC with the Oblivion Lost mod and there's absolutely no question. Speaking of, if you haven't played SoC with the OL mod, you're missing out big time. Simply put, it's what SoC should have been.