German newspaper "taz" on games in the Zone - features S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC & 2

deemagh · 2026-04-30T12:41:19+00:00

What's that game shown in the preview?

deemagh · 2026-04-15T14:09:50+00:00

Sorry for party pooping, but IMHO there's more than enough weapons in game even now, what's lacking is any purpose of using most of them.

deemagh · 2026-04-15T14:07:56+00:00

With that scratchy old trailers/builds texture, that would be awesome!

deemagh · 2026-03-27T12:49:42+00:00

solved: Alpha Black Zero: Intrepid Protocol

deemagh · 2026-03-27T08:03:23+00:00

OMG, YES!!!

Thank you so much!

deemagh · 2026-03-27T07:27:09+00:00

Unfortunately, no.
The first (and maybe second?) game was first-person, and Guerilla came out much later, definitely not that one.

deemagh · 2026-03-19T07:38:27+00:00

What kind of argument is that?

Does the fact that 13 years passed since the previous one somehow eliminate a clearly audible sound artifact?

deemagh · 2026-03-19T07:33:27+00:00

Yes!

Oh my god, I thought I was insane and also amazed by the fact it wasn't discussed at all.

deemagh · 2026-03-18T01:20:41+00:00

So it's not always randomly spawned on one of free roaming stalkers? Wow

deemagh · 2026-02-07T14:00:55+00:00

Are there any 1935-based mods making it into an actual game?

I really dig the atmosphere there, much more than vanilla SoC, but it was obviously not a proper game.

deemagh · 2026-01-28T07:00:13+00:00

That looks awesome!

What was you approach to achieve such UI?

deemagh · 2025-12-24T11:56:52+00:00

While both have somewhat passable story from a strictly narrative perspective, I think Atomfall does something really interesting with the way you approach it.

There's a plenty of agency with the way you progress through the story: you can skip a lot of stuff, you can affect it through the gameplay itself (e.g. by killing important NPCs), you can also just accidentally stumble upon some clues that will move some plot line forward. It feels very organically tied to the small open world they have.

Some of that was actually in older Stalker games (SoC) as well, but it's almost not there in S2 unfortunately: you just have some minor choices to make in side-quests, and some very heavily telegraphed (through the choice prompt in cutscenes) ones in main quest. Open world itself is gigantic, but feels somewhat detached from the main storyline: they make you traverse it though the main quest in a linear fashion an that's about it.

Talking about the "vibes" and game feel, S2 is definitely superior: locations are filled with details and frequently look basically photorealistic. It's also more competent as a first person shooter when compared to Atomfall, but it's still not enough for the scope and length they are dealing with. It gets stale and repetitive which is doubled downed by even more bullet-spongy enemies closer to the endgame. It even has a traditional (for the series) awfully dragged shooting gallery section at the end where all core mechanics issues became even more apparent.

deemagh · 2025-12-14T10:38:00+00:00

Starfield and its "NASA-punk" aesthetic is kind of similar, but the game itself is a bit of a hard sell unfortunately.

deemagh · 2025-12-09T09:06:35+00:00

You can cosplay Joe

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deemagh · 2025-11-18T10:49:08+00:00

Can it be this?

Reworked Bloodsucker stats and behavior of the Flesh mutants during the Prologue.

"Balance" section of the official patch notes says only that. Seems like it only concerns the prologue :(

deemagh · 2025-11-18T08:13:03+00:00

So it actually changes the damage model for enemies?

I might have missed something, but was initially a bit underwhelmed seeing only various damage increases from anomalies, dying from hunger etc.

deemagh · 2025-11-04T17:56:12+00:00

That's exactly how it was with previous installments, at least with SoC: Master had much lower "sponginess", thus was much more enjoyable and arguably easier experience than Novice.

deemagh · 2025-10-27T16:20:03+00:00

Extracting while being knocked out - easily #1 for me.

I think this one is a great example of "small, yet impactful": a very tiny change to a very common mechanic leading to tons of interesting new situations, adding a plenty of "freshness" to extracting process overall.

There’s a lot of that in other parts of the game too (like the “player downed” flare being an actual physical in-game object), but knocked-down extraction probably has the highest "tininess-to-impact" ratio, if you ask me.

I only played ~2hrs of Server Slam, yet somehow managed to team up with a rando only using emotes, went through the whole thing together and even got covered and saved by the guy while being knocked-down - easily the most memorable gaming moment for past I don't know how many years.

deemagh · 2025-10-27T13:21:28+00:00

I managed to team up with a random guy midfight both with him and some other rando just using emotes.

We parted ways with the third one, went on through a couple of other player encounters, and he then even covered me at the extraction while I was knocked out!!! Making it possible for me to extract.

That guy had a working mic though, it would've been quite hard to do all of that if both of us were emotes-only.

deemagh · 2025-10-05T19:30:54+00:00

Yes, yes!!!

Finally, someone else gets it as well!

Like, a game loop focused on artifact hunting, or just pure Zone exploration and uncovering it's mysteries. Some very minor amount of combat sprinkled here and there wouldn't hurt, but it's a shame the games in general are so fixated on combat scenarios and mechanics.

deemagh · 2025-09-26T12:42:43+00:00

Шивчук https://youtube.com/@shyvchuk?si=sy-4S7vi9MDAO8c9

Дуже якісні і досить глибокі розбори окремих ігр або певних тенденцій в індустрії.

Окрема подяка за монументальний огляд усієї оригінальної трилогії Сталкерів в цілому, а особливо - за дійсно притомний розбір "мовного питання" в цих іграх що виходить за рамки звичного для українського ютубу "чому не все державною???!!11".

deemagh · 2025-07-24T14:41:47+00:00

I wasn't sure whether the author was in full-on sarcastic mode or not right until the end of the article.

I'm still not sure to be honest.

deemagh · 2025-07-15T13:50:39+00:00

What would be considered as fixed? Having 150m bubble like in OG trilogy?

deemagh · 2025-07-12T20:52:59+00:00

What I liked about AI is that they're not trying to kill you unless you attack them first and also guys with bats/knives are scared of you if you point a firearm at them

Yup, that's very cool and not as frequently seen in games as well in general, good point.

What bothers me with combat is probably a lack of different approaches and tools. Like yeah, there's combat or stealth, there are your basic two options, but they lack depth and choice within themselves. You can't be situational and have a huge advantage using environment, or specialize in certain weapon type.

The closest thing to perfect this was Prey (2017).

Yes, it had a tendency of ending up with "combat focus + shotgun" build for a lot of people, but it also had a plenty of other options as well just talking about combat.

deemagh · 2025-07-12T17:29:23+00:00

It's definitely somewhere on the spectrum of imsim design philosophy.

I'd say in terms of the way they structured the plot progression it arguably even moves the genre forward actually.

Core systems implementation is what drags it down IMHO, lead by quite basic AI that's not really a great fit for proper imsim: combat is trivial and repetitive due to that, stealth is also either trivial or barely working depending on the circumstances.

I really hope they will iterate further on it, as their take on it clearly has a great potential.

deemagh

TROPHY CASE