Stalker: COP, Fallout 4 and Philosophical Divergences in Design

I've been able to get back into playing computer games after a fairly lengthy absence where I only had Terraria, Starcraft & Brood War (which were/are free), and a great little game called Dungeon Warfare to distract me from professional and other pressures. Of course the first thing I did after a 3+ year absence is get a cheap computer together to play fairly modern games. Of course I started with Fallout 4, because I had only played a few hours on a friend's PS4 and enjoyed it enough to want to give it a full go. Then the Stalker series went on sale, and since I'd been meaning to play a Stalker game since the original was released, I grabbed Call of Pripyat.

Playing both more or less side by side when time allowed has been interesting. There is a real divide in development philosophies between each that is kind of useful for examining the differences in Western and Post-Bloc thought. The differences in narrative style and game mechanics tell a wider story that's kind of interesting to me, and since I almost never blog anymore, and nobody reads this blog anyway, I thought I'd put my thoughts into the internet right now. Plus both games are post apocalyptic in a sense: Fallout in the global sense, and Stalker in the more local sense (already food for thought). There are significant differences between these two 'shoot a gun at a mutant'-type games.

For instance, in Fallout 4, when you emerge, everything is a mess and even the simplest tasks have been left up to you. You begin to fix the world, which is established before you, and doing OK, but it's clear that the crux of everything is you, the player character. You decide who wins confrontations, what gets built, who takes power, and things generally don't change without your actions. As you level up, the world begins to bow to your will.

In Stalker, you're thrown into an area where nobody really cares about you, as you're just another guy in a weird wasteland, and the only distinction you have is a gun given to you by the military for exemplary service. Everything in the Stalker world is already set up, simple tasks are being undertaken by everyone, and there's a fun bit of competition to grab artifacts and make money. Also nobody looks up to you, and when they ask for your help it's either because it's dangerous, the quest giver is a coward, or someone needs you to come along as a hired gun.

Environmentally, too, this divergence is apparent. In Fallout 4 there are radiation storms that are mildly inconveniencing, but you get so many meds and tricks to deal with it that you'll never truly be endangered. In Stalker there are periodic storms that wipe out everything, even knocking birds from the sky, and all characters have to run for shelter or perish. The storms frequently wipe out other characters, and you can then loot them to make a quick buck. If you get caught in a storm, unless you have a special medicine, you are dead, and running for cover can be hectic, and judging whether or not it's worth going out to do something is important, as sometimes the weather system will trick you.

One very cool bit of emergent gameplay in Stalker is a rush to loot fallen NPCs, which other NPCs will regularly do, so quite often you'll come across a body and there will be nothing to grab, except maybe the bullets you can unload from a gun. In Fallout 4? You guessed it. You're the only one looting anything; the world exists for you to loot, and others to merely pass through. There's no real competitive sense.

Enemy design in Fallout 4 took a step up from previous entries in the series, which combines with a new combat engine to make the shooting and killing pretty good. Melee is sad because of canned animations and enemies that get really good at blocking, making it kind of slow-paced and clumsy even compared to previous FPS Fallout titles. In Stalker, enemy design is carried from earlier entries, and weird. Some enemies are etherial 'poltergeists' who just fuck you up ruthlessly, and you have to avoid them, others use psychic powers to make you pant and drop your shit. Many of the enemies in both games feel like bullet sponges, but humans in Stalker generally die with one headshot, while in Fallout the damage of a headshot is negotiable, and later enemies are incredibly spongey.

Presentation is paramount in both titles, and they set their atmospheres very effectively: Fallout 4 with more panache, and Stalker with a bit more grittiness: the engine is a bit rough and still very much in service to that game, where in FO4 one gets the sense that the overhauled and relatively polished engine is almost just an excuse to launch the title. I mean it follows from the Oblivion with guns aspect of Fallout 3, that we got Skyrim with guns. Not bad, per se, but you can see the business model behind the product.

