Stolen S.T.A.L.K.E.R. artwork

[Barbas]

I just encountered that in the right-hand margin on this [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/walkthroughs/14946-Ashes-of-the-Singularity-Alpha-Beta-Walkthrough-How-To-Tips] page when signed out. Sent word to the Tech Team. Keep calm and carry on.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Big snip

Ouch. This must be painful to see to people at GSG. Some guys really need to improve their research skill.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Also Fallout 4 is probably buggier (there's a lot of problems with the toolsets of F3/FNV and Skyrim, and you installed too many mods you'll have to start using workarounds like fullscreen emulator because fullscreen will actually break the game).

Someone forgets the mess that Shadow of Chernobyl was on release, where falling through geometry was common enough that it regularly happened to plot items. Then there was the broken AI that gave about a 50/50 chance that you either faced a smart enemy or an enemy that froze in position or decided to keep sprinting against a wall. Then there were all the graphics issues (that made the game a massive resource hog as well as giving it about a million graphical artifacts) and the notoriously bad stability issues and the memory leaks. Then there was Clear Sky, which still to this day is incredibly buggy but was so bad at release that it was actually unplayable for a majority of day 1 players.

The best one can say is that Call of Pripyat was actually stable and relatively bug free once it released outside of the Russian speaking territories, but that was on account of the original Russian language release being on par with Clear Sky in terms of bugginess and stability.

In comparison Fallout 4 seems like the patron saint of good coding.

 

[StoleitfromKilgore]

@Charcharo:

and Clear Sky actually beats some AAA games in 2015 in certain graphical aspects.

A lot of it comes down to aesthetics. For example, I recently finished both Vietcong (from 2003) and Metro: Last Light and to me the way that the rain looked when impacting the water in one mission of Vietcong still looks at least as good as in much more recent games.

As far as Clear Sky is concerned: Well at least dynamic light and water on surfaces still look very impressive (Even though parts of the latter are very buggy. Especially water flowing down surfaces almost never has worked for me properly until recently. Dynamic smoke has never worked for me.) Still what works is very impressive. Take a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nUrTkDbwS0

 

[StoleitfromKilgore]

@Charcharo:

Interesting. I thought Complete has SRP as its base?!? I had to change a few lines in some file to get it to work. There's a thread somewhere on the old GSC-forums which has the numbers which worked for me.

One day I will have to try Clear Sky with just SRP.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

All I remember from that was a rare crash here and there. It seemed stable enough. Certainly more than you'd expect from a developer with a rookie name like they had back then.

Lucky you. I got it on its' European release date and I had to suffer through a lot. The Dx10 setting was impossible to use since it crashed the FPS into single digits, inventory items would degrade without use, AI scripting would fail to kick in and require reloads, the AI would go bonkers and have NPCs and monsters cluster together or fail to react, I would crash to desktop every other hour or so etc. etc.. At the same time I haven't found a single broken quest in Fallout 4, I haven't had a single CTD and the worst bugs I've found have been some delays in AI scripting and physics bugs (such as animals suspended in the air and the occasional raider that has gone into orbit).

My point is that Fallout 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R are many things, but neither of them can be said to be stable, bug free games and pretending as if the latter is better then the former makes me wonder if you even played SoC or Clear Sky. Because for those of us who played either or both at release the bugginess was so bad that many considered both games unplayable and SoC in particular suffered (and still does) from glaringly obvious omissions of content, where it is obvious that something was meant to be in the game or at a particular location but there's nothing of interest there. Just look at Pripyat in SoC, it should be the most interesting location in the game, but apart from the Monolith "base" and Strelok's hotel room there's not much going on there but rather tedious combat sequences. Especially compared to earlier areas like Cordon where every little cranny seems to hold something of interest.

 

[EternallyBored]

All I remember from that was a rare crash here and there. It seemed stable enough. Certainly more than you'd expect from a developer with a rookie name like they had back then.

Lucky you. I got it on its' European release date and I had to suffer through a lot. The Dx10 setting was impossible to use since it crashed the FPS into single digits, inventory items would degrade without use, AI scripting would fail to kick in and require reloads, the AI would go bonkers and have NPCs and monsters cluster together or fail to react, I would crash to desktop every other hour or so etc. etc.. At the same time I haven't found a single broken quest in Fallout 4, I haven't had a single CTD and the worst bugs I've found have been some delays in AI scripting and physics bugs (such as animals suspended in the air and the occasional raider that has gone into orbit).

My point is that Fallout 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R are many things, but neither of them can be said to be stable, bug free games and pretending as if the latter is better then the former makes me wonder if you even played SoC or Clear Sky. Because for those of us who played either or both at release the bugginess was so bad that many considered both games unplayable and SoC in particular suffered (and still does) from glaringly obvious omissions of content, where it is obvious that something was meant to be in the game or at a particular location but there's nothing of interest there. Just look at Pripyat in SoC, it should be the most interesting location in the game, but apart from the Monolith "base" and Strelok's hotel room there's not much going on there but rather tedious combat sequences. Especially compared to earlier areas like Cordon where every little cranny seems to hold something of interest.

Yeah, same for North America, I don't know how the hell Charcharo got such a good experience out of the game around launch, but I had to wait for a patch after a game breaking bug in SoC, and Clear Skies wouldn't run for more than a minute or two on my computer for the first 2 weeks after launch. FO4 has its bethesda bugginess, but the STALKER games ran like trash on my PC for an unacceptably long time, and I know I was only one of many that had serious problems with that game. What restored my enjoyment of those games was the devs attempts to fix the bugs, that brought the game to a playable state.

