S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby nub on Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:42 pm

Release Trailer
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This has been out for a few months now, but I thought I would share this here since I know a lot of fellow 'Lopers were big on the Stalker series.

Lost Alpha is a standalone (and 100% free) remake of the original Shadow of Chernobyl. In 2009, GSC released an alpha build of the game to the modding community to be used freely. A group of avid modders and content creators got together and formed the Dezowave group, and decided to try and recreate what GSC had originally envisioned Shadow of Chernobyl to be prior to all the extensive content cutting. Using the assets from the alpha build, they have recreated whole areas in the world that never saw the light of day, added in mutants that never made it to the final build, and even expanded the story line to fit the newly expanded world. They have also done extensive work on the visuals to make the game look better. Dem god rays.

After a lot of time and effort, they have finally managed to complete their work and have released Lost Alpha as its own game, and it is 100% free to download. You do not need Shadow of Chernobyl nor any other Stalker title in order to play it (and yes, it is totally legal in this regard). There have been three patches since its release, so make sure to get the most recent one along with the main game.

I don't think I need to mention that it's going to have a few bugs here and there, but it shouldn't be anything compromising. Besides...what is Stalker without a nice, healthy dose of bugs?
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby [KIRBY] on Thu Aug 14, 2014 3:00 am

played it since it came out, and saying "few bugs" does not even do it justice, even Clear Sky was not THIS buggy on release, but then again, its Stalker experience after all :)

to be honest, playing it I felt like playing SoC for the first time again, while I am not a fan of story and amount of cutscenes, it has its charm to it, as in budget of mod team could probably be compared to budget of GSC back when SoC was being made.

still, I would recommend everyone that is into stalker to play it, hopefully with less CTD problems than at release.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Major Banter on Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:47 am

I'm about halfway through at this point, and it's a buggy, amateur, piece of shit that constantly crashes and fails to load cutscenes.

I love it.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby TKAzA on Thu Aug 14, 2014 12:41 pm

Major Banter wrote:I'm about halfway through at this point, and it's a buggy, amateur, piece of shit that constantly crashes and fails to load cutscenes.

I love it.


If your half way through i doubt you will have picked up the latest patch that fixes most the crashes, but still its part of its charm.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Major Banter on Thu Aug 14, 2014 12:47 pm

Yeah it was a choice between maybe lose my save and fix bugs, or get on with it. The save-proof mini patch helped a lot with stuff like batteries and so on though.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby joe_rogers_11155 on Thu Aug 14, 2014 7:51 pm

Maybe this is a good place to ask:

I've been wanting to buy Call of Pripyat but it never seems to go on sale. Is that because the developers are gone?
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby [KIRBY] on Thu Aug 14, 2014 8:09 pm

story of stalker developers is a rather sad one, and game does go on sale usually, you can pick it cheap
would recommend playing other two before tho
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Jeeves on Thu Aug 14, 2014 8:41 pm

Wasn't the story that their initial publisher THQ went bust, and their sequels weren't relatively commercially successful despite trying to adapt them to appeal to a broader audience; so their playboy owner layed off his entire staff?.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Major Banter on Thu Aug 14, 2014 9:26 pm

STALKER goes on sale all the time, but even at, what, £13/$20, it's 100% worth it. Slap Complete or MISERY onto it and enjoy it.

Jeeves wrote:Wasn't the story that their initial publisher THQ went bust, and their sequels weren't relatively commercially successful despite trying to adapt them to appeal to a broader audience; so their playboy owner layed off his entire staff?.

If you read up on 4A Games' experiences of working in Ukraine, they've had to deal with everything from having their hardware impounded when leaving/entering the country, protection payouts, and local government corruption. These guys have a really hard time working in Eastern Europe, and while STALKER was profitable I think GSC had a few more problems than just publisher related issues. Hell, SHoC did perfectly well for itself - THQ I heard were frequently frustrated, but they did their best to help GSC out.