In terms of presentation, Fallout 4 is glorious compared to Stalker: going from Stalker to Fallout is like stepping into a crisp evening breeze where the lighting and textures are great, the sound design is cleaner, and it's apparent that they are games from different eras. That said, one thing I appreciate about Stalker is that it's very much utilitarian, meaning that the world looks good enough and plays well,  but the main vehicle is the gameplay itself. You won't come back for the graphics, but anyone who goes back to a game for the graphics has bigger problems.

It stands to reason that the narrative aspects of each game follow the divergence of opinion and outlook. As just another Stalker, you do what you can and meet very few unambiguously friendly characters. One of the first you'll encounter randomly shoots out the door when you walk by, and might even kill you. In Fallout, nobody is your friend until you do one thing for them, but after one quest they're good buddies with you, and quite often you'll meet characters for the first time and already be on a chummy first name basis with them. Some types of Fallout 4 enemies will shoot at you regardless of everything, whereas in Stalker, most humans are neutral and going about their own business (which mostly involves sitting around, walking around, or shooting at things), and won't shoot on sight unless you give them a reason.

Fallout 4's characters are all fully voiced. Some are more interesting than others, but none stood out to me. Every now and then one would die, and in one case I had to betray and slaughter a bunch, but for the most part, I'd meet a character and think that maybe there would be depth, but there was none or little to be found. Most of the backstory is written out in computer journal entries that most players won't read. Stalker's characters are almost entirely cyphers, and have few voiced lines, and are probably more devoid of characterization than Fallout's, yet despite that, you still get some sense of personality when you meet them. And they've all got hilariously acted voice clips (except a super annoying guy named Hawaiian, who you can't kill).

Quest design in each game is nothing to sing praises about. Stalker's quests let you do a lot more investigating and rely on you to make decisions about where to search for things, and who to talk to. In Fallout 4 every quest is fed to you with markers, but you get to decide who to talk to. Every now and then there won't be a marker, and since you'll be used to them, you'll get thrown off completely whenever this happens. I can't say the storyline of either game wowed me, but Stalker was much more original since I hadn't played the other games. Fallout has potentially infinite quests, but these are so unremarkable that they actually drag down the rest of the game, and consist entirely of killing and/or grabbing.

Item design says a lot about games. In Fallout 4 you get a shit ton of items, limited carry weight, and wear a bunch of different parts of armor. The inventory system is pretty smooth, upgrading is simple (perhaps simpler than some players would like) and there's a lot to collect. Whether collecting any of it is worthwhile is up to the player. A randomized legendary loot system gives you items that vary from 'crappy' to 'overpowered', with most items falling boringly in between. There is no item durability system, a first in the Fallout FPS series, and unless you play on survival mode, ammo and healing syringes have no weight.

Stalker's item system is interesting, chewy even. Vendors won't buy any items that are too worn out, meaning you rarely want to pick up guns to sell, since most are worn by the time you get to them. What's fun is you can simply unload guns in other inventories to take the bullets and continue on your way. There's a weight system that's fairly realistic, and slows you down as you carry more stuff, meaning you can get stranded if you try to be a pack rat, and since every round of ammo has weight, and all other items do too, you need to think about what you may take with on a run or a mission.  You also need to carry food, booze (to clear radiation) and bandages (to stop bleeding) as well as medkits for emergency healing, and various types of drugs.  Plus you get artifacts, which are anomalous miracle things that fill you with radiation, or even drain you of radiation, and give you various resistances or buffs.

Stalker has no item manipulation. You drop something and it stays there, usually clips into the ground a bit, and there's no moving them. Fallout 4 has Bethesda's famous 'put it anywhere' system where you can make a stack of items if you want. I suppose that adds depth and replay value for some people, but since Morrowind, making a little customized dwelling hasn't appealed to me. So the whole community building part of the game was lost on me. In Stalker you don't build anything. The world is essentially static, which works out pretty well. Both games have a lot of designed setpieces, and Fallout's blow Stalker's out of the water in terms of complexity, apperance, and detail, but Stalker's have more of a grim and foreboding feeling.

