Why no FPS has surpassed STALKER SoC?

Hello friends,

So its 2019. and this game released in 2007. receive good reviews from ciritics and overwelmingly positive reviews from gamers and fans despite some technical issues.

lot of people claim Half life is still best FPS ever but it was surpassed by this game by longshot. i do consider Half life as one of the best but STALKER did everything better. and even though i love Metro games they are still not even close to STALKER or as much i im excited for Metro Exodus and think it will be amazing (game itself, not shaddy business practice) but it wont be better than this game.

first off.. STALKER is set in most unique setting. that is chernboyl and pripyat. metro set in post nuclear war but the chernoboyl and pripyat setting are far more cool. and no developer has ever made a game that set in that location.

It was open world yet it didnot feel forced unlike far cry. it was more of sandbox linear type of game (COP was fully open world thought), the lab x is still the best gaming moment i have ever had.

its atmosphere is top notch still, the weather effect etc. it was just most innovative game of all time imo.

theres plenty of reason why this is still best FPS of all time and probably the best game ever made too along with original Deus Ex.

so why no developers apart from 4A games has made something like this? will it be surpassed anytime soon? lets discuss

I never got into Stalker but I'm in the camp that doesn't believe Half life is the greatest FPS of all time or HL2. F.E.A.R. for me is the greatest FPS of all time and no other game has surpassed it's amazing firefights.

Many have, if you weren't so closed minded you'd realize that.

can you name them? not the one before and not the one that came after.

I beg to differ. I enjoyed Far Cry 3 + blood dragon more and its more arcade fun. You needs mod to make stalker even run cause base game is buggy as fuk which seriously hinders anyone enjoyment. FC3 is fun even on base game.

I think Stalker got a big reputation cause of its atmospheric setting which is still admitted amazing and the survival system. Also the world is pretty reactive, kill hunter, less will appear but world is more dangerous. Its pretty great system tbh.

far cry 3 was casual cinematic game have big giant arrow where to go, enemy indicator, QTE and too much cinematics.

if you wanna compare any far cry to STALKER. compare Far cry 2. that game was great. and has bit of STALKER feel.

Metro Exodus has map on hand like far cry 2 had and not arrow where to go is inspired by them.

STALKER does small linear levels with aliens better than Half-Life? I had no idea. I can think of a shitload of games that does things better than STALKER. So can you, you've played DOOM. Then you'd know shooting in STALKER feels like shit in comparison. Look at DOOM 3. Good graphics even today (whereas STALKER looks like shit, bar the atmosphere), the shooting feels great (whereas it's weaksauce in STALKER). And STALKER was released 3 years later than DOOM 3.

"This is the best FPS ever, fact, so I'm gonna make a thread called 'why has no FPS surpassed this' ". That's you shoving down your opinions in other peoples throats. It's very annoying. And this is coming from me who loves STALKER. If I ever begin to hate STALKER, it's because of you.

But with that said, I really want a STALKER 2, and I really want it to be good.

I wouldn't call it the best. But it's one of the most immersive games made. A big reason for this is that it's devoid of Hollywood aesthetics where everything is perfectly scripted in a perfectly choreographed world, that has the unintended effect of artificiality.

Stalker by comparison is mundane, like real life. Everything is muted, dirty and shitty looking. There is no lead character who looks like Leon Kennedy or obvious villian like Andrew Ryan throwing out prophetic lines that will make journalists piss their panties at such deep.

Everything feels generic, you feel generic. When it hits a beat, the beat is infinitely more impactful.

LOL the entire Lab X is much better than entire Half life 2 and this is someone who consider HL2 as one of the best FPS ever.

the thing was STALKER was just so good that nothing really surpassed it. we never had any FPS after that that is set in Chernobyl and pripyat 2 of most interesting place on earth.

beside you mention Doom and as much as i like Doom. but STALKER has like best gunplay ever apart from FEAR. you have to lean and concentrate to shoot enemies. they die of single headshot if you use right accuracy. there has never been a game where using AK 47 was so much fun.

STALKER is almost perfect game bar storytelling.

Stalker in bad in many respects. Halflife 2 is almost perfect.

edit -

masterpiece

@uninspiredcup: Couldn't agree more.

STALKER has better shooting - Check

Better level design - Check

more atmospheric - Check

More challenging - Check (Half life 2 was wayy too easy even on hardest difficulty. its a cake walk. HL1 was hard)

and i could go on and on.

