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Back to Stalker: Call of Pripyat mods. This one's called "Winter of Death" (who names these things...). Its a mod which throws the Chernobyl area into winter, with all those radioactive swamps icing over and the Stalkers toting about in some new outfits. Plus points on the new look, but I managed to run through the whole thing in less than a day. The mod cuts out all of the original missions for its own selection, which while half decent could have done with more polishing (and fell prey to the cliche of just throwing more enemies at you to make things take longer). The real issue is that you spend half of the missions attempting to find an artifact (and repeatedly being screwed over and having to go to another location to find it). When you eventually do said artifact is essentially god mode and you cruise through the remainder of the missions up until the last one which for an arbitrary reason strips you of it and all of your gear (most likely to kill the player to make up for the lack of a proper ending) ...then throws a bunch of enemies at you including one guy who can shrug off RPG hits (I haven't played the series, but he may well be the Juggernaut model from C.o.D.).

Its no Misery, but I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. Stylistically it looked good (I'll be knicking some of those outfits for my Stalker models), but there wasn't much depth to the storyline. A lot of waste potential given they spent the time to make things look pretty (maybe that's where all the time was sunk). =/

Next up is one called "The Way Pripyat". It ditches most of the vannila games areas, so at least I won't have to replay those again. From what I've seen of it its a little rough around the edges (...which seems to be a given with this series' mods), and well if it sucks I'll fall back on cooing at the new outfits again. =P

Trying out Neo Scavenger. It's pretty fun wandering around scavenging crap and crafting things. Finally making a bit of progress on my third start - found a lighter right away which has been a godsend, and after about an hour I finally found a pan and a guy with a good sized backpack I looted after killing him. It makes boiling water a lot easier.

Now if I could just find a goddamned left shoe so my feet stop getting jacked up.

 Wyrmalla wrote:
Back to Stalker: Call of Pripyat mods. This one's called "Winter of Death" (who names these things...). Its a mod which throws the Chernobyl area into winter, with all those radioactive swamps icing over and the Stalkers toting about in some new outfits. Plus points on the new look, but I managed to run through the whole thing in less than a day. The mod cuts out all of the original missions for its own selection, which while half decent could have done with more polishing (and fell prey to the cliche of just throwing more enemies at you to make things take longer). The real issue is that you spend half of the missions attempting to find an artifact (and repeatedly being screwed over and having to go to another location to find it). When you eventually do said artifact is essentially god mode and you cruise through the remainder of the missions up until the last one which for an arbitrary reason strips you of it and all of your gear (most likely to kill the player to make up for the lack of a proper ending) ...then throws a bunch of enemies at you including one guy who can shrug off RPG hits (I haven't played the series, but he may well be the Juggernaut model from C.o.D.).

Its no Misery, but I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. Stylistically it looked good (I'll be knicking some of those outfits for my Stalker models), but there wasn't much depth to the storyline. A lot of waste potential given they spent the time to make things look pretty (maybe that's where all the time was sunk). =/

Next up is one called "The Way Pripyat". It ditches most of the vannila games areas, so at least I won't have to replay those again. From what I've seen of it its a little rough around the edges (...which seems to be a given with this series' mods), and well if it sucks I'll fall back on cooing at the new outfits again. =P

This is really making me want to dig out one of the Stalker games again, man. But I don't have Call of Pripyat, and I've always found choosing the right mod to be confusing. Do you have any suggestions for mods for the first one, or for Clear Sky?

Well, I had enough of ZoA bs for now.
It's a brilliant concept, and I love the magazine system and dynamic world, but holy crap is it an unstable, unfinished and buggy mess.

Trying LURK right now. It's ok, but I'm not sure I like the graphical style.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 toasteroven wrote:

 Wyrmalla wrote:
Back to Stalker: Call of Pripyat mods. This one's called "Winter of Death" (who names these things...). Its a mod which throws the Chernobyl area into winter, with all those radioactive swamps icing over and the Stalkers toting about in some new outfits. Plus points on the new look, but I managed to run through the whole thing in less than a day. The mod cuts out all of the original missions for its own selection, which while half decent could have done with more polishing (and fell prey to the cliche of just throwing more enemies at you to make things take longer). The real issue is that you spend half of the missions attempting to find an artifact (and repeatedly being screwed over and having to go to another location to find it). When you eventually do said artifact is essentially god mode and you cruise through the remainder of the missions up until the last one which for an arbitrary reason strips you of it and all of your gear (most likely to kill the player to make up for the lack of a proper ending) ...then throws a bunch of enemies at you including one guy who can shrug off RPG hits (I haven't played the series, but he may well be the Juggernaut model from C.o.D.).

