Soldato
To be honest, I don't even know what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for, I was just found by god knows who, god knows where, and brought to the table in some basement and they called me "The marked one". No explanation to who I was before and what was I doing in the area.Flammy said:The first thing I noticed was how I was jsut chucked into the game with little or no clue as to what was what.
Stashes.What are the purple icons with the 3 little triangles on the map for?
Number of named enemies in the area intercepted by your PDA. That's why when you point at them in the game they have names and ranks.What does the number underneath the minimap represent?
Some maps are littered with them, they appear in a radioactive glow, usually pink, after anomaly snoops through the area and they seem to be moving ever so slightly with time.Where can I find artifacts, do I have to do something to the anomaly?
That's what bread, sausages and tins are for. Fork and knife marker to the right of the screen means you are hungry. The more red it becomes the more severe your hunger is.Will I need to eat or sleep?
Respawns usually mean that area is needed for some task. If you finish off all the enemies or animals while going through the area but then get contract to kill them again it would be silly to find nothing's there, so the game respawns some areas in ridiculous way for "future use".Why do things keep appearing on my map randomly?
It's always in one of the menus on the bottom, sometimes it's data from someone else's PDA when you search their boddies or stuff like that. I agree it's a mess.Why does my PDA say it has new info when it doesn't?
The one with the biggest pointage gets a holiday in Ural with Svietlana. Seriously though, I think it's just purely for bigdickism.WHats the point of the ranking system?
I agree, unless you are some kind of artefact freak and you just have to have some powerups (which are expensive and you would literally have to try and trade with every character in the game to find some of them) money has no value in that game whatsoever. I run around back and forth for ages gathering artefacts to try and get to firt 100,000 expecting for a barman to pull out some mighty quake rpg from under the table but it just doesn't happen.The reward is usually money, which I have yet to find a reasonable use for as no-one seems to have anything worth trading.
To be fair, at later stage you do find some pretty sweet weapons with scopes that shoot the monkeys with 2 bullets through the chest but at that stage their rifles and sills are just ridiculous - I've just sturmed the base where solders seem to be shooting through crates and cars I ducked behind and bullets keep hitting me even when I hide behind armed transporter, so it's laser precision and almost concrete piercing bullets. Which I wouldn't mind that much if it wasn't for the fact every time you quick load the game it takes flipping ages. If you have to reload the game 5 times for each square yard of the map before you figure out where the sniper is it gets pretty tiresome.Combat is frustrating. All the weapons I have used so far are INCREDIBLY inaccurate at range, but enemies seem to have the dreaded long-distance eagle eye shooting skills.
It's hitzone gone wrong - if they are further than point blank aim at top of their head, it seems to be hitting them mostly in their neck, aiming at their feet often hits their torso. Single shots only, recoil of bursts always send your bullets through the air unless point blank.Having to shoot a baddie 5 or 6 times with a submachine gun in order to kill them isnt much fun either, especially in the sections where I had to kill literally about 30 bandits to get to the checkpoint.
So true, even when you make literally no noise on the indicator at all they just see you in the deepest bushes like you were wearing man united t-shirt.Enemies seem to spot me crouching in a bush from 300 metres away too, so stealth hasn't really been an option so far.
F6 is quick save, either F7 or F8 is quick load. It's definitelly not F9 by default.Its buggy too, why is there a quicksave button (F5 I think), but no quickload?
All in all, I'm getting tired of the bugs too, which is a shame, considering anticipation and possibilities. Sometimes you can see just how badly coded it is, it runs 30fps, then you move round the corner and for no reason at all at the first sight of some badly coded anomaly or sprites in field of view the whole screen starts jerking at 2 fps. And then tasks, mid way through getting there you get message "Defend (here name of the camp) failed", no explanation why, there was no time limit, you turn around, run to the same place, speak to the person and they give you the same assignement again. Sometimes you don't ever finish tasks because somehow the game doesn't register it properly, you get underground, you find Strelok's stash, find his pen drive thingy, get out of the underground but not the correct way and so your mission is never finished as "Find your way out of underground" is never acknowledged. Well, I'm out, I'm above the ground, am I not? Was I supposed to make it in a particular fashion or something? If so, why are there no details about it "you were supposed to find you way out of underground by jumping like bunny and dragging all corpses". Or something.
If you walk into a place sometimes half of characters want to give you assignments, and if you want to save some time the logical thing would be to get all assignments in one go, then go and do them. But by the time you finish second or third one half of the remaining ones just fail for no reason. So it would seem you are supposed to go, do one assignment 3 maps away, then come back, spending 15 minutes running though empty maps, get another assignment and so on, so forth. Mess. Just mess. If at least you could spend that money and buy yourself some vehicle, or something, you know, just drive through, or teleport yourself using some anomaly, whatever.
Next thing is AI logic. You do some assignment for some loners, they are yellow, you do another assignement for the same loners, they are still yellow, you run by their shelter chased by enemies and they don't even pull out their guns to help you. Eh? How about you do something for me bangholes. Here's a cookie and a can of Stalker.
I know I will uninstall it in a day or two. It's just too resource hungry, while looking like a bad graphics version of HL2 and loads too long (and I thought Battlefield 1942 load times were a killer)...
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