Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