Its no Misery, but I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. Stylistically it looked good (I'll be knicking some of those outfits for my Stalker models), but there wasn't much depth to the storyline. A lot of waste potential given they spent the time to make things look pretty (maybe that's where all the time was sunk). =/

Next up is one called "The Way Pripyat". It ditches most of the vannila games areas, so at least I won't have to replay those again. From what I've seen of it its a little rough around the edges (...which seems to be a given with this series' mods), and well if it sucks I'll fall back on cooing at the new outfits again. =P

This is really making me want to dig out one of the Stalker games again, man. But I don't have Call of Pripyat, and I've always found choosing the right mod to be confusing. Do you have any suggestions for mods for the first one, or for Clear Sky?

AMK 1.4 is apparently really good. If you can get the damned thing to work properly, that is.

Zone of Alienation does work, and it is a variant of AMK (so it has some of the cool stuff), but as I said before, it's unstable and unfinished.

Autumn Aurora 2 is pretty stable. I did receive a fatal crash that stopped my run, but that may have been because I had too many tasks; the only error with AA2 is that having too many tasks at the same time crashes the game.
I do have some nitpicks though; it changes the character models, and introduces skins from Metro 2033. NPCs are immune to blowouts, and the Dynamic News System (borrowed from AMK), doesn't seem to work properly.

Zone reclamation project is a simple bug fix.

Complete is a good first time mod, but I wouldn't recommend it; it makes the game way easier.

Much thanks. I've played the game all the way through once, and halfway through a bunch of times, so I'm not a beginner. But it looks like there's a trade-off with each choice, still.

I'm up for a challenge; I'll try getting AMK to work.

If you manage to get it to run, please tell me.
I've been trying to get the cursed thing to run for the last 2 days >.<

Call of Pripyat is probably the best in the series. The areas have more going on in them, armour and weapons have better customization branches, and yes it only has one ending for the main quest, but each of the individual areas and missions get their own ending slide (Fallout style). However there's probably more mods out there for the first two games, so its a toss up between having more options or playing a game who's vanilla version is better.

If you're going to jump back into the series I'd say that the Lost Alpha is probably where to go. I haven't played it because the link I found was screwy, but if you can find one it looks really good.

For the first two games I haven't really spent much time looking into mods bar new guns and items. I would say though that the bigger mods you can find on Moddb which just add more features aught to be decent, but I couldn't be more specific (I mean Misery does something similar for CoP, but whether you like that's own to your playstyle ...Though I would say there's a version for Clear Sky IIRC).

So I have an insight on what the larger mods for CoP are like, but not so much for the other two. For CoP I'd recommend the SGM mod or one of its derivatives (Geonezis). It adds a load of new missions and items, but tends to keep the vanilla gameplay (or at least doesn't makes things as extreme as Misery). I would admit that you do need to jump through more hoops in order to play the main quest, but if you've played the game already that means you at least won't just be playing through the same crap again. Geonezis is a mod based on SGM which branched off from an earlier version. Instead of adding in most of the old zones from the first two games (damn, yeah SGM adds in extra areas btw) it only sticks in one. However I'd say that yes visiting more areas is cool and all (the older ones certainly run better than the CoP ones), but they don't feel as fleshed out as the vanilla areas unfortunately. So in my opinion I would say go for Geonezis just because there's less "go from area x to area y to pick up item, return to area x. Repeat endless loading screens". There are other SGM mods like Geonezis too, but I haven't really delved into them, but they add similar stuff like new items, weapons and armour, mutants, missions, etc (one has female Stalkers too, but whoever made the models made a hack job of them).

Hmn, I would say that as far as the community goes the Stalker one doesn't lend itself to as much polish as you would see in Fallout's. I don't know if that's down to the engine (Bethesda's game are all about modding), but just in general terms the mods I've played could all do with a bit more polish. Then again Stalkers hardly filled with women in bikinis either (for the hundred busty mods I do wish someone would put the time into something canon). That said the Stalker devs apparently are back together and working on something, so that may well be Stalker 2 (its a pity then that I don't think the guys who went off and made the Metro series and the others working on Survivarum probably won't be coming back. Then again neither will the Areal ones). Still a pity that the embargo on Russian trade's continuing too, as I still want to give the miniature's boardgame a try.

