04.23.07
Game logistics
I got S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (henceforth “Stalker”, FFS) to work by disabling the dynamic lighting. Now everything looks way less impressive, but at least it doesn’t crash every 3-5 minutes. There are two immediately obvious structural differences between Stalker and Boiling Point or Oblivion:
First of all, it’s not one consistent world; it’s actually made up of zones, and you are prompted to confirm when you move between them. I think this is a big shame because although each zone is pretty big, the divisions break the supreme feeling of consistency and immersion that you feel when you can move freely throughout the game without meeting a single loading screen as you can in Boiling Point (Oblivion has to change maps when you enter towns/buildings/ruins/caverns/portals to Hell, which also breaks it a bit).
Secondly, there are no vehicles in Stalker. Boiling Point has an assortment of trucks, cars, choppers, and planes and Oblivion has horseys and quick travel, which is also important in this context. In Stalker, you can sprint, run, walk, or crawl, that’s it. And if you sprint or run, you get tired. At first glance, this may seem like a really bad idea, because it can make for a lot of very tedious travelling. However, in my experience, Stalker’s zones aren’t big enough to make it annoying. Unless you’re loaded with loot, you can generally sprint long enough to make it across any of the zones I’ve been to so far in a minute or two. Additionally, the game doesn’t seem to require a lot of moving between distant zones, unlike Oblivion which will happily send you to 3 different corners of the world in the course of a single quest.
I’ve come to realize that I actually really like Stalker’s system because it motivates me to plan my movement logistically. Thanks to the quick travel in Oblivion, I can easily travel to the other end of the country to buy a loaf of bread and then travel back again without any sort of punishment. I can do it as fast as the game can load the new area. Stalker forces me to think about where I’m going. How much stuff can I afford to haul along and sell while I’m near a trader? Have I accumulated enough missions in a given area that going there is worth the trouble?
Interestingly, this is one skill I’ve found I can use in my daily life. Especially at work, where we have several remote locations that we support in addition to those institutions that live in the same building as my department, and it’s useful to collect assignments at a given location for a while before making an expedition to the institution, so I can solve several problems at once; just like I might accumulate 4-5 quests in “Desolace” in World of Warcraft before bothering to travel there.
Two factors other than distance contribute to the importance of logistics. One is that enemies respawn and will attack you as you move around, further complicating travel. This is no different than Boiling Point or Oblivion, though. The second factor is that missions in Stalker are time-limited! I didn’t realize this until this weekend, and I’m actually very impressed with it. It’s about time somebody made another game where the player can’t just mess around indefinitely in the middle of saving the world or solving a hostage situation. Most missions have a specific time limit, such as “You got 1 day to kill this guy”, but in addition to that, missions may be failed without warning due to the game’s eco system. Perhaps the guy you were to kill is taken out by a radioactive anomaly or a pack of mutated boars. Obviously this complicates your logistic planning, because if you take too long to accumulate missions in an area, some of them may be failed before you get there. To avoid making this extremely annoying, however, side missions are generated randomly as the game progresses, so if you fail a mission, you can always come back later and get a new one.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with Stalker, it’s very different from Oblivion or Boiling Point, but all three games are conceivably built around the same basic concept, which makes comparison a very interesting exercise. I may analyse and describe Stalker further in later posts, but I really have to start writing my Fiction Theory paper soon, otherwise stress will render me a mumbling wreck, curled up in a foetal position, blabbering incoherently in a corner.
EER said,
April 24, 2007 at 12:24
I didn’t play Stalker and Boiling Point, however I do want to comment on the quick travel ability in Oblivion.
Sure, it sucks if you have to ride on for 20 minutes to reach your next objective (especially if it happens multiple times during a quest) but I really didn’t enjoy the dent in immersion when quicktraveling.
I think a big part in the immersiveness of a gameworld is due to the fact that you see the whole road and changes in landscape if you walk/ride/drive through the scenery. I remember back when I played Morrowind I enjoyed to walk all the way from Caldera to Gnisis (or even to the Telvanni districts) just because of the drastically changing scenery. In a similar way, I enjoy driving around the city in GTA:SA, the whole world just makes sense.
By using teleportation (quicktravel, ‘COC’ in morrowind), I think it leads you to disregard the gameworld and entices you to complete objectives ASAP with a tunnel vision. Which may be what the masses want (but I don’t).
Talking about time limits makes me think of ‘Dead Rising’ pretty nice game, with similar time requirements. Even though the story is VERY similar to ‘day of the dead’, it’s very enjoyable (if killing zombies is your kind of game).