It comes back to STALKER 2. Something happened in the pipeline of development, and Sergei's involvement has always been very much the unknown. It's a real shame.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/9/8/4568598/stalker-fallout-gsc-game-world
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby nub on Thu Aug 14, 2014 10:32 pm

I wanted to cry when I found out about GSC World shutting down, because I was anticipating Stalker 2 like crazy. But it sounded like the CEO just didn't give a flying fuck about the developers, so it was probably for the better that the company was shut down.

It's just a shame the Stalker IP had to die along with it. Survarium looks cool, but the whole online F2P FPS thing is just not appealing to me at all. The way they described their vision for it in that Polygon article as "Looks like Stalker, but plays like Call of Duty" is probably exactly why. To me, that's just outright bad design philosophy, but I guess they had to go that route in order to get "clean" funding. It's a shame that crowd funding wasn't really a thing at the time. They easily would have gotten the money they needed from Kickstarter.

The Metro games are about as close to a Stalker game as you can get right now, but they're obviously still not the same. They're designed to be entirely linear, and the atmosphere - while good - just doesn't match the Stalker games. Stalker was just...completely unique; including everything from the atmosphere all the way down to the "game feel." To top it off, the game world managed to feel really organic and mysterious, no matter how much you played the game.

I guess, in the end, we just need to appreciate the series for what it is; though I don't think it will ever be matched unless all the veteran developers were to band together and make an actual spiritual successor.


Oh, and yes, I believe the recent patch did fix a lot of CTDs, and since it alters the storyline somewhat, it will corrupt any save files you may have. So you'll probably have to start a new game. The other thing that bugs me about this mod is just how damn unoptimized it is. There's been users with fucking GTX Titans complaining about lousy performance. Apparently grass shadows and DX10 rendering are the major culprits.

...But I want all the graphics. :c


Anyway, I'm personally waiting for LURK 1.2's eventual release. It's by the guys that did MISERY for Call of Pripyat, but this time around they aren't focusing on making it balls-to-the-walls difficult. I think once it's out, it will be the best SoC mod out there. Even better than Complete. Daemonion is doing amazing sound work for it, and Millenium's weapon models and animations are fantastic.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Major Banter on Thu Aug 14, 2014 10:35 pm

I'm in the Survarium Alpha/Beta/Whatever, and the PvP is mehtacular. Still, once they nail the guns, co-op and freeplay might just tip the scales. The maps are utterly gorgeous - I'd love to be able to roam around them in my own time, alone or with just a couple of friends. We'll see.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Jeeves on Fri Aug 15, 2014 12:02 am

Thanks for that Banter. From that article it appears that Ukraine -- even before this war -- was barely a first world country.

It comes back to STALKER 2. Something happened in the pipeline of development


Absolutely: "The game had been in development for two years by that time, and layoffs and attrition had shrunk the staff from a high of nearly 200 to a core group of less than 50"

I'd speculate that laying off nearly 75% of the work-force before the game's story was even known to the staff, suggests that the he was not assured of it being a success.
He also quibbled over wages with his programmers, which are not very much anyway by western standards; as a millionaire he could easily of paid them indefinitely, suggests that he had his doubts.

I agree with you that SHoC was likely(and unexpectedly) very profitable, and the change of publishers was only due to THQ dying, but Deep Silver(publisher of CS) is, and presumably was in 2008 a big game publisher; and it would surely have been a mistake to not offer to publish another profitable Stalker game: In 2009 CoP is published by obscure European publisher 'bitComposer' and they claim to have sold 500k units(they also claim that SHoC and CS make up 3.5 of the 4 million units sold of the entire series). GSC self published in the East, so those figures are ambiguous -- perhaps deliberately, but assuming those numbers are EU/USA, there is a large disparity between them which implies that COP did not sell well, comparatively.
Considering that Stalker is a niche game, and also considering it's ditching by a software publishing behemoth(Deep Silver) and the proportionately poor sales of the most recent sequel, its reasonable to say that STALKER 2 just wouldn't have sold well enough over here.



nub wrote: Stalker was just...completely unique; including everything from the atmosphere all the way down to the "game feel." To top it off, the game world managed to feel really organic and mysterious, no matter how much you played the game


I couldn't describe it any better. I'll play through this and compare it acutely with SHoC.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby nub on Fri Aug 15, 2014 10:02 pm

Major Banter wrote:I'm in the Survarium Alpha/Beta/Whatever, and the PvP is mehtacular. Still, once they nail the guns, co-op and freeplay might just tip the scales. The maps are utterly gorgeous - I'd love to be able to roam around them in my own time, alone or with just a couple of friends. We'll see.