Edit:

Oh and if you want to change the Blowout settings go into the configs folder and find the Atmosfear settings file. There's a list of characteristics that lay out things in simple terms that are easy enough to change (ie stuff like "Result of Blowout: Turn to Zombie/Kill/Exploded/Nothing" or even "Blowouts/Psychic Storms/Eclipse: Turn on/ Turn off"). The same goes for a lot of the game's features, but that involves a bit more work. Hmn, I've found a few mods running the latter versions of Atmosfear have all that stuff in an in-game menu, but well there's a text file there too if that doesn't exist (ah, and btw SGM has a similar menu for all its options too, as does Misery IIRC, just for ease and tweaking).

Eh, I found CoP to be a bit easy. You get good gear early on, and bandits aren't hostile.

I did like the upgrade and armor mechanics though, as well as the anomaly detection thing. That was pretty cool.

Speaking of mods, I just tested out Oblivion Lost 2.2, just to see if it works, as it's a AMK derived mod.
It's...interesting. You have a really large stamina pool and 80 kg weight limit, so you'd think it would be easy, but -

*Anomalies have their own "ai"; they move during the day, so you might run into a burner that wasn't there before. AMK 1.4 had something like this, but it was only in the event of a blowout; blowouts randomize the anomaly locations in AMK, and they don't need blowouts to move in OL2.2

*You encounter stronger mutants early on.; Nimble's jacket was being guarded by a psi-dog. At that point I found out why I had the large stamina bar.

I did play Lost Alpha a while ago, but I never finished it. I did like what it had to offer - the maps are much bigger and a tad more complex, and there's a belt system where ammo has to be in your belt in order for you to reload, which I thought was a nifty little mechanic.

What does SGM do? Is it like the CoP version of AMK 1.4?

Hearthstone, though I am beginning to loathe it more and more.

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Hearthstone, though I am beginning to loathe it more and more.

Tis be a normal feeling with any Blizzard game, but care to eloborate

 Trondheim wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Hearthstone, though I am beginning to loathe it more and more.

Tis be a normal feeling with any Blizzard game, but care to eloborate

It's more to do with the current playerbase; I only seem to end up playing Hunters (and playing Hunters immediately kills my enjoyment), Druids, and Mages with optimised decks. I, personally, like to try and play new things, and things I think that are fun. It's, however, completely impossible thanks to the other players.

Back to TF2 it is, then!

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 Trondheim wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Hearthstone, though I am beginning to loathe it more and more.

Tis be a normal feeling with any Blizzard game, but care to eloborate

It's more to do with the current playerbase; I only seem to end up playing Hunters (and playing Hunters immediately kills my enjoyment), Druids, and Mages with optimised decks. I, personally, like to try and play new things, and things I think that are fun. It's, however, completely impossible thanks to the other players.

Back to TF2 it is, then!

So in esccense its like WoW? Or Star Craft? But yes I see what you mean. It seems a lot of people is unable to have fun while playing games, and must only use the optimized builds for that game

 Trondheim wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:

 Trondheim wrote:

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Hearthstone, though I am beginning to loathe it more and more.

Tis be a normal feeling with any Blizzard game, but care to eloborate

It's more to do with the current playerbase; I only seem to end up playing Hunters (and playing Hunters immediately kills my enjoyment), Druids, and Mages with optimised decks. I, personally, like to try and play new things, and things I think that are fun. It's, however, completely impossible thanks to the other players.

Back to TF2 it is, then!

So in esccense its like WoW? Or Star Craft? But yes I see what you mean. It seems a lot of people is unable to have fun while playing games, and must only use the optimized builds for that game

Starcraft seems a good comparison, yes. Way too competitive.

Oh dear that sounds bad, reall bad then. I think I ill continue to shun Blizzard games still then. For my own part I will rather play a SP game or some form of multi player that rewards you for thinking outside the box, and using uncommon/seldom seen methods to achive my victory.

Command & Conquer is a better RTS series anyway, imo.
More freedom, and not as much micromanagement.

Agreed, the games made by Westwood in particular was absolute stellar works of art. Both Ra2 and the Tiberian Sun series, Firestorm in particular was amazing

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Command & Conquer is a better RTS series anyway, imo.
More freedom, and not as much micromanagement.

This. Even I liked the games and my micromanagement is TERRIBLE. Red Alert 3 was a lot of fun, but the Asians were utterly awful to play as because you had to use the special abilities all the time and their extremely poor anti-air was a major pain in some missions.

I love RA2! I consider it to be one of the best RTS games ever made.

Also, the intro is amazing -




Tiberium Sun had a particularly neat cinematic that runs the first time you play TS




Hype ensued. I wish more games did that :(

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
I love RA2! I consider it to be one of the best RTS games ever made.

