STALKER base or Oblivion Lost?

C

Cali3350

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Mar 22, 2002
Messages
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Never played STALKER before and i feel like giving it a good go around here pretty soon. Normally i like to play games the way they are meant to be played by the devs before exploring any mod, but i hear such universal praise for this mod in particular i wonder if i should just hook it up first thing.

Any Opinions or insights?
 
I wouldn't even load up stalker w/ oblivion lost. I played about 4 hours into stalker vanilla and forgot to reformat. I re-installed and booted up with OL and it's a whole different beast. MUCH better than vanilla. :D GL, Happy Stalking.
 
I tried OL & I didn't find it very fun from the start. Being attacked by some sort of strange wild cat or whatever it was... I died at the very beginning of the game w/o much of a chance to do anything else. I have another mod that I'm using but I can't recall what its name is. I'll have to find out after work.
 
You quit on the best STALKER mod ever because a creature killed you in the very beginning?
 
My vote is for OL also. You do run into some tougher creatures in the beginning of the game, but nothing insane and you can avoid a lot if you're careful. I'm having more fun with OL than I ever did in the vanilla game.
 
GJSNeptune said:
You quit on the best STALKER mod ever because a creature killed you in the very beginning?
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Try 5 of the damn things attacking me when all I have is a pistol & just shooting at one barely got me anywhere. That's not cool at all. I'm an FPS veteran... and that was a blatant no-no in my book. The mod fails with me completely & I can't agree that its the best due to that.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Try 5 of the damn things attacking me when all I have is a pistol & just shooting at one barely got me anywhere. That's not cool at all. I'm an FPS veteran... and that was a blatant no-no in my book. The mod fails with me completely & I can't agree that its the best due to that.
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If I quit games the first time I played and got my ass handed to me, I probably wouldn't be playing games. You can't get better at a game if you never lose.
 
Did you mess with difficulty settings? OL's settings are harder than the vanilla settings. We're all FPS veterans, but we didn't give up. I had some trouble in the beginning, but there should be a semi-automatic weapon in one of the attics. Makes things much easier. You're missing out on a great mod.
 
Mods for STALKER?

I played this game when it first came out and liked it. Doesn't really have great replay value so I stored it away.

Sounds like there's mods for it so I might look into this!
 
Ah, so reduce the difficulty & have at it? I figured I could go at it with the newly named "elite" setting (aka veteran) & go all out. Seems it handed me my ass quickly...
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Ah, so reduce the difficulty & have at it? I figured I could go at it with the newly named "elite" setting (aka veteran) & go all out. Seems it handed me my ass quickly...
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In the read me its suggested to use master or veteran, it was balanced using those settings. As others have said you should run or find a better weapon. Some encounters will require you to be better equipped to handle the situation.
 
So there are actually a bunch of extra weapons lying around in Cordon? If that's the case... things will be a whole lot easier for me. I'd prefer using the single shot mode on a semi-auto rifle than the pistol.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Try 5 of the damn things attacking me when all I have is a pistol & just shooting at one barely got me anywhere. That's not cool at all. I'm an FPS veteran... and that was a blatant no-no in my book. The mod fails with me completely & I can't agree that its the best due to that.
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If almost every single one of [H]ardocp players of Oblivion Lost all agree that it is amazing and easily playable...maybe you are just not being creative or exploring enough?

It is supposed to be difficult, you are supposed to think through clever ways of getting through areas and dealing with insurmountable odds. Here's a tip, explore everything you can. There's secret armor in the first town. Do the first mission a few times to steal the weapons from the garage park with the bandits. Gather and sell until you can buy the Winchester. Then you can steal AKs and Akabans from the army outpost to the south. Pick them off with the Winchester. Before long you'll have more weapons than you know how to deal with.

Also, everything in the game dies faster with headshots. The monsters can take tons of body hits, you need to headshot them.
 
Normally, I play the game doing exactly as you suggest. I explore everything & collect all items to sell them for better equipment. All of that is fine & dandy but I didn't realize that the town had more in it than the vanilla version... This is why I had such a damn headache from being killed by creatures I never fought before.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Try 5 of the damn things attacking me when all I have is a pistol & just shooting at one barely got me anywhere. That's not cool at all. I'm an FPS veteran... and that was a blatant no-no in my book. The mod fails with me completely & I can't agree that its the best due to that.
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I agree totally. I replayed through the second time with OL and found that exact part to be maddening. Sure you can kill them, but it pretty much cleans you out for ammo right before the first big fight of the game. I sat there and counted the number of times I had to shoot each one in the head before they would drop. More than one is unrealistic, more than two is just retarded. I think I got to three direct headshots without them dying before I got Crysis flashbacks decided to try not engaging them.

You can run but they, like most enemies in OL, have psychic powers of perception and apparently nothing better to do than to chase you all day. I thought OL was pretty much made by hard-core gamers for hard-core gamers, which is fine but I play for entertainment, not some kind of virtual achievement medal.

I suggest playing through first with some various improvement mods (skies, armor degradation, etc.) but leaving OL for your second playthrough. Chances are you'll want to play through again. By the time you get the feel for how the game plays, you'll be fine with the extra challenge.

Besides, having bloodsuckers and several zombies come out of nowhere while you're starting the game and have just a pistol is seriously, hard-core stupid (happened to me twice after a blowout in the starting area) for a first-time playthrough. I can't imagine anyone who isn't a lifetime professional gamer enjoying that. Vanilla Stalker is hard enough at the beginning as-is.

