Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 2 days ago I might have to play around with those a bit more. I don’t mind though, it’s suppose to be fun not feel like a punishment.
Well, that’s the thing - STALKER players are generally masochists who hate themselves and love misery! The punishment is the fun! How else would mods like Fatal Error be so popular?
I’m only halfway in that camp, though, even though I do enjoy the loot/survival/scavenging based gameplay. I don’t play the G.A.M.M.A. modpack myself, but I do use a similar design philosophy to that in my own custom list where traders don’t sell guns or armour, everything drops in low condition and you need to scavenge stuff for parts to progress (I forgot to mention Weapon Parts Overhaul probably).
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh, I totally get that. My own preferences lean heavily towards style of gameplay that most people would call tedious and annoying, I’m just not into “1 hit death, enemies spot and attack you from the other side of the map and you dehydrate in minutes” type of thing. That’s why I usually start with medium difficulty settings and bump up from there as I get the feel for how things are balanced.
Punishment IS fun, over tuning on the other hand can be less so. Since everyone has their own preferences, that sentence is purely subjective for every player and what they see as too much.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. It’s a fine balance between immersion (which to me is one of the main draws of STALKER) and enjoyable gameplay. I tried playing a Call of Chernobyl-based modpack called A.R.E.A. as a counter example, and that shit is just pure pain. Way too much “realism”, way too little fun. It was certainly interesting but… yeah.
Though actually on the note of spotting you from half the map, there are a ton of helpful AI mods that are pretty much standard that I should probably also dig up for you…
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The video you sent me pushed me into another marathon of mod browsing so thanks for that… Nah, seriously - thanks! I found another 5 or so mods to try out already, though most of them are gameplay related rather than graphical ones.
I was actually planning to try out the Alife collection for AI changes as they seem like a promising set of improvements. Have you tried them? Are they any good or are there others you’d recommend over (or in addition to) those?
Which is the Alife collection? I think what most people are playing with now is Alife+, although that got released a few months after I stopped playing the last time so I have no first hand accounts of it. I do have a couple of good AI mods in that sheet I linked, like Semi-Radiant AI and rank-based travel.
Otherwise like ReDone Combat AI, RE:Vision, Stealth are popular mods. Probably also want Decreased Enemy Bush Hearing Distance, Zone NPCs Can’t See Through Bushes and Zone Mutants Can’t See Through Bushes and Ghillie Rework. Some of these mods probably need some minor compatibility work for script merging or at least load order management.
Useful Idiots that I already recommended is in my opinion essential for companions (and includes the functionality of the He Is With Me mod you already have installed, I would just replace that with it). Companions Disable Headlamps In Stealth is also good, I’m trying to remember if there is a newer version somewhere though. There might be.
These were just some off the top of my head, I’m probably forgetting something.