Also, the intro is amazing -




Tiberium Sun had a particularly neat cinematic that runs the first time you play TS




Hype ensued. I wish more games did that :(

This should beat the 'tiberian sun' intro in every way.




I'd just like to add the end of the opening is every fanboy having an nerd-gasm simultaneously.

Btw if we're talking RTS games i feel like it's best we moved beyond the whole builder and gatherer type of mechanic in the game anyway. I feel like 'star wars: empire at war' did it right at least for the land based battles. I was never that great at space battles oddly enough. It's only too bad westwood/petroglyph could never figure out how to add a third faction in any game without making them way too unique from the other two factions and also way too over-powered as well. The zann consortium was probably fine in a campaign but in an actual land based game they were total BS to fight against. A super powered hover tank with weapons that go through shields and can hit air units. Bite my *ss petroglyph!

One thing i'll always miss about westwood/petroglyph that most RTS's don't have is the super-weapons. The nuke NOD used in the original C&C game was tear inducing for both players. A massive "F You' to the one on the receiving end.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Eh, I found CoP to be a bit easy. You get good gear early on, and bandits aren't hostile.

I did like the upgrade and armor mechanics though, as well as the anomaly detection thing. That was pretty cool.

Speaking of mods, I just tested out Oblivion Lost 2.2, just to see if it works, as it's a AMK derived mod.
It's...interesting. You have a really large stamina pool and 80 kg weight limit, so you'd think it would be easy, but -

*Anomalies have their own "ai"; they move during the day, so you might run into a burner that wasn't there before. AMK 1.4 had something like this, but it was only in the event of a blowout; blowouts randomize the anomaly locations in AMK, and they don't need blowouts to move in OL2.2

*You encounter stronger mutants early on.; Nimble's jacket was being guarded by a psi-dog. At that point I found out why I had the large stamina bar.

I did play Lost Alpha a while ago, but I never finished it. I did like what it had to offer - the maps are much bigger and a tad more complex, and there's a belt system where ammo has to be in your belt in order for you to reload, which I thought was a nifty little mechanic.

What does SGM do? Is it like the CoP version of AMK 1.4?

For the most part SGM adds new missions. For instance turn up at the ship expecting to run after helicopters and be in Pripyat in no time it is not. Nah you need to do a load of favours first before you're even allowed to activate the helicopters (...which is dumb, but meh if you want more to do there's that). It adds in the areas from the first two games and has you treck through them before and between the vanilla game's missions (ie you arrive in Cordon and have to treck through the Swamps to Jupiter, first sorting out a Bandit problem for the military and finding a way to get past landmines first). Plus there's the general new items selection available. What I would say though is the the Geonezis mod does sort out some of my gripes with SGM. For one it gets rid of most of the added anomalies. Not the "ooh maybe there's treasure in there" anomalies, nah the "oh yay, invisible death traps every five feet" type. The areas and missions are different too, but follow the same structure. What I do like is the variety of items (though they could do with having their own huds), I mean there's something like twenty different types of gas mask in there alone.

But well neither's perfect, though for CoP I'd recommend them over Misery as far as overhauls go. Misery adds some cool stuff, but it screws up gameplay too much with its fake difficulty (go back a few pages here and you'll find a spiel of my posts whining about that mod's constant need to throw multiple Controllers at you needlessly ...and the horrible sound effect that that entails). A lot of the other mods only make minor changes to the base game along the lines of new items, which is fine for a first or second playthrough, but at this point I really don't want to be replaying the same missions over and over. So in my case I have Geonezis installed and I'm trying out some mods which strip out the original storyline entirely.

Hmn, I'm looking at Shadow of Chernobyl right now and wondering if I should go back to that actually. I'm having a toss up between AMK and Stalker Soup. Neither go really into a great level of detail about their features though, so I don't know what to go for. I didn't play much of SoC so I'm not bothered about if the storyline's different, rather I prefer mods which add a ton of new gear and gameplay features. Stalker Soup apparently has a ridiculous number of areas (there's a map in the spoiler. Namely some areas closer to the zone's center are only unlocked after the Brain Scorcher's been done with) and tries to cover the original scope of the game more, but frankly I don't know what to go for at all.

It's not entirely clear, but going from what I've seen -

AMK adds blowouts, anomalies that change position after blowouts, new weapons and improves the AI.
NPCs loot items, move corpses and can heal other NPCs

The overall world is also much more dynamic; it is very well possible to run into a pseudogiant in cordon, or even a controller.

Speaking of controllers, they are more common, and can now zombify stalkers and mind control mutants to attack you.

