I'm getting pretty upset at myself. You guys told me this was the best game ever and I'm trying my hardest to enjoy it...

This is what everyone is talking about. It's immersive in a way not much is. If you haven't played much you may not have found weapons that feel powerful. I'm pretty sure you get a ppsh41 before leaving the first area and it's an upgrade from shitty AKMs or whatever the starting weapon is.

This board is fucking dead and you should play the game for more than 2 hours.
I also disliked Dragons Dogma at first but found why people liked it.

Its a fucking RPG, a non shot casual one, these things, they take time.

Like I said, this board is dead

I haven't played unmodded in a long time, sorry senpai

Well that's already bullshit, not every "good" game is automatically going to be an enjoyable experience.
People have different tastes, stop being so fucking retarded.

I've sunk 14 hours into it bro.

the appeal of stalker lies in four things:
1: no other game that i have ever played has made me feel as alone and unimportant as shadow of chernobyl. pay attention to what's going on around you: factions fight each other regardless of whether or not you're there. dogs will fight with other packs of dogs. none of them give a shit whether you care or not
2: the hobo phase lasts until like halfway through the game. you will find yourself living like a scavenger, watching fights until you can swoop in and take the spoils, until eventually you live like an asshole, picking on the weak to steal their ammo
3: you actually have an impact on how things turn out in the zone. if you side with doody and kill freedom, you'll find fewer and fewer of them as time goes by. etc
4: the sound design is fucking unbelievable, like for real. no ambient music, can hear the wind moaning in the trees, can hear a dog barking from far away. you're all alone out there and it sure sounds like it

Not really
I like pretty much every genre aside from Sports games.
If you make an effort you can as well.

Immerse yourself, first playtrought is always baby steps and confusion.
Try playing the game unpatched with an outdated GPU and Vista, the later of which gave me graphical issues which included static colored rainbows in the sky.

Are you playing on Master?
Are you using Artifacts?
Are you doing secondary missions?
Are you doing optional fetch quests? you better not

If you can't get into Stalkan you will never get into shit like GSG, EDF 4.1 or E.Y.E, you will remain a pleb forever

i hope this stupid fuck gets wrapped around a tree

Yeah I gathered that in my playthrough so far, but atmosphere alone doesn't make a game.

No, that's bullshit. If it's good you should have fun the first time.

Are you playing on Master? yes
Are you using Artifacts? no
Are you doing secondary missions? yes
Are you doing optional fetch quests? yes

EDF was boring to me and I've never played EYE, but I love GSG

STALKER is mediocre in a lot of ways but outstanding in atmosphere and world-building and fills an underserved niche. This is the secret to most of Holla Forums's favorite games.

I honestly believe that the high-budget shittiness of modern games is a form of cultural cordyceps. People who accept it get infected by it, and once they're infected they can't just enjoy something for its strengths, they've been modified to be constantly upset about every aspect of a game unless they're soothed by a constant drip of gloss.

I hope he crashes

How? You shoot empty a pistol mag on a fag 5 meters away from you and he just flinches a couple of times. Gunplay is the one thing I don't like about STALKER.

...

He almost did at the end

I meant the guns themselves, not balance.

Time to worm on your build then faggot
Ignore fetch quests aside from the secondary high paying jobs you tard
I pity the casual that has never flown a Velgata on top of a building and bombarded Giant Insects as his friends keep them at bay.
It shows
Don't even bother, you're a fucking casual and you won't like it because its unorthodox, extremely flawed and doesn't hold your hand.

And thats a pile of shit, I've found plenty of games much more enjoyable when I know what the fuck I'm doing.
Like replaying RE with different characters.

Lol

You enjoy game X. That must mean it is good, right? Well I dislike game X. Does that make it bad? Who's more right? Do we determine the goodness of something by counting the number of people that like it vs the number of people that dislike it?
Here's another secret: People's subjective enjoyment of something is not the best method to judge its quality.

Guess what? You may just have broader tastes.

Why would I like something that is extremely flawed?