The three STALKER games each had issues of their own that required fixing through mods. You liked Shadow of Chernobyl the most. Unfortunately, I found ShoC to be the worst overall. I actually like Clear Sky better and Call of Pripyat the best, especially once mods were applied.

ShoC's emphasis was fighting bandits and other human NPCs which I found to be derivative because most other FPS games did the same thing. Vanilla ShOC forced a bunch of side missions on the player as soon as entering a different map, particularly the Wild Territory. Then, I had to go to different maps to report the results and collect my rewards. That got tiring after a while. It wouldn't be so bad if there was fast travel. But, ShoC didn't have it. Clear Sky attempted to develop ShoC further by implementing the faction wars thing, repairs/upgrades, and fast travel. It also looked nicer than ShoC. But, the shooting mechanics was flawed. Plus, I found it silly for the bloodsucker to be impossible to kill when it's cloaked. The only way to kill it was in the last few seconds when it decloaked and poised to strike.

Call of Pripyat has the smallest world of the three and it certainly has that open-world feel. It's almost totally devoid of the silly side missions that were in ShOC because the big bucks can be earned by looking for artifacts and trading them. What side missions remained were closely tied to major upgrades and the SP campaign. I found the SP campaign in CoP to be much tighter than the previous two games even though I can do many of them in any order I want. The emphasis of combat was in fighting mutants rather than human NPCs. That meant the mutants in CoP were more aggressive and deadly. Of course, there are enemy human AI too such as zombies, the occasional bandits, mercs, and later on, the Monolith faction. But, I think CoP is what the series should have been. I certainly love the setting.

as an all round experience stalker is amazing. atmosphere off the charts. no hand holding. gritty, raw, immersive. ironically the weakest aspect is the shooting. crysis came out a few months later and battered it as far as a pure fps goes

To add some more.....

One thing I liked about the STALKER games was the lack of boss fights. Just about every action game I played in my lifetime had boss fights at the end of a level and the big boss at the end of the game. It was getting meh to me.

ShoC had a sprawling final level with portals the player must enter. CS had a similar level with portals. But, its main goal was to prevent the target from entering one of them. CoP's last level was an escort mission while running a gauntlet of already encountered enemies....and then hold out.

CoP also has the most interactive human NPCs out of all my action games. Only Fallout 4 has more interactive NPCs. But, it's (FO4) still arguably an RPG. I actually had to compete with NPCs when scavenging the dead or while looking for artifacts. I had to be careful when doing melee attacks with my gun because the NPCs can snatch it from my hands and then use it on me. I can trade with them if money is short. They'll pick up guns I drop if it's better than the one they currently have.

@ghosts4ever:

You should also try (if you haven't already) STALKER: Lost Alpha DC v1.4007. It's sort of a remake of ShoC. It's fan-made and it's free. Lost Alpha combined assets from all three STALKER games. But, the X-Ray engine is still a similar one to ShoC and CS.

All Stalker games have been boring and broken.

For me, no FPS game has ever surpassed Goldeneye 007 released in 1997.

22 years and it's still the FPS game that I continually go back to when modern FPS games disappoint me.

Halos... Nuff. :P

goldeneye was never good game. even back in 90s quake and half life released and was much better.

Stalker SoC is one of my favorite games ever.. I think part of the reason is that it just felt so fresh at the time, like nothing else i'd played before.

even though Stalker Call of Pripyat was more polished and had bigger areas and some other nice improvements, it didn't have that same spark of originality.

so even if someone else made a better Stalker (Metro Exodus might fall into those lines), I doubt it would have the same impact on me that the first Stalker did.

i love fps games but dont care for stalker, wouldnt be in my top 10

call of pripyat is no whear near Shadow of Chernobyl. SOC was engaging from start to finish while COP from start was pretty boring then become interesting when it went to pripyat.

I lost count how many times i complete SOC.

Metro Exodus will be more in the line of Crysis with STALKER vibe. it wont be better STALKER. only STALKER 2 can be better STALKER.

All the stalker games were broken buggy pieces of shits that required 10 mods to be even playable... so yeah lots of games are way better, and to even compare these crap games with half-life 1+2 shows how disillusioned you are..

Could never get into it personally.

I played vanilla version first and it was fine then tried it with complete mod and it blow half life 1 and 2 out of water. and i love half life alot.

Stalkers just different beast. only one of its kind.

Apparently I didn't get the memo that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was the FPS to beat. This is news to me.

