Stalker bundle -- all 3 games for $10 at Bundlestars

[WhipperSnapper]

I've been contemplating whether I would like the Stalker games and now they're finally on sale at Bundlestars, $10 for all 3 games.

http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/stalker-complete-bundle/

What happens when you buy on Bundle Stars? Is it no different than just buying on Steam?

What are the Stalker games like? Is it kind of like an Elder Scrolls open world FPS/RPG type of game but with guns?

 

[werepossum]

Not sure about Bundle Stars - I've never heard of it - but the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are awesome. Clear Sky not so much, but each game has mods (especially Complete) that fix the problems and make them even prettier, so once modded even Clear Sky is pretty awesome - just not as awesome as the other two. Right now Steam has them for $10 (Clear Sky) & $20 (Call of Pripyat & Shadow of Chernobyl) each, and I don't think they were near that cheap even during the sale.

They are more shooters than, say, Fallout, but still have intricate and reasonably good stories and interesting characters and places. Not nearly so much as a real RPG, but very atmospheric. Artifacts (kind of alien-looking things produced by the Zone's anomalies) play a very big part - people ask you to retrieve them for money occasionally, but they can also be sold to buy supplies and better equipment, and the properties of many of them (electricity or fire or radiation protection, increased endurance or load-bearing capability, slowing of bleeding damage, etc.) are almost essential in the later stages of the game. There's a lot of content and a lot of places to explore and people to meet (or kill), factions to appease or join, quests to pursue based on leads or found clues. They are open world and you can move from zone to zone, but especially in the early stages you are constricted for your own safety.

I highly recommend them, they are some of my favorite games. If you like heavily atmospheric shooters with big open worlds, they can't be beaten.

 

[tidy]

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[werepossum]

I can't speak for any of the subsequent games but Shadow of Chernobyl is a marvelous game. I haven't come close to finishing it because I got scared of some quest related bunker, but I've still played enough to put it in my top 15 games of all time. The game is absolutely dripping with atmosphere. Fallout 3 feels very dry by comparison.

Some aspects of the game have aged well, while others haven't. The visuals on average are still very good. It has many of the perks of being a true PC game, like beautifully delicate foliage structures instead of the large clumpy stuff that's made to suit 720p. It still has some of the best flashlight effects I've ever seen too. I once saw an NPC flashlight cast such an intricate shadow that I though it was some kind of corruption/bug, because it just looked too detailed to be legit. On the other hand, the gunplay isn't very natural, and while there is some excellent sound design, it's mixed in with some stuff that sounds quite out of place. There are plenty of other little niggles that sort of betray the game's age, like the awkward sprinting animation (like a Weeble sliding around on ice).

It's a mixed bag, and notoriously buggy. NPCs react to murders in unpredictable ways. I've had a few quest breaking bugs that forced me to replay portions of the game (like a critical NPC getting stuck and not following it's designated path), but I was playing 100% vanilla. Maybe a community patch has fixed most of these bugs. The engine has stutter issues, but it's no Gamebryo by any means. I cleared up the majority of the stutter with a combination of 120Hz refresh and 60fps cap. Sure, the world is divided into several very large maps with loading between them, but I'd sooner put up with that than suffer immersion destroying landmass pop-in every 5 minutes.

The default OpenAL audio is defective, with minor distortion (with multiple loud sounds etc.) and positional anomalies on every system I tried it on. However, I solved it 99% by replacing the game's OpenAL dlls with OpenAL Soft.

Yeah, I had a game-breaking bug in one of them. I was supposed to go one way but went another and broke the scripting, so thereafter I encountered almost no one. Finally went online, figured out who I should be meeting and how I was supposed to enter the zone, and had to go all the way back to re-enter to make it play right. Still great games though, and one of the very best I've ever played for avoiding pop-in on big maps.

 

[Stringjam]

I love all of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, even Clear Sky.

They aren't for everybody - - it's one of those series you either love or hate.

Shadow of Chernobyl is my favorite, and the one I would recommend to start with. Don't play this game or Clear Sky without a mod aimed at fixing the bugs (you will see Complete recommended the most).

