Game Review: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
One of the downsides to having easy retail access to new games as soon as they come out, combined with our desire for immediate gratification, is that gaming websites and magazines are under such pressure to produce reviews immediately after a game is released that they only ever judge the game in it's initial retail state (and in fact, many succumb to reviewing late beta versions in order to get a jump start on the competition). While this is generally reasonable for the gamer - nobody should pay full price on the first day for a game that is simply broken - it means that any improvements the developer makes through patches, and the fan community makes through mods, will probably do little to create new customers in the months following the initial release.
And a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (ugh, I abhor the meaningless initialism!) is a perfect example of this situation. This was a game under development for more than five years by Russia's GSC Game World, a company known for it's underwhelming 2001 FPS Codename: Outbreak and the more popular Cossacks RTS series. The story is set around the Chernobyl area, in the future, after a second meltdown had caused the formation of "the Zone", an area in which strange "anomalies" sprang up randomly and mutated animals had free reign. So-called "stalkers" were people who wandered into the Zone in search of artifacts - essentially power-ups created by the strange phenomena associated with the Zone. For years we were treated to amazing trailers featuring a gloomy, decaying, downright spooky world where the inhabitants roamed freely in search of whatever they wanted at the time - artifacts, food, weapons, etc. A revolutionary artificial intelligence system dubbed A-Life had been designed that promised to produce a vibrant, convincing game world populated with life-like characters. I've got videos dating from 2003 showing these features in action, and I waited in excited suspense for years just like everybody else.
But as development dragged on, and the A-Life system required more and more time to tweak, and the graphics needed to be continually updated, at some point, the primary revolutionary feature of the game - the promise of a seamless, totally free game world - was quietly scrapped (or rather, put aside) in favor of a more traditional storyline-based, quest-driven game experience.
And so when the game was released four months ago, the inevitable reaction from most was disappointment. The open-ended game environment we'd been promised for years was gone, replaced with fairly standard shooter/RPG elements. Add on top of that the only slightly above-average graphics, especially relative to the recent eye-candy-heavy Prey, F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2, the hints of lack of polish and poor language translation, and you got a mostly lukewarm response from the gaming press and fans who'd years ago already according the game 'instant classic' status. To be fair, some websites saw through these surface blemishes to appreciate the full game experience and gave it high scores, but overall the reception was mixed at best.
When I started the game, there were a number of minor rough elements that immediately caught my attention: the inexplicably goofy 'switching weapons' and 'opening inventory' sounds; the poor dialogue translation, with long paragraphs that sounded both unnatural and pointless; the way the sound of human voices and animals howling was not properly attenuated by distance, making it impossible to tell if that mutant dog was right behind you or so far away as to not even be rendered; and the unconventional quest-giving and -tracking system that took some time to adjust to. Compared to the level of presentation professionalism and polish we've gotten used to (ignoring the increasingly serious problem of actual gameplay bugs being left in shipping games that require subsequent patches), it felt slightly amateurish.
But then I started to notice the good things: the way groups of stalkers would sit around a fire, talking and telling jokes (in Russian) and laughing, sometimes even playing guitars; the way the combination of all the sounds - animals howling, random gunshots and cries of pain, wind blowing - and the artistic style of the game really made you feel like you were walking around a mostly-deserted, hostile environment where nature had been severely disrupted.
As usual, immediately the mod community kicked into action. A user-friendly automated mod manager was developed; before an official patch fixed it, a mod made the field of view adjustable according to the aspect ratio of the resolution being used (thus expanding the FOV properly for widescreen users such as myself); and the amazing Float32 shader mod went through countless iterations to radically improve lighting quality while also speeding up performance. There were also a handful of increased-resolution texture mods, especially for the weapons, animals, and NPCs; a replacement of some sound files (thankfully fixing the two sounds mentioned above); new and more varied sky and cloud textures; and perhaps most importantly for me, the Redux mod, which aimed to add realism to some of the game features: for example, bandages changed from restoring health to simply stopping bleeding, as they should; firefights became much more intense as a result of shot lethality being increased; the UI was simplified and minimalized; the frequency with which food needed to be consumed increased; anomalies became invisible, requiring an equipped detector to avoid them; and a host of other minor touches that improved the feel of the game.
And so after the official patches and numerous mods, I had a fully-tweaked, high-resolution, beautifully-lit game with minimal annoyances, a marked difference from the game that comes in the box. While even mods couldn't change the absence of the A-Life system we'd heard so much about (although modders have tried, with some success), all of these changes did add enough to the game to make a huge difference. I hadn't played a game with an environment that elicited such a response of cautious, curious fear in me since The Two Greatest Games Of All Time: System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Often I would just stop and gape in amazement at the beauty of my surroundings and the enveloping feel of the sounds; of course, it helps (in fact should be required) to play at night, in the dark, with ear-covering headphones.
Tonight, after four months of irregular playing, I finished the game. While no single element of the gameplay was brilliantly innovative in the ways we originally thought they would be, and the story felt disjointed in places, and the ending(s - there are three) were cool but average, overall I just loved this game. All the parts came together to produce a fun, challenging, convincingly creepy game, and I loved every minute of it. Sure, many things could have been done better; but the absolutely perfect game has yet to be created, and probably never will be. In the meantime, I hope to be playing more games like this one.
