utak3r

0 comments by utak3r on Jan 11th, 2010

The holy war: which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game is the best one?... Can you even point it?
Till last fall the answer was really easy - Shadow of Chernobyl was far better in players opinion from Clear Sky. But... when Call of Pripyat was released (first in east and central Europe), it divided opinions somewhat. So, how it looks now?

Shadow of Chernobyl has maniac fans, although they keep ranting about it. The truth is, the game announced and shown back in 2002-2003 years was somehow different that it was finally released (although take a look at the old alpha version, which shows Oblivion Lost as the game in far future, fighting with robots in some old Aztek's buildings). Unfortunately, THQ kept pressing on GSC and they cut off many things from the game.

The story.
In Shadow of Chernobyl we have for sure the best story in all three parts. The problem with this story is it's badly told - player knows almost everything in the middle of the game. Side quests? There're tons of them... but most of them are all the same: get some artifact, kill someone or get rid of the mutants lager... it's really boring and the further in the game - the more annoying.
On the other hand, in Call of Pripyat, we have much less interesting story, although it's led really well. But, the best part in here are the side quests, which are prepared really well. There're few of them, but they're coded by hand, no random generated tasks (with the exception of artefacts hunting, which you can do for the money). Quests are multi-level and completing some of them take really lots of time.

The gameplay.
One of the most interesting ideas from GSC was an open world and a non-linear gameplay. What we've got in the released products?
In Shadow of Chernobyl it starts quite nice and promising. We can go as we want (with just few exceptions) and some things in the future gameplay depend on how we went so far. Nice... but, from some point on (let's say, from the Red Forest) this whole thing is gone... here starts the normal, linear game - and much worse - from the somewhat the Zone should be (we, few stalkers around and hordes of mutants) it became a pretty much crowded place with big warzones. From this point on we got something resembling regular FPS shootouts.
In Call of Pripyat, on the contrary, we have quite big terrains with just few stalkers hutning for artifacts or mutants - and the mutants themselves. Quite many of them, especially zombies are there in rather big numbers - and, in my opinion, it's just like it should look like. Non-linearity comes almost to the games end, there's only a short ending period when it becames totally linear - so it's not hard slapping us in the face, as it was in Shadow of Chernobyl.

Technicals.
This is the easiest part. Finally we got a really stable game. I was playing on the 1.6.01 version and I finished my game with just one(!) bugtrap, which has gone away after reloading a savegame. Furthermore, the graphics engine is more complete, it goes smoothly - to be honest, it runs even faster, only with the quite much better graphics! :)

Conclusion?
I don't know, what to say... for sure you can't say Call of Pripyat is worse than Shadow of Chernobyl, although some blind fans keep saying so. Is it better? Well, it's somehow different. I think, from now on, we will have two our beloved games - just both of them. There still will be new mods for Shadow of Chernobyl, but Call of Pripyat will have its own, too. It already has quite many of them... The future? We're all waiting for the Lost Alpha mod for Shadow of Chernobyl and AMK 2.0 mod for Call of Pripyat. And, of course, many others, too :)

What you think?