Not just graphics either, the AI scripting would bug out a lot, and just stop working sometimes for me, It took me a solid week of being confused at people praising the faction system and atmosphere of Clear Skies to realize that my experience with braindead NPCs wasn't actually how the game was supposed to run. Clear Skies was a pain in the ass for this, I remember events not triggering properly, or when they did trigger there were issues with pathing and audio lines being repeated way too damn often. Clear Skies seemed to be infested with scripting and AI bugs. Luckily they seemed to patch that pretty fast, so the devs at least cared enough to fix it, Bethesda has a tendency to rely on fan patches to fix things.

Also yeah, for as much as I ended up liking SoC eventually, once everything was fixed, the final areas of that game sucked hard, which has always stopped me from playing through the game again, I get past the atmospheric early sections and just lose motivation to slog through the disappointing endgame. Clear Skies had the opposite problem, the faction system only get interesting after the first few hours, so you have to slog through a sucky beginning to get anything good. I also remember Clear Skies starting out with this weird objective capture questline at the beginning, where people just kind of capture things without you, which seems realistic enough, but they still rewarded me for helping even if I wasn't there when they moved on an objective, getting rewards for not even doing anything because the NPCs already killed everything before you got there is some Bethesda levels of jank.

I liked both games in the end, but holy shit did their launches in North America suck, both those games needed serious patching to realize their potential.

 

[Strelok]

Bethesda's "small" Fallout 4 Dev team

Spoiler

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Dev team

Spoiler

With what maybe two or three games under their belt at the time, an underwhelming FPS and one or two RTS games. A small team attempting to push the boundaries of gaming AI and immersion. Then there is Bethesda, missteps and messes since their creation hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions in backing and they still manage to shit out a mess. Even consoles are not safe with 15 minute load times?!?!!? Broken AI and falling through the world. By @Gethsemani logic Fallout 4 should be flawless, which it certainly is not. Here's a story, I buy The Terminator video game (Bethesda) for PC way back in 1990, loved it, what a great concept... Except one problem, play as the Terminator, go to gun store, steal RPG, go straight to the largest mall parking lot, fire RPG at any random car, entire parking lot explodes. Kyle and Sarah die no matter where they are on the map, together or not... Win game? Then wish there were refunds back then or at least patches. Fast forward Terminator: Rampage 3 years later. Get game, one disk is missing, talk to Bethesda friendly help line place order for replacement disk three, get Gretzky Hockey 3 disk 6 or some shit in the mail, a game from 1991 by the way, call again, fix issue, Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 some random disk again, and it happens one more time. Then get to a game breaking bug, a key to leave a level is stuck in a room with no doors, it's 1993, no patches, no help. Had to run no clip to finish the game... YAY!!! Immersion!!! My point Bethesda has an atrocious track record back to their roots, even now with all the sales and all the money they still can't get it right.

Fallout New Vegas was my favorite a horrible broken mess at launch, but was still my favorite Fallout of the new series, I wonder why? Lets check with the designer...

Interviewer:Are there any apocalyptic games that you've really admired? What was it about their vision that you appreciated?

Josh SawyerI also really like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. The games can be unforgiving and the setting is sort of a micro-apocalypse, but they have fantastic atmosphere and really make the world feel dangerous. It's also interesting to see an apocalyptic setting that isn't American.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2010/nov/10/fallout-new-vegas-interview

It's why I thought the gun play and immersion was much better than Fallout 3. Also I will never forgive Fallout 3 for that horrendous non-DLC ending, yes my partner was Fawkes, and no I do not believe that melting alive in radioactive tank with my dead father is my destiny.

Both S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC and Clear Sky I finished before any patches existed, a few minor crashes but nothing more. Clear Sky DX10 features had to be set down a bit, by default they turned on to max, DX10.1 then DX11 brought better performance to AMD users at the time, then later Nvidia when new cards that supported DX11 were released. The main issue was light shafts which at some points in the morning could extend large building shadows across the map which caused issues. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) was also on by default which was a beefy rig crippler at the time. GSC did a great job with what they had, yes they couldn't deliver on all the promises they made, and some of the promises didn't work like AI working against you and able to finish the game without you. Bethesda continues to release broken games, when even the fanboys know that they shouldn't have to, they are not a small developer just starting out, but every release feels like they are.

I would rather play the worst S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, than the best Fallout game

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

By @Gethsemani logic Fallout 4 should be flawless, which it certainly is not.

Are you guys even reading my posts? The level of strawmanning in this thread is insane. I've never said anything about development team size, relative gameplay quality or enjoyment factor between the STALKER games and the Fallout games.

My only point is, and was, that saying that the STALKER games were less buggy then the Fallout games on release is disingenuous. I've played all the games on release, I've loved all 6 games to death (SoC, CS, CoP, Fo3, Fo:NV, Fo4) but they have all, save for CoP, been disastrously buggy messes and this is the prevailing understanding of all six games. CoP was only decent in that regard because they put off Western release for some six months due to how buggy the Eastern European/Russian version was.

There's a reason why I've played through CoP some four or five times by now. I am not criticizing the STALKER series, I am calling out bullshit.

 

[iller3]

It genuinly annoys me that people associate this art with Fallout 4 now because someone stuck a logo on it and cropped out the STALKER bits. It shows up when you GIS Fallout 4.

It even has a military copter, the CNPP and a few other STALKER landmarks in it.

It also says a lot about the Fallout 4 art that most people choose to use artwork from another game entierly.

Yeah I never make a big deal about "Art theft" or copyrights in general even as an Artist.... but Cropping the author's name or taglines out of an image really Burns my Toast and I wish there was a Multinational Internet Regulation strictly against it that back traced and penalized the people who do it. .... not Financially I mean, but just banning them from being able to Upload image data to the internet for a while so they could think about what they've done.