I´ve spent the last four or five hours playing STALKER, and it basically still looks like a boring FPS version of FALLOUT to me. Didn´t they originally advertise an all dynamic, AI-driven 30 square km game world? Something that was worth waiting for?
What I see now is a dull RPG where you basically play the old "ask A for a mission, go to B, do something for C, collect item D, go back to A for a reward and a new mission" game. And, as always, you only have a pistol where your enemies outnumber you and have LOTS of AK-47s. Great. In FARCRY or RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN, that was fun. Here, I just have again that feeling of extreme disappointment (worse than it was with Half-Life 2). I'm probably just getting too old for that shit or maybe I have already played too many of those games in my life. Instead of putting all the efforts into fancy graphics engines, they should better invest in the game itself and make it FUN to play.
Those were great First Person Shooters and real milestones:
Doom (simply addictive, desctructive fun :-)
Half-Life (still BY FAR the best FPS game until today)
Unreal Tournament (fast and fun - this game got me to like Deathmatch)
Return To Castle Wolfenstein (great atmosphere, well done, and just FUN to play)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (the ultimate network game)
Far Cry (great level design and the last "Big Thing" in the genre)
FEAR -- could have been a tick better story-wise, but basically was well done.
Those were more or less disappointing "in-betweens":
Unreal (nice graphics, but too buggy and too difficult)
The Quake Series (what happened to Doom????)
Doom 3 (awesome sound engine and horror atmosphere, but the game itself...?)
Half-Life 2 (nice NPCs, nice graphics, but the "story"...?)
STALKER (I'm still trying to find the fun part of the game, maybe it is hidden somehwere)
Anyway, it all doesn't really matter. As long as Neil Manke is working on a new THEY HUNGER game, there is still hope for the genre. And maybe CRYSIS will be a worty successor to FARCRY as well.
What I see now is a dull RPG where you basically play the old "ask A for a mission, go to B, do something for C, collect item D, go back to A for a reward and a new mission" game. And, as always, you only have a pistol where your enemies outnumber you and have LOTS of AK-47s. Great. In FARCRY or RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN, that was fun. Here, I just have again that feeling of extreme disappointment (worse than it was with Half-Life 2). I'm probably just getting too old for that shit or maybe I have already played too many of those games in my life. Instead of putting all the efforts into fancy graphics engines, they should better invest in the game itself and make it FUN to play.
Those were great First Person Shooters and real milestones:
Doom (simply addictive, desctructive fun :-)
Half-Life (still BY FAR the best FPS game until today)
Unreal Tournament (fast and fun - this game got me to like Deathmatch)
Return To Castle Wolfenstein (great atmosphere, well done, and just FUN to play)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (the ultimate network game)
Far Cry (great level design and the last "Big Thing" in the genre)
FEAR -- could have been a tick better story-wise, but basically was well done.
Those were more or less disappointing "in-betweens":
Unreal (nice graphics, but too buggy and too difficult)
The Quake Series (what happened to Doom????)
Doom 3 (awesome sound engine and horror atmosphere, but the game itself...?)
Half-Life 2 (nice NPCs, nice graphics, but the "story"...?)
STALKER (I'm still trying to find the fun part of the game, maybe it is hidden somehwere)
Anyway, it all doesn't really matter. As long as Neil Manke is working on a new THEY HUNGER game, there is still hope for the genre. And maybe CRYSIS will be a worty successor to FARCRY as well.