Call of Pripyat, to me, plays just fine in its vanilla form. Adding Complete or other graphical mods seems to make the loading times go to the moon.

 

[TechBoyJK]

$10 is a great deal! Install vanilla, then mod them up to make it better.

 

[Harrod]

Good deal if you don't have any of them. I've only played through SOC, and technically didn't beat it according to another thread on this forum. But the atmosphere was awesome.

 

[DigDog]

i'll take the opposite stance .. ten bucks for 3 is what they are worth.

i'm sorry, but what makes the series great is the fan-made patches. the games as published by deep silver are garbage. i admit i have not played vanilla SoC but i had to suffer through CS and CoP and i can't begin to count the save-corrupting and game-breaking bugs i had.
worst QA ever.

 

[werepossum]

I see them as analogs to Bethesda-era Fallout games - great games at the core, huge amount of content, yet very buggy. As long as the fan-made patches are available, why wouldn't they count in evaluating the games' value?

 

[DigDog]

should they ? yes, they should, but only for people that *know* about the existence of the patches. it's not a clear cut case, since vanilla CS is still broken (save files can corrupt) and vanilla CoP has at least two "sometimes repro" game breaking bugs.

i have said before that the stalker series is one of the best game experiences you can have (and tnx to AT that made me discover it), but it needs to be said that you MUST use a patch to play the game.

and frankly fallout was nowhere near as buggy as this, one thing is a glitchy texture, another is playing 4 hours to get out of the swamp and having to restart from zero because the save file was generated in a way that as soon as you change map it will corrupt without a chance of recovery.
or a NPC that fails to trigger a storyline flag.

 

[werepossum]

should they ? yes, they should, but only for people that *know* about the existence of the patches. it's not a clear cut case, since vanilla CS is still broken (save files can corrupt) and vanilla CoP has at least two "sometimes repro" game breaking bugs.

i have said before that the stalker series is one of the best game experiences you can have (and tnx to AT that made me discover it), but it needs to be said that you MUST use a patch to play the game.

and frankly fallout was nowhere near as buggy as this, one thing is a glitchy texture, another is playing 4 hours to get out of the swamp and having to restart from zero because the save file was generated in a way that as soon as you change map it will corrupt without a chance of recovery.
or a NPC that fails to trigger a storyline flag.

I had the opposite experience. Playing vanilla Fallout 3 I crashed to desktop literally every minute; in vanilla Fallout New vegas, maybe every five minutes or so. I played completely through Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat without an inordinate amount of crashes and with no game-stopping bugs - although there were a couple places where I had to replay an hour due to something not triggering - and played through Clear Sky until I became bored (which might have been three or four hours in.) I suppose it depends on one's hardware and software set up, and playing the Fallout games for the first time on a quad core (and maybe on Windows 7, I forget) really borked my experience before modding.

I see them as a series of trade-offs. For Fallout, I have to apply a LOT of mods to make them play the way I want them to play, but I have that option. For the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, all I needed was Complete, which is just as well since there are far fewer mods available. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are much prettier and have better game play and dialog; the Fallout games have more content, more depth, more replayability, and better stories, especially NPCs and side quests. Each series, in different ways, are close to my ideal games. Only a handful of games (Monolith's Aliens II and FEAR come to mind) have been in that rarified group for me, with others such as the Metro games being at least within shouting distance.

 

[Eelectricity]

Anyone here that played these read the book that they're based on? I have not played them and would like to know if the games are true to the story.

The book was originally written in russian and there are a few english translations.

 

[Stringjam]

Anyone here that played these read the book that they're based on? I have not played them and would like to know if the games are true to the story.

The games are not true to the story. I would say that the biggest influence S.T.A.L.K.E.R. got from Roadside Picnic was a Zone with artifacts and lethal anomalies.

How that Zone came into existence in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is completely unrelated to the book, but IMO, it is far more interesting. I played Shadow of Chernobyl first, and then I read the book. I was honestly a little disappointed in the book after playing the game.

 

[Eelectricity]

Did you know what the book was really about? I did not until I read a review of it after.