Jonas said,
April 24, 2007 at 18:53
I agree completely. My point was that if you removed the quick travel from Oblivion you would drive most players insane (me included), but I think a streaming world game should be designed to allow for fun and unannoying gameplay even without a quick travel structure. A good way to do this would be like in WoW, where the quests sort of nudge you along through the world from one place to another and you rarely HAVE to move between the world areas (you do so anyway, because of the social aspect, to meet up with friends and such, but you probably wouldn’t travel long distances voluntarily as much in an SP game).
Some of the most enjoyable times I had in Oblivion was riding through the wildlands to reach an objective somewhere I hadn’t visited yet, such as a forest ruin or a keep in the mountains. I very rarely “slow-travel” (heh) anywhere unless the game forces me, but when it does force me, I enjoy it. Kind of weird…
As for Dead Rising, killing zombies is not my thing. However, the real problem I (and most I’ve talked to) had with Dead Rising is that zombies respawn completely every hour on the hour. Respawning enemies works in STALKER because you CAN make a difference - the bandit camp you wiped out yesterday may now be occupied by allies! In Dead Rising, you fight your way through hordes of enemies only to have them reappear behind you. It feels too much like Sisyphus - The Game.
EER said,
April 25, 2007 at 13:51
Exactly, just having the option to skip travel will stop you from slow-traveling (nice one) completely. I think I’ll try Oblivion again sometime soon and try to refrain from quick-travelling completely (I need to replay it anyway because I want Shivering Isles)
WoW is another game I never played and try to keep as far from as possible (I just know that I will get addicted if I start playing, so I stay away from MMO’s). I think it would be good to have quests set in a certain region, instead of all over the place. At the very least you don’t annoy impatient players very much and still don’t need to have a quick-travel mechanism. I imagine this is the way Blizzard set up WoW, so that’s cool
Another thing that annoyed me in Oblivion (in an immersive environmental kind of way) is the fact that K’vatch never gets rebuilt, even if you wander around for months on end, it just remains a pile of rubble. A missed chance for a ‘living’ environment, imho.
On Dead Rising (again): you’re right, it is annoying to have respawned zombies all the time. One of the ‘achievements’ on the XBOX360 versions was to kill 48K zombies (in the intro a message was shown saying there were ~48000 inhabitants of the village). It would be incredibly cool if killing 48K meant that there were just no more zombies to kill and hence, the game is cleared of all zombie activity
(but it doesn’t, so that’s not cool).
Mr_Cyberpunk said,
April 30, 2007 at 23:53
Hey jonas. You said that the vehicles aren’t working. I have proof they do - except you need a mod to unlock them (because they are meant to work by standard but had to be disabled at launch due to bugs)
http://screenshots.filesnetwork.com/52/files2/77758_4.jpg
I started to play this game and hated it, it was worse than boiling point to begin with.. But as I played it grew on me. Once I got into the city part at the start I realised that this game was oddly similar to Fallout Tactics. I must say that I’ve become hooked on the game.. My only issue is the load times and occasionaly the server lags in Single Player ??! wtf?
I started off by collecting weapons as I went.. I realised that you don’t need to do that (except with Ammo) because you get so much money after a while that you have no idea what to do with it.
There is also a mod that removes the mission time if you feel that the game is rushing you too much.
If you look hard enough you can find all kinds of improvements to the game.
Jonas said,
May 2, 2007 at 17:07
Hey CP, thanks for commenting.
I knew about that mod, actually, but my post concerned the official game, not including mods. And out of the box, there are no vehicles. I didn’t download the mod because I feared bugs; how well does it work?
How far are you? The only traders I’ve found so far are the guy in the Rookie camp and the bartender in the stalker city. None of them sell very good weapons. I picked a G36 off the corpse of some Freedom guy in the military warehouses, and nothing compares to that. It kicks so much ass, it’s bloody crazy. It’s powerful, it’s accurate, all it needs is a grenade launcher, then it’d be perfect. It also looks really cool and is lots of fun to use. After getting it, I’m working like crazy to get the G36 from The Cassandra Project into TNM
Oh, get the Real Weapon Names mod if you haven’t already, btw, makes it much easier to manage your weapons when they’re called something recognizable, and adds a nice layer of immersion
I really like the time limits, btw. It’s one of the best thing about the game if you asks me, so long as there’s no time limit on storyline missions, which there isn’t.
Any other mods you can recommend?