Stalker has no levelling system either. You start at level Dergyatev, and you stay at that level. Your equipment will get upgraded and you'll gain artifacts that make you more powerful or add to your abilities or resistances, but you don't get perks or anything. Your perks are the things you take with you, and how you use them. Which is nice. You can nearly get through the whole game with just your upgraded starting equipment. It won't be easy, and might in fact be tedious, but it can be done. It's nice, in an era of skill trees and XP, to play a game that doesn't have either. You play for cash, and upgrades, and supplies. Refreshing.

Fallout 4 is all about leveling. Unlike in previous Fallout games, you can upgrade your attributes with skill points, so nothing is out of your reach. If you begin as a brainless brawler, you can eventually learn nuclear physics. If you begin as a pencil-necked sweet-talker, you can eventually become a hulking behemoth who can punch people's heads off and still be silver-tongued and smart. The perks are not groundbreaking. Enjoy adding 20% more damage and a flavor perk for whatever weapon you'll be using, or whatever skill you do (all hacking and lockpicking is inexplicably gated by skill level), and that's about it. Some perks make you absorb radiation, or add quality of life abilities, or even add fun and unpredictable things (nearly always based on undefined 'small/decent/good chance to' conditions), but the whole system left me cold. Plus, the game is only hard until you're past level 30 and have the skills you need to wreck it. After that, you'll slowly put points into skills that make no sense from a roleplaying perspective, because you've filled all the rest out.

Overall, Stalker has more of a sim game feel where you are engaged to make choices all the time. In Fallout you gather tons of stuff and kill tons of stuff, but it rarely adds up to what you had hoped for, so you end up needing to challenge yourself or running the risk of losing all interest, and either is possible in a very open world that has no true ending. In Stalker, there's a clear endpoint to the game, so messing around isn't that important, unless you're trying to break the game by abusing stashes, progression points, or level geometry (I didn't really get into that with either game, except an attempted 'Idiot Savant' run in FO4 that was not as much fun as I'd hoped).

Two different, open worlds, and one teaches the myth of the west (ie. that you're special, and it's non-negotiable and boring) and the other the myth of the Bloc (ie. that you're not at all special, maybe you kind of are, but that's up to you, and others will dictate most of what you do). One holds your hands maybe a little too much, and the other lets you run off like an unsupervised child. Both have unforgiving moments, stories with options and paths to take, and probably enough replay value for a couple of runs. FO4 is more beautiful, detailed, and well-animated, but Stalker has a more interesting and alien environment that does not depart from realism quite as much, and feels less welcoming. I discovered a feeling I remember from gaming in the early and mid nineties as a kid: games don't have to be super welcoming experiences to be fun, sometimes having to struggle how to learn to play effectively, or slowly working out what everything is and how it works, is the truly interesting part that draws you into a game.

Both games are escapes from our own world. They offer an 'unpredictable' open world environment for the player to wander and expore. Yet the design differences are best exemplified, I think, by the memories from each that stand out most to me. In Stalker, it was watching as time and time again packs of dogs just ruined the NPCs, and I looted them. In Fallout 4 it was sickening sense of turning on another group and ruthlessly executing them in their den without any chance to talk things over or any recourse to a non-violent solution. The world of Fallout 4 felt an order of magnitude more arbitrary, which left it feeling hollow despite all its frills and half-formed characters.

In that sense, Stalker is a little better in terms of narrative: you can find non-violent solutions to some missions. Of course killing mutants, as always, is non-negotiable. It's hard to say one game is better than the other. They both offer different ways to explore the ideas that one is self-made, that change is harmful but necessary, and that you have to hazard the unknown for a chance at more. They're both quite brainless, but Stalker lets you think a little bit more about what you're doing, and gives you a couple of chances to see things through your way.