xmetatr0nx said:
Well i played STALKER before fallout 3 (because it was released first), i honestly thought that fallout 3 was what STALKER tried to be.
Nope.
Stalker isn't a post-apocalyptic game. It's a game about scavenging in a wasteland with overtones of a warzone. There
is civilization around you -- that's who's buying your stuff and where all those fancy guns come from -- but you don't get to be a part of it. I think it does a much better job of playing up the fragility of your existence than the Fallout games do. In Fallout 3, I certainly never felt like I was actually in danger of running out of stuff. Fallout never really has truly frantic moments, either: everything's kind of running on a smooth beat, whereas Stalker bounces between eerie slowness and frantic scrambling. Survival is emphasized much more in Stalker; you just plain feel like you're closer to death all the time.
Metaphorically, the world of Stalker represents a reaction to life in the post-Soviet world: everyone's scrabbling about to get something out of the carcass of a dead thing that was never
good, but at least used to be alive. It's a young man's post-Soviet world, to be specific, the dead world of people who never knew anything else. It's all about pointlessness and isolation; the utter absence of women and family in the game is a big part of that iconography. In Shadow of Chernobyl, your protagonist is a dire guy who's lost his past and never really finds it -- the details of it never really matter, you know it's not a happy one. In both games, your heroes' few hard-fought friends are lost to them. They're both on the edge of death. Their very names define them as world-weary, emotionless killers. Nothing short of a total metamorphosis can redeem them.
Fallout as a series is an American reaction to a post-Cold-War world: a big Generation-X "Fuck you!" to our now-useless cold-warriors. The relics in the games paint the old world as stupid, culturally-stunted, and hysterical, endlessly vacillating between the mindsets of McCarthy, Reagan, and Leave It To Beaver. The Fallout world can be lonely, too, but it's much more positive about the whole thing. Struggle as they do in the wasteland, people survive, and on their own terms. Your protagonist is someone who goes from a sheltered, regimented world into this wild frontier and
thrives in it. As shitty as the world is, your young little renegade can find friends everywhere and has the power to make it her own.
They're both behind the times, in a way, channeling attitudes that were much stronger a decade and a half ago. (That's one of the reasons I don't think the Fallout franchise needs any more games.) But those attitudes are as different as east and west.
Stalker is lonely. Fallout is social.
Stalker is dour. Fallout is sarcastic.
Stalker is frantic, bipolar. Fallout is more measured, restful.
-- Alex