This is Holla Forums so it's hivemind till someone says so with a ">Holla Forums is one person." post

Normalfags do it. Not that they are right, because they aren't. I'm just saying that collectively it is believed to be true.

Rapid fire bait or this board really has gone to shit now.

I think when I got the mod call of chernobyl I don't think I suck so much time into a game than then.

Because the good points and the uniqueness are enough for you to ignore said flaws.

Nigger, we get it, you like checklist highly polished shit.
Go play a Blizshit game or something

STALKER is just the tutorial for Pathologic anyways

Its the later
Its been shit for a long time
Just less shit than the alternatives
Its been steadily declining ever since the first quarter of 2015.

Calm down. I don't want to hate the game, and I'm going to take the points you guys have mentioned and attempt to use it to enjoy stalker. I'm just upset that I sank so much time into something I'm not enjoying already.

You know
When you're right you're right
any you, sir, are definitely right

Playing on master is like the #1 thing because the easier difficulties are all fucked up and make the game harder in a shit way.

Try some of mods. Maybe you're just a faggot that can't appreciate it. Who knows. Don't get angry about it, or you'll become just like this faggot who is just unable to understand why people have different tastes.

In what way? Stalker is NOT scary. It's just creepy. Thats it.

You know its getting bad when you see faggots defending the PS4Pro and FFXV.

I am calm user, just saying as it is
These games have tons of ambition, and while many of it isn't well executed, theres plenty that is and we can see its influence on later games, giving out experiences that no other game has.
If you don't like that go play something iterative that takes a game like this as its base and polishes it.

You made the Deus Ex thread didn't you?

maybe im a pussy

No. I liked that game. Mad fun, especially with the overhauls.

Only the two Military snipers near the Swamp bridge.
I always get scared before a playtrough because I always forget to save after getting out of X-16 and killing the grunts at the entrance, after walking a shitton of terrain towards my objective I always forget about those two fuck and they shoot me to shit before I can even see them.

M8, not saying you have to suck the games dick but come on now. Even then the point of the game isn't to have something purdy to look at and that's it the point is the atmosphere, immersion, and combat

pls no bully. I just expected more after what I heard about it here.

OP, as someone who didn't like this game for about 8 years, just drop it. If the urge strikes you to jump in again down the road, re-install. I finally got into it when all the bugs got fixed and there were a lot of QoL improvements in the Complete mod. Maybe this will happen to you down the road, too. Things change with time.

Like I was saying, the board is dead

You are user. You need to find a nice boy or strong tomboy to protect your smile.

If you didn't shit your pants at the first mutant encounters you're a filthy Lets Player watching retard.

the first time i played the game i was 13 years old, and i think it scared me more as a grown up, i've played it for hundreds of hours now with mods and shit, but when i got back into it after 7 - 8 years it scared the shit out of me

I just beat it myself and yeah it wasn't as much as it was hyped to me, I got my own complaints. I played vanilla, I found myself having several stash boxes completely fucking filled with shit, overencumbering yourself isn't really as punishing as I thought it would be and when you get an exoskeleton it's the same as being overencumbered anyway, combat got really easy really quick aside from the big battles, and money is kinda worthless except to buy some of the late game armors that you can find out in the Zone anyway and everything else you get a ton thrown at you anyway. Game is nowhere near perfect but the atmosphere and immersion is on point and you can easily autistically roleplay in the game which I can't really do with most games soc that's why I like it

squatting at a campfire with other Stalkers and drinking whatever vodka you have on you is pretty damn chill I gotta say

You both need to man up.

I wasn't born with said tastes.
I know people who only play ASSFAGGOTS nowadays when they used to play all sorts of shit.

You can get into most genres if you just try it, don't just let acts of mere consequence and chance dictate what you like or not.
You'll be missing on tons of good shit, likely even things you might like better than what you're playing now.

What a sad experience you must have had, were you even immersed?

Course. At times I was paranoid as fuck, but I was never scared. Horror games and movies dont normally scare me, but theyre the best for setting and themes. Like Silent hill. It's not scary, but the feeling of the game and theme is great, same for Stalker.