Maybe one of these days the dismissive notion that the base game of Shadow of Chernobyl is "buggy as fu.ck" without a number of mods will cease, but i'm not getting my hopes up.

Shadow of Chernobyl was very buggy wen it was released. It received a handful of patches relatively shortly after its initial release, by the official developers, to fix a vast number of the reported bugs. The current version of the game on GOG.com is that fixed version, mostly bug free.

Mostly. Now, to further polish it up to a near perfect silky smooth state, you need one community patch - the Zone Reclamation Project. The fact that we're able to go beyond and modify it to improve the core game is a welcome addition, but not a requirement for you to enjoy and experience S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl in its purest form.

I'll have to strongly disagree there; Both Half Life 2 and Doom 3 honestly had surprisingly shit gunplay because the feedback of the weapons felt extremely subdued, weak, combined with some real underwelming sound effects and mediocre - bad enemy encounters. Not that there aren't a number of real brilliant mods that can easily fix them up to perfection, but we're just talking about the base games here. The original Half Life has much better gunplay than its sequel. And the interiors of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series in general are some of the best i've ever experienced, the atmospheric design of them just overwhelms the living shit out of my very soul.

Disregard the OP with his insanely obvious issues that i will not get into, he makes S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans look bad.

,Halflife 2 bad sound effects? Stalker, good? Wait, wat? Halflife 2 has some of the best sound design you will literally find in a game.

An example -

As the player is introduced to the world, we get this on a speaker. Where instead of killing people off through conflict , the idea is to gradually strangle them by denying them the right to breed. Presumably, killing younger generations as they're send of to detention centers and as not a single child in the game is seen.

This is what happens when the player optionally interacts with a playground.

There's nothing even close to that level of thought in Stalkers sound design.

Almost all of Stalkers enemy encounters basically involve simply spamming the player with the same enemies over and over barring creatures, with the underground facility definitely better than Ravenholm by a mile. But by and large, same enemies, spam spam spam. You'll be hard pressed to find an FPS that comes remotely close to HL2's variation.

This was better version of creepy playground.

half life 2 has been surpassed. except it my friend.

anyone who think HL2 gunplay is better than STALKER just being HL2 fanboy who cant see its one flaw. the fact is. its gunplay was just.. very basic

STALKER gunplay require more skills, accuracy and its just more fun to shoot enmies with AK47 then combine with submachinegun.

If we compare gun play between the STALKER games, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2, I'd say the ones in Doom 3 felt the most visceral. That word was often used by pro reviewers to describe id games and I think it still holds true. Gun play sounds seem vivid. The ones in the STALKER games aren't quite as powerful-sounding as in Doom 3. But, they certainly are quite detailed. I don't have vanilla ShoC anymore. I applied the Complete Mod to it. Using that as a reference, there are distinct differences in sound when the bullets hit concrete, metal, or the ground. The same goes for ricocheting bullets. There are also better visual cues. Sparks fly when bullets hit metal and there are puffs of smoke when bullets hit the ground or concrete.

It's been a while since I played HL2. I don't even have it installed on any of my computers. But, I recall it having the weakest gun play among my games.

Of course, the STALKER games also have that potential for inducing massive urgency when that gun jams at the worst possible time. I miss that in my other games. It's amusing to watch when it happens to someone else. ;)

STALKER a horribly dull shooter with shit graphics shit story and shit shooting mechanics is one of the best ever made?

Yeah, okay, keep taking those meds.

Oh Ghost...

What parts of the shooting mechanics are bad? I mean I played all 5 STALKER games. But, I want to read it from your perspective.

I used to grouse about the lack of bullet accuracy in the STALKER games. But, I've since found it it's because of damage to the guns. Once replaced with a new one or repaired, they're fine.

Seems about right when firing from the hip without crosshairs/reticle.....

I mean, i appreciate the scale and tension that STALKER brings, though it's one of those types of games you know you really like, but you can't sit yourself down to enjoy for days on end.

If we're to talk about first person open worlds, i think Postal 2's a better example. The Dude's chores played a lot like a linear shooter and Paradise is much smaller than the Ukrainian exclusion zone. However, the small map sizes of Postal 2 meant that if a building's in your field of vision there's a 90% chance that you can go inside it and if it's someone's house, the residents will react in a way you'd expect someone to react when a grown man dressed like a school shooter kicks in their window whilst jumping inside.

I can. I've been playing:

• Call of Pripyat
• Call of Chernobyl
• Clear Sky
• Lost Alpha DC
• Shadow of Chernobyl

since late spring of last year.