Many of these features can also be found in AMK derived mods, such as Zone of Alienation and Oblivion Lost 2.2

Stalkersoup is more of a freeplay mode; it adds areas from Clear Sky, and has it's own story mode.
There are also vehicles that may be driven, more types of mutants and anomalies, and more weapons and gear.

Nobody responded to my previous post :(. I thought you'd like it cthulu.

I saw it. It's pretty good, but I prefer the simplicity of the Tiberium Sun first-time intro, with all that data running.
It's hypnotic.

Got pulled back into Dwarf Fortress.

I'm currently on an embark to a little spit of land in the middle of a glacier waaay down south- it was the only bit that wasn't pure ice, but it's still plenty cold. I didn't realize, when I first embarked, that there were 0 mountains and only an itty bitty hill in the entire zone. Plus a 3 layer deep aquifer.

So I channeled down through the ice, let it freeze the aquifer, and I'm now building a small surface fort out of ice chunks. I think I'm finally going to be able to do something with proper fortifications, though so far I've yet to have even a single goblin show up- probably due to being surrounded by ice.

Just downloaded the Spintires tech demo (yeah, I'm pretty far behind on video games. I'm trying to catch up). I have to say, as someone who has driven in real life on the exact kind of terrain it is modeling, the physics modeling is pretty dang good!

It took me a bit to decide I liked it though. It turns out that everything off the marked paths is "super mud" designed to instantly bog you down and stop you from hitting the edge of the map (as in your massive tractor tired monstrosity instantly drops to the axles and gets stuck, then your back wheels still on solid ground get stuck when you try to back out. Mud doesn't work like that...). That frustrated me to no end until I figured out what was going on. It's a real shame too because the most unrealistic game and logic destroying feature is the first thing you encounter if you're like me and try going up the hill at the start of the tech demo.

Also sad that I couldn't push a lamp post over. I've felt them move in real life when I've leaned against them...they aren't that sturdy! I'll just console myself by pushing trees over and using them to get across patches of mud by driving on them (which does work. I was amazed when I found that out).

P.S.: Oh, and is it too much to ask for a first person view please? I think this may be the first driving game where I feel less sure of my surroundings by having the camera outside the car.

I've been thinking of getting elite dangerous, the $60 picetag is my only concern. I don't like paying that much. The most I have spent on a single game is probably about $50, but that was with a lot of DLC.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


One thing i'll always miss about westwood/petroglyph that most RTS's don't have is the super-weapons. The nuke NOD used in the original C&C game was tear inducing for both players. A massive "F You' to the one on the receiving end.

The only Westwood RTS games I played were their Dune games, and I miss the superweapons, too. Playing as House Atreides was fun, right up until you heard the computer interface say "Death Hand missile launch detected" and you had to rebuild a third of your base...

squidhills wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


One thing i'll always miss about westwood/petroglyph that most RTS's don't have is the super-weapons. The nuke NOD used in the original C&C game was tear inducing for both players. A massive "F You' to the one on the receiving end.

The only Westwood RTS games I played were their Dune games, and I miss the superweapons, too. Playing as House Atreides was fun, right up until you heard the computer interface say "Death Hand missile launch detected" and you had to rebuild a third of your base...

To be fair, if you allow your enemy to tech that far you have alread spoiled just about any chance of winnig

squidhills wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


One thing i'll always miss about westwood/petroglyph that most RTS's don't have is the super-weapons. The nuke NOD used in the original C&C game was tear inducing for both players. A massive "F You' to the one on the receiving end.

The only Westwood RTS games I played were their Dune games, and I miss the superweapons, too. Playing as House Atreides was fun, right up until you heard the computer interface say "Death Hand missile launch detected" and you had to rebuild a third of your base...

Supreme Commander has super weapons as well.
No fancy message, but they do exist.

I'm still working on getting that Stalker mod to work

Anvildude wrote:
Got pulled back into Dwarf Fortress.

I'm currently on an embark to a little spit of land in the middle of a glacier waaay down south- it was the only bit that wasn't pure ice, but it's still plenty cold. I didn't realize, when I first embarked, that there were 0 mountains and only an itty bitty hill in the entire zone. Plus a 3 layer deep aquifer.

So I channeled down through the ice, let it freeze the aquifer, and I'm now building a small surface fort out of ice chunks. I think I'm finally going to be able to do something with proper fortifications, though so far I've yet to have even a single goblin show up- probably due to being surrounded by ice.

Glacier embarks never turn out as exciting as I imagine them to be. Can goblins even reach your location? A lot of times in the current version, I find that the pole areas are cut off from most civs.