Okay, so I've purchased this game online and am waiting for it to arrive. I had a few questions for the community about the game before I start.

1. I'm pretty big on survival in games, such as going into buildings for food, water, or anything else I might see as essential. I hear this game has survival elements, what exactly does this entail?

2. Should I play with the Complete mod? I don't know exactly what the Complete mod does, I just don't really want the game's main components altered to make the game easier unless it's something the developers should have implemented from the start.

3. Can you play the game with a 360 controller?

4. This is probably a little late, but should I play any of the other games before starting this? My main concern with playing the older games is graphics, not like I can't be immersed with uglier graphics, but eye candy is a plus.

5. And lastly, can I get a few opinions on what others thought of the game? It's already purchased, but a few opinions might give me some insight on how to play.

Thanks to anyone who comments.

*edited for easier reading

Ill try my best to answer these in order.... Survival entails using bandages, food, items etc to maintain your health during the game. I certainly recommend playing with the complete mod, for the visual upgrades among other things, and it certainly doesnt make it easier. You cannot (or wouldnt want to, rather) play this game with a 360 pad. I didnt bother playing the previous games first, so I dont necessarily recommend it. I think its an amazing game, holds up pretty well, and is incredibly immersive and sometimes frightening. Have fun, buddy.

On the subject of playing previous games in the series I can say that I started out trying to play the first STALKER and tried playing it for a few hours but just couldn't get into it, call of pripyat on the other hand immediately grabbed me and I played a ton of it.

Definitely get the complete mod.

If you complete this one and want more you could probably easily jump into the first two, I don't remember them graphically looking that different.

Definitely suggest the Complete Mod if you're going in with SoC. Not only does it bump some of the textures up, but it also fixes quite a bit of bugs that the game has, even with the number of patches the devs originally applied to it.

Call of Pripyat is probably the easiest to get into, mostly due to it being the most stable of the three games. I haven't played the Complete Mod for it though.

@poppduder: How do the survival elements measure against New Vegas and its Hardcore mode? I felt like it added so much of a deeper experience with the need to eat, drink, and sleep. Does this game have similar elements? Also, can you search inside buildings?

@pie: What about Pripyat grabbed you over SOC? I adore the concept of these games but couldn't get more than an hour into SOC.

Call of Pripyat just dumps you into the world where as SOC has that weird slow opening with the bad salesman guy. You just get an AK, some vague objectives and the world.

Just got the game, installed and played a few hours. So far I like it, but it doesn't scratch that survival itch I've been looking for...fingers crossed for The Last of Us. Thanks everyone for your input.

Just finished the game and it was pretty great.

yeah, not really a survival game. Food is easy to come by. I would describe it more as an open world exploration/scavenging shooter RPG.

Important stuff:

equipe bolts by pressing 6 and check for anomalies by throwing them when your counter start blipping.

equip your artifact detector with o in an anomalie field to detect valuable artifacts

invest in a better detector early. The one you have at the beginning is shit

only equip an artifact if you can balance its radiation output by equipping a radiation absorbing artifact

keep a shotgun in your inventory. you always need a good shotgun in this game

soak in the atmosphere and mood when exploring empty USSR buildings with only the wind blowing through blasted windows to keep you company. What a great game.

@patrickklepek , you should definitely play it to get the best eerie eastern european fix gaming can provide

My recommendation to you to scratch that survival itch is DayZ. I'll try to make a list of all the things that make it probably the best zombie survival game to date.

You must eat food or run the risk of passing out and probably death, not sure on that last part

You must constantly drink liquids be it water, coke, pepsi whatever or my guess is you will die. You can get water from ponds and such with a water bottle

If you are attacked you can bleed and that requires a bandage. If you don't have any bandages you will eventually bleed out.

Low blood brings blurry vision, poor sense of sound and times where you just pass out. On top of that injury must be treated with pain killers or they will shake, making it hard to aim

You can break bones which makes you only able to slowly crawl around until you aquire morphine ( happened to me once, had to wait in a house alone while my buddy scavenged a hospital)

Eating can bring slight health back but nothing to write home about. To fully heal you need blood packs and heres the kicker, you need somebody else to give it to you. Also a recent patch added the chance of getting an infection from contaminated blood.

You can get sick and get a nasty cough along with messed up aim and need antibiotics to cure

Im gonna stop there but if you wanna hear more I can tell you some of the other insane systems in the game (or mod).

I played SoC for about 12 hours, but eventually had to give up. First of all, the game's environment is insanely oppressive, which is a huge bummer. It's easy to get immersed in, but not easy to enjoy. Secondly, even with mods and bug fixes, the game's UI and systems are still unnecessarily complicated and awkward.