My favorite OL moment: getting hit by a grenade just after leaving the starting village for the first time because the solder patrol "saw" me from 50m+ out (or wherever they were on the road) and decided to engage without warning, and without me even noticing. The only fun part after that was watching them (from the ground) proceed to exterminate the village because I guess being in the same continent as them was enough to trigger their offensive AI code.
 
Right now I'm playing on the ABC Mod w/ Float32 & S.H.A.R.P.E.R. Textures. I find it to be very enjoyable overall. An alternate to OL if need be.
 
Stalker's excellent as it is. I just tried a second play through on OL and nearly shat, so consider vanilla Stalker to be a warm-up for Oblivion Lost.
 
The issues I had with OL is not that it made the game more difficult but it made it too easy, even on the hardest level. While in the early stages being raped by groups of monsters and bandits can become very annoying but once you get a decent weapon the game becomes easy. Once you get a decent weapon the monsters will run from you;) The reason is that the weapons in OL are more accurate, and do twice as much damage as in the vanilla game while the monsters strength does not compensate for the weapons. One example of the unbalanced weapons, is I can make repeatable long distance head shots with my MP5. I could not do that in vanilla STALKER. I also noticed the AI seemed dumb down, the monsters are now too aggressive. In vanilla they would usually run if wounded or they did not have the upper hand. Now I rarely see that happen. While OL adds a lot of great features to the game that make it better it also completely unbalances the game in the players favor. I also did not find the vehicles that useful in the game. The maps are too small for vehicles. In addition the moving anomalies make it dangerous to take a vehicle. In addition the vehicle physics need more work. Many times my jeep would get flipped over by a pack of dogs or roll over just by itself.
 
OL is the best :)

actually sat down and played stalker, well lost myself in stalker for 12hours after modding it

i never play games that long
 
wildfire99 said:
I agree totally. I replayed through the second time with OL and found that exact part to be maddening. Sure you can kill them, but it pretty much cleans you out for ammo right before the first big fight of the game. I sat there and counted the number of times I had to shoot each one in the head before they would drop. More than one is unrealistic, more than two is just retarded. I think I got to three direct headshots without them dying before I got Crysis flashbacks decided to try not engaging them.

You can run but they, like most enemies in OL, have psychic powers of perception and apparently nothing better to do than to chase you all day. I thought OL was pretty much made by hard-core gamers for hard-core gamers, which is fine but I play for entertainment, not some kind of virtual achievement medal.

I suggest playing through first with some various improvement mods (skies, armor degradation, etc.) but leaving OL for your second playthrough. Chances are you'll want to play through again. By the time you get the feel for how the game plays, you'll be fine with the extra challenge.

Besides, having bloodsuckers and several zombies come out of nowhere while you're starting the game and have just a pistol is seriously, hard-core stupid (happened to me twice after a blowout in the starting area) for a first-time playthrough. I can't imagine anyone who isn't a lifetime professional gamer enjoying that. Vanilla Stalker is hard enough at the beginning as-is.

My favorite OL moment: getting hit by a grenade just after leaving the starting village for the first time because the solder patrol "saw" me from 50m+ out (or wherever they were on the road) and decided to engage without warning, and without me even noticing. The only fun part after that was watching them (from the ground) proceed to exterminate the village because I guess being in the same continent as them was enough to trigger their offensive AI code.
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I'll third third this idea. Play through the core game first, maybe with tsome of the graphics enhancements but don't go with OL until your second time through. Even the core game has parts that will make you so mad that you'll tempt posting about how bad it is. Now take that times 1000 in OL and you may end up like this where the first 5 minutes leaves a horrible taste in your mouth because you just ate some grenade.

Veteran or not, OL can be ridiculous when it really doesn't have to be.

The Core game is still a great and wonderful time, you don't have to worry about it being bad.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
I tried OL & I didn't find it very fun from the start. Being attacked by some sort of strange wild cat or whatever it was... I died at the very beginning of the game w/o much of a chance to do anything else. I have another mod that I'm using but I can't recall what its name is. I'll have to find out after work.
Click to expand...

Yeah man those fucking cats killed me a lot too at the beginning of the game, but they were only a problem in the very beginning because I wasn't very well equipped and I was so used to playing the vanilla game.

In vanilla Stalker I just ran around everywhere in the beginning zone because there really wasn't much to fear from the animal AI (or human for that matter). With OL however, I like to think I started playing more like a hunter. I distinctly remember playing the beginning of Stalker with OL and it reminding me of the scene in No Country for Old Men where Josh Brolin is out hunting deer to where he finds the drug money. It was that moment in OL that hooked me more than any other from the vanilla game (and I played a good ways into the game before installing OL). Really I think OL just reintroduces an atmosphere of immersion that was removed from the original game.

Honestly, just give it another go and make hunting those cats at the beginning (with a rifle or SMG of course) one of your first priorities. Once you get past the one frustrating part of OL you're really going to start enjoying the game.
 
I'm doing a round right now with MaxFinalMOD but I may run through again with OL before Clear Sky is released on the 5th (plus x number of days till I get it from gogamer.com).

The mod I'm using has a few curve balls on its own, which is nice. I think a good skill progression could be Vanilla -> Max -> OL. Gives you a progressive feeling to hone your stalker-hunter skills before slamming into OL at full force. I'll use OL to prepare me for some hardcore gaming on Clear Sky. Once I have it, I'll probably play at the highest difficulty.
 
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