On to Bioshock! (Which, oh, by the way - will be the perfect game.)
And a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (ugh, I abhor the meaningless initialism!) is a perfect example of this situation. This was a game under development for more than five years by Russia's GSC Game World, a company known for it's underwhelming 2001 FPS Codename: Outbreak and the more popular Cossacks RTS series. The story is set around the Chernobyl area, in the future, after a second meltdown had caused the formation of "the Zone", an area in which strange "anomalies" sprang up randomly and mutated animals had free reign. So-called "stalkers" were people who wandered into the Zone in search of artifacts - essentially power-ups created by the strange phenomena associated with the Zone. For years we were treated to amazing trailers featuring a gloomy, decaying, downright spooky world where the inhabitants roamed freely in search of whatever they wanted at the time - artifacts, food, weapons, etc. A revolutionary artificial intelligence system dubbed A-Life had been designed that promised to produce a vibrant, convincing game world populated with life-like characters. I've got videos dating from 2003 showing these features in action, and I waited in excited suspense for years just like everybody else.
But as development dragged on, and the A-Life system required more and more time to tweak, and the graphics needed to be continually updated, at some point, the primary revolutionary feature of the game - the promise of a seamless, totally free game world - was quietly scrapped (or rather, put aside) in favor of a more traditional storyline-based, quest-driven game experience.
And so when the game was released four months ago, the inevitable reaction from most was disappointment. The open-ended game environment we'd been promised for years was gone, replaced with fairly standard shooter/RPG elements. Add on top of that the only slightly above-average graphics, especially relative to the recent eye-candy-heavy Prey, F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2, the hints of lack of polish and poor language translation, and you got a mostly lukewarm response from the gaming press and fans who'd years ago already according the game 'instant classic' status. To be fair, some websites saw through these surface blemishes to appreciate the full game experience and gave it high scores, but overall the reception was mixed at best.
When I started the game, there were a number of minor rough elements that immediately caught my attention: the inexplicably goofy 'switching weapons' and 'opening inventory' sounds; the poor dialogue translation, with long paragraphs that sounded both unnatural and pointless; the way the sound of human voices and animals howling was not properly attenuated by distance, making it impossible to tell if that mutant dog was right behind you or so far away as to not even be rendered; and the unconventional quest-giving and -tracking system that took some time to adjust to. Compared to the level of presentation professionalism and polish we've gotten used to (ignoring the increasingly serious problem of actual gameplay bugs being left in shipping games that require subsequent patches), it felt slightly amateurish.
But then I started to notice the good things: the way groups of stalkers would sit around a fire, talking and telling jokes (in Russian) and laughing, sometimes even playing guitars; the way the combination of all the sounds - animals howling, random gunshots and cries of pain, wind blowing - and the artistic style of the game really made you feel like you were walking around a mostly-deserted, hostile environment where nature had been severely disrupted.
As usual, immediately the mod community kicked into action. A user-friendly automated mod manager was developed; before an official patch fixed it, a mod made the field of view adjustable according to the aspect ratio of the resolution being used (thus expanding the FOV properly for widescreen users such as myself); and the amazing Float32 shader mod went through countless iterations to radically improve lighting quality while also speeding up performance. There were also a handful of increased-resolution texture mods, especially for the weapons, animals, and NPCs; a replacement of some sound files (thankfully fixing the two sounds mentioned above); new and more varied sky and cloud textures; and perhaps most importantly for me, the Redux mod, which aimed to add realism to some of the game features: for example, bandages changed from restoring health to simply stopping bleeding, as they should; firefights became much more intense as a result of shot lethality being increased; the UI was simplified and minimalized; the frequency with which food needed to be consumed increased; anomalies became invisible, requiring an equipped detector to avoid them; and a host of other minor touches that improved the feel of the game.
And so after the official patches and numerous mods, I had a fully-tweaked, high-resolution, beautifully-lit game with minimal annoyances, a marked difference from the game that comes in the box. While even mods couldn't change the absence of the A-Life system we'd heard so much about (although modders have tried, with some success), all of these changes did add enough to the game to make a huge difference. I hadn't played a game with an environment that elicited such a response of cautious, curious fear in me since The Two Greatest Games Of All Time: System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Often I would just stop and gape in amazement at the beauty of my surroundings and the enveloping feel of the sounds; of course, it helps (in fact should be required) to play at night, in the dark, with ear-covering headphones.
Tonight, after four months of irregular playing, I finished the game. While no single element of the gameplay was brilliantly innovative in the ways we originally thought they would be, and the story felt disjointed in places, and the ending(s - there are three) were cool but average, overall I just loved this game. All the parts came together to produce a fun, challenging, convincingly creepy game, and I loved every minute of it. Sure, many things could have been done better; but the absolutely perfect game has yet to be created, and probably never will be. In the meantime, I hope to be playing more games like this one.
On to Bioshock! (Which, oh, by the way - will be the perfect game.)
posted by GregP at 9:23 PM
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