Casual achievement hunter’s progress log #70

Yes, it’s more combat focused now but the gunplay is still the same, enemies don’t have infinite respawns etc.

I’d disagree. The gunplay’s even more based on luck with guns shooting at a 45 degree angle at times (best example being the sawed-off shotgun for that). Same with respawns. Enemies absolutely respawn and the entire faction system is built on that. Squad spawns in, they squat at a designated area-of-interest, they pick a target and they move towards it. That’s how the entire system’s built, after all. Only things to not respawn are specifically placed enemies either for scripting or just regular missions. So yeah, that underground base you take out for the Ecologists is filled with only placed enemies, but otherwise the open world is almost entirely inhabited by respawning squads.

The respawn system is a huge departure from SoC since SoC did have respawning, but it was extremely limited, unlike in CS where a squad respawned every few minutes at worst and every quarter hour or so at worst. The reason it didn’t feel as frequent was that their A.I. was designed to stand at their point of interest for a while before they started advancing towards a target.

The fact they introduced gun and armor upgrades makes it more fun IMO as your guns don’t jam as often.

Yeah, I agree with that. I liked adding things to my gun and also taking other stuff away. It was quite limited though for the guns. Not sure what armor upgrades you’re talking about though other than artifacts and just new armors. Maybe I missed the entire mechanic for the armors. But the guns jamming less frequently was more convenient, but it also totally fucked with the entire concept of the game since everything’s worn down in that world. Or it’s supposed to be, at least. There was no “elite” in that game anymore because everyone had weapons in great condition and the weaponry you got wasn’t based on the faction, it was based on how far you were in the game mainly with very rare exceptions.

I personally really like combat in stalker and more realistic gunplay where shots don’t 100% land where you aim and guns don’t have pre-made spray pattern.

I don’t know of guns that don’t fire where you point them, since… you know, guns have barrels for that. As for the spray pattern, I can’t say anything.

It still has some quiet moments from what I remember. Neither it was bombastic adventure all the time. A first walk through the Red Forest was quiet and terrifying. Flooding the tunnels for Duty was a little short but similar to those underground missions in SoC. Plenty of quiet time when traveling through the zone between the missions. And SoC had those CoD moments too, when you left the first underground complex to find yourself in the middle of military base, good luck trying to leave there stealthy. Or the bandit base where the boss had the second key to another underground complex and you pretty much had to kill all of them. Even the first mission where you had to help clear the bandit camp near the neutral base in Cordon, if you got unlucky and the 2-3 guys that went with you got killed at the beginning you had to kill like 10-15 bandits on your own. And all of that early in the game, late game had plenty of fights and moments like this, but I guess you could say the game earned it there.

I think it comes down to two things. The ratio and the gameplay mechanics. CS’s first quarter is extreme, linear action. The last third is also linear action. Secondly, the faction war mechanic is designed so you won’t go for really any time without being prompted to go into a mid-sized skirmish. Or when you move around normally, then odds are you’ll run into those medium sized groups. In SoC I was able to easily go 20 minutes without spotting a human enemy with it being possible that I went 45 minutes without combat because not everything required large scale fighting all the time. You start off, you kill 3 boars, you then kill around 40-50 bandits across 3-5 camps, depending on your choice. Then you get out of the swamp and you’re greeted by the turret. You obviously can’t know you had to take the other path, so you might want to try and push through, but it’s not a good idea. So you push back and kill around 10 bandits just going from one camp to another for the other exit. That’s just the first 20% of the game. And I’ve already killed more enemies than I did for the majority of SoC. Mind you, you can lower the body count if you push through it quickly, but then that will also ignore the entire point of Stalker.

There’s a reason people mock the ending of SoC. The good thing for SoC is that the ending isn’t as long and also, as you said, it had earned it. You’d had skirmishes with the best of the best and everything ramped up to a bombastic end. It was a weak end still, but you can see the classic theme of escalation in the writing that they tried to implement.

I don’t want to sound elitist or anything, but what difficulty did you played on?

I played on the Master difficulty to avoid bulletspongy enemies.