Freeplay is probably about the only thing I'd find interesting, but what would you even do in freeplay? Are they planning on adding a story line that takes you through large areas that are all interconnected, like in Stalker, but with the option of cooperative? That would be cool, but having my friends with me and goofing off would kill the atmosphere for me. It would be interesting if they implemented a faction wars concept similar to Stalker, but instead of something like A-Life driving NPCs to make it dynamic and unscripted, it could be entirely driven by the players. Kind of like in Planetside 2 where the world is fully open and battles happen organically and aren't "matches." That could easily be a fun game. Maybe that's what they're aiming for. But deathmatch is just...a waste of time...

Online shooters like CoD and Battlefield (hell, even CS nowadays) don't really hold my interest anymore because I find them utterly boring and monotonous. Unless it's a retro arena style game like Unreal Tournament or Quake, or is really niche and unique like Natural Selection, I don't even bother.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Jeeves on Tue Aug 19, 2014 11:09 am

I was stalking through the forest, becoming increasingly creeped out by the eerie atmosphere. Low on Ammo and anxiously wary of mutants I find the walls of a compound, and spot a large Antenna tower beyond the walls. I cautiously walk up the road. I walk into one of the buildings and see some archaic scientific apparatus; no ammo here. I search the rooms up-stairs, nobody here: safe place. Thunder crashes, the sky turns grey and it starts to rain. Suddenly I hear someone shout out in Russian followed by an explosion! and then silence... I wait for a minute, then creep back through the rooms and look out of a window...nothing. I turn towards the stairs and am literally face to balaclava with a Trenchcoat Bandit :shock: . He gets it in the face. Was he alone? How many of them are there? I hear voices down the stairs. Low on ammo! Can I run? Into the pitch-black of night where the mutants are?. Knowing I cant shoot all of them I do a Hail-Mary and chuck a hand-grenade down the stairs. The voices stop. I look down the stairs expecting to see red on the walls but just hear groans; Thank God I used an F1. They were laying next to each other in the doorway of an adjoining room, arteries torn apart by shrapnel; I leave them to make their peace with god -- before their friends show up.

Shit, where is the way out!?. I look out the door to the west and recognise the entrance to the compound. I recognise half-a-dozen bandits with pistols and shotguns guarding it!. I sprint out the door and hide behind the perpendicular wall of the building. Hopefully we can play cat and mouse until I find a way out. The voices get angrier and closer. I spot a ladder up to the roof; Low on ammo and paranoid that a dozen more Bandits are waiting for me deeper in the compound I start climbing. I haul myself onto the roof. At the opposite end, another Trenchcoat Bandit steps out from behind a ventilation duct and loads an IL-86. Round after round pumps through the ventilation duct next to me.
He desperately tries to reload as I advance toward him while frantically depleting the last clip from my Walker P9-M.
I take his ammo and unload his IL86. I then step to the edge of the roof and take revenge on the Tracksuit Bandits below. Sporadic gunfire follows me as I sprint out of the Compound -- guess I made the right choice; He who fights and runs away, etc. Anyway I'll come back tonight and cut your throats while you dream of finding the Wishgranter.

I cant believe that I've escaped, ha ha fuck the zone. Night falls and I plan to go back for Ammo and supplies at dawn. As I look for a place to make camp I'm accosted by 2 Bloodsuckers and a Peudogiant. "Sorry", says Lost Alpha "Your shit outta' luck". "That's not fair, I don't deserve to die like this " I meekly object, Lost Alpha refuses to hear any of it: "Open World" it glibly retorts and stands by smugly as Bloodsuckers tear my body into a bloody mess.

Such is life in zone.


Aside: The PseudoGiant is fucking ridiculous.
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Re: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Postby Stormy on Sat Aug 23, 2014 7:20 pm

Damn thats some good advertising. Downloading now
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