I literally uninstalled SH3 when the game started up and I was surrounded by darkness

sage

Like before you fall down into the abyss and shit? Thats not that bad, most of the monster suck at chasing you too, and it goes back in time before anything happened. If its too hard to play, could always watch a few gameplay vids on youtube so you know what happens beforehand. Might make it less scary.

The shooting isn't realistic or fun. The guns are worse than Far Cry 2's, terrible for an FPS game

Read this novel:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
Continue playing the game if you liked the book. If not, there is no point in forcing yourself to do something that was supposed to be fun.

novels take me a week to finish if not more. I read very slowly

You don't have to finish it to find whether you like it, right?

Stop picking up rusted shit off the ground.

yes i do otherwise it isnt a fair judgement

So you are a completionist. Meaning, you will slog through the game too regardless of its appeal.

yes

Congrats on repeatedly posting on a "dead board." You must be braindead, as well

I didn't like it either, user.

Say why. I gave a reason, give yours.

The game was too linear, too dark (literally), and didn't "catch" me with it's story, atmosphere or anything else. The gameplay was ok, but not enough to carry the title for me I guess.

Honestly though, I've wanted to go back and give the game a fair second chance. It didn't strike me as garbage.

Yeah I feel the same way. I guess to truly get immersed in a game you have to be living a good life, have a good amount of free time, and be in an unrushed, decent mental state.

trips o' truth

Maybe keep trying, user? I got STALKER because Holla Forums and /k/ always touted it as a classic, it was similar aesthetically to New Vegas which I loved (running around a radiated, abandoned wasteland with lots and lots of guns), and rooskies which was a fun change of pace.

I hated it first try. Everything felt dated and just generally boring, the menu system was garbage, the faction system was weird instead of engaging, and the recoil on the starting weapons was just fucking retarded and annoying. Dropped after a couple hours.

Later I posted these misgivings., and a lot of people said "Keep playing to X18, then you'll understand." They were right; that was when it all clicked into place and I felt a part of the game world and enjoyed it immensely. Now that feeling can carry over to new playthroughs. It's a great game user, just keep playing to X18. That's when the lore begins to make sense, that's when the game's famous atmosphere gets kicked into overdrive, that's when a lot of 2spuki shit happens that shakes up the boring "go here and kill these raiders" main goal of the game - it's where you first can start understanding the world.

Why Holla Forums likes EYE though is still absolutely beyond me

It's a toy, like an action figure there's nothing exceptional about the toy it's just a vehicle for play

Get some vodka and an isolated environment to play in.

I fucking suck at video games and even I could play STALKER, and yes, on master difficulty. Git gud faggot

I might actually pick this up, curious though how it handles with a controller vs the keyboard. I mean, FPS' naturally play much better with a mouse and keyboard, but I havent actually played a console game in awhile and kind of feel like having a controller in my hands again for awhile to game (I dont know, dont ask, I dont get it either), so I've been avoiding spending money on an FPS.. TPS like MGS5 maybe but.. eh…

So what would Holla Forums say?

stalker games aren't hard, they are just tedious.

stalker has too many inputs for little things to be played effectively on a controller. Relies a lot on aiming at small targets, quicksave/loading to recover from sudden deaths, really don't play this with a controller. I'd say don't play it at all because there's far better games than this.

If you're this retarded I can't imagine you making any progress in the game. Kill yourself.

There's way more tedious games than STALKER, you can't play games.

Fixed.

mad slav

...

Psst master difficulty ramps up gun damage universally, so all guns - yours and theirs - deal more damage. In my opinion once you learn how to use cover effectively Master is actually easier, just more unforgiving of mistakes

Happens literally all the time

go back to reddit with this filth. everyone knows shit games are shit and good games are good and you're either with us or against us and if you're against us you better prepare for entire run on sentences full of vulgar words that attempt to slight your very character you ass sucking nigger loving crotch martian.

get over yourself

That's fucken cheating user.

Just get Autumn Aurora 2

I prefer Call of Pripyat TBH