I have Call of Pripyat, but I haven't played it yet. I'm sure all of my criticisms apply just as easily to CoP though.

@pyrodactyl: Yeah, I've had to look up a few things while playing. I knew this game didn't hold your hand, but was surprised at how much it just throws you in to figure everything out for yourself. Thanks for the bolt info. I had seen the bolt under #6 but assumed it had something to do with repairing something. And yeah, I learned about equipping artifacts the hard way...by not paying attention and dying in the middle of completing a mission. Why, in regards to the shotgun? I have a few and only have one on me if I have ammo for it. Do they deal a crazy amount of damage?

@sackmanjones: I've thought of getting into DayZ, but watching a few videos it didn't look all that great to me. I'm sure this is a well known fact, in which I don't know, but is DayZ all online or can you play singleplayer?

@spiritgod: not sure which difficulty setting you picked but a shotgun is the best way to take out mutants and dogs on hard at least. Some of them move too quickly for good headshots with an assault rifle, have a lot of health and rush you. Bloodsuckers and hamsters in particular are way easier to deal with using a shotgun. Try finding the one one step above the dual barrel so you can have more than 2 shots ready at all times. Also, you can buy ammo from the shop.

@pyrodactyl: I have it on the default difficulty, since I'm fairly new to the franchise. Thanks, I'm sure it'll help me with my playthrough.

@jrinswand: I would say call of prypiat has a more open world feel but yeah. The atmosphere is still thick with despair and desolation. One of the only game to provide that kind of feeling though. It's not really scary, just, eerie and desolate, in a post apocalypse sort of way.

All you need to know is right here. I'd recommend playing SoC/CS first only because both of those games have tutorials that introduce you to the game's mechanics. It's funny how most people, when they get into the STALKER series this day and time, opt to play CoP first over the first two when it's the least friendly to new and inexperienced players.

In my experience, most of the mods for STALKER make the game brutally unforgiving and sadistically challenging. Here's a good write up on the difficulty of some of them.

So here's a few basic tips to help you out. Take note all of these are for Vanilla, not any one of the mods.

- You can run past most of the early game mutants

- Don't do any of the mutant side quests unless you're actually prepared! You'll get far better weapons later on that can one shot most of the mutant bosses.

- Unlike SoC/CS, all the NPC's are initially neutral towards you. No more bandits/military/mercenary blasting you in the face for no reason. Of course the Monolith and the Mercenaries will be hostile once you get to Pripyat, but you don't have to worry about for now.

- Fuck burers

- Bloodsuckers may be invisible, but you can see the water splash around their feet when they're running towards you (in the swamps of course)

- All the calibration tools are in Pripyat, so none of the lvl 3 upgrades can be unlocked early on in the game

- Viper 5 (Mp5) is easily the best weapon in the game. Semi, burst, full auto modes, 40 rnd max, easy to aim iron sights, can be equipped with a silencer, and uses both the cheapest and most plentiful ammo types in the game (9x19mm and 9x18mm). If you're lucky, you can grab it off dead bandits early in the game.

- Don't underestimate the knife

- Binoculars can detect mutants and other STALKERS. I think it's listed as "weapon 5" in the controls. Might want to remap it to "b" or something else

- Doctors can heal and get rid of radiation for free

- Radiation is fairly common in the Zone and the artifacts that get rid of it are the best types. Side for the weight increase and thermal artifacts, the rest of them aren't very useful

Good luck and happy hunting

Don't be crazy. The best gun is the gauss gun.

Aside from that one there is the automatic shotgun for mutants and close encounters in buildings. The full auto sniper thing with integrated scope and silencer is also fantastic for medium to long rang headshots. Besides, ammo is really not an issu in the game passed the first few hours.

@pyrodactyl: Well in terms of pure stat wise, the RPG-7 is as accurate and powerful as the Gauss Rifle. But yeah, I think we both know the serious disadvantages of using the RPG (heavy, limited and expensive ammo, single-shot, etc).

For early beginners, I think most people will get alot of mileage out of the Viper 5. And not just in CoP, it has served me well in every one of the STALKER games. It's certainly makes the pistols redundant. That extra accuracy is useless without a scope and none of them can mount even one. I find that the shotguns burn through ammo far too quickly and with the incredibly slow reload it's not an ideal weapon on master difficulty. Plus, I don't like how poor the handling is, feels like I'm running my mouse through molasses. I'd definitely recommend upgrading to Storm once you can afford the 20,000 price tag and that's only if you get it on the first purchase from Nimble.