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?

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.

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).

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.

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).