Pod wrote:
I don't see what about the game was a mess? That not all of the dialog was spoken? Infact I can't see the combat as being weak - it's much more preferable in my opinion than a lot of other games I've played. The AI was genuinly smart, and often I'd be shooting at guys infront of me, who are hiding behind cover and that, only to see that 2 of them had snuck round the side on my left and had a perfect firing position. Most games the enemies just stand there or run back and forth, or run between cover at the most inopportune moments. The AI in STALKER tried to do it whilst you weren't shooting at them, at least.
Well the first thing I noticed was that some of the text did not fit the boxes and spilled over. I hadn't read about that part. Nor did I expect every single enemy to be an absolute crack shot. It's all well and good looking at movies of one dude with a handgun take on an entire army but in the real world it doesn't work like that. There isn't enough ammo for a start, and it seemed that there was no way of avoiding a conflict even when you weren't in the mood. So what would end up happening is I would be stuck behind a ruined bus or something with no ammo being shot and left and right. Try to run away? get shot in the back of the head by the Russian gold medal winning marksmen who never EVER missed. Now. On that point I found that to be incredibly irritating about Fallout 3. EVERY SINGLE bullet fired at you nearly always hit you from three miles away. Yet, even at top level of XP (30 after BS IIRC) some of yours would still miss. Which made weapons like the 4 beam laser gun a waste of ammo because unless all 4 beams focused it was less effective than the single beam.
Each on their own are small niggles. Add it all together? it quickly gets really annoying. Fallout 3 had some issues I did not like. Thankfully the combat wasn't the largest part of it and it didn't try to be a FPS. STALKER was pretty much a FPS and suffered with all of the annoying issues that bug FPS. You are entering into a virtual world and thus the AI needs to be coded to produce virtual settings. One man cannot take on a team of crack shot commandos (STALKER) with a rusty old rifle.
Just to add a bit to that. Your enemies had endless ammo. Where the fuck they got it all from? Mystery to me ! So that would leave you two options. Try and run the half mile to where they are and die in the face with a rambo knife, or try to run away and die in the back. Fucking stupid.
The AI needed work. Maybe I am just hyper sensitive to such things? but basically when the AI is out you end up with a frustrating mess. Your comment about how awesome the enemy AI is? yup, very true. Too good to make it an enjoyable experience. Frustration soon sets in and you start to realise you are being faced with stupid impossible tasks.
Pod wrote:
disclaimer: I only bought&played it a month ago, so maybe I had all the bugs removed, but I saw none of this.
It wasn't so much bugs, but unfinished game code.
Pod wrote:
So what? Is this even a valid point? You don't like the game because one of their original ideas didn't make it into the final product? There's a metric fuckton of half-implemented ideas in virtually every major game out there. They're either removed due to time constraints or becasue they don't fit the game in the end. Remember hot-coffee, as a famour example? Did you say GTA4 was a crap game because you couldn't play it, even though it was there in the code? OR perhaps TF2 is a shit game because it's gone through 4 or so different prototypes?
It wasn't because original ideas didn't make the final product. It was because they were removed for the sole reason of getting an unfinished project up for sale to bring in the dollars. Hot Coffee, FYI was in early versions of the 360 game. It was only when companies like the one I worked for (Blockbuster video) refused to sell it to *any one* (they don't sell porn in any shape or form) that R* removed it . We then stocked it but had a policy to card any one (and take a photocopy of that ID) under 21.
That would have hurt their sales. Because the first thing Americans do is camp themselves outside stores like that to buy it.
GTA4 was poorly coded and due to which ran poorly. See also : Crysis. Was talking to a friend about this earlier. There are certain sections in Crysis that are terribly buggy. Due to which you can be getting 60 fps one minute and then 5 the next. And, it doesn't matter how beastly your hardware is because it isn't about that. It's about a poorly coded game. Thankfully with Crysis there are only a few levels that suffer with that and the rest kind of outweighs it. Warhead runs so much better becuase they have pulled out the numbers of enemies, lowered down certain things and with a very careful eye you can see how it actually doesn't look as good as the original. Going back to Crysis? it's been around for aaages now, and even with SLI 295 still suffers some lag and problems due to bad code. And, I would imagine that GTA4 will end up the same.
Pod wrote:
So a third-party mode which unbalances the game is a fault of the original developers?
It's already unbalanced. Activating a third party mode makes you a better shot, but it makes them even better than they already were, which IMO and lots of others was already fucking stupid. I don't like hard games. This is very true. However, I don't like stupidly unfair games that are frustrating to the point of actually not being any fun. After all, they are games.
Pod wrote:
I don't see what was unfinished about it. I did practically every quest in the game and went to all parts of it and saw no bugs. Sure, you could pick up a "bread" item that was unusable, and a guitar that was unplayable, but what the hell does that matter?!
If you enjoyed it? (and you wouldn't be alone) then great. I noticed too many things in the end and coupled with the terrible "you're fucked out here alone" AI became annoyed and frustrated at it. A lot of those reasons I have forgotten now, but hey, I might even reinstall it later and remind myself.
RuySan wrote:
It seems Coffey didn't either but only read about them.
I played it for about a week solid. Desperately trying to enjoy it. Final summary? I didn't like it. At all. It was one of those games that ticked every box but when I played it left me extremely dissapointed. And when I looked in magazines and saw people pointing out all of the reasons why they didn't like it it suddenly became clear.
It was because it was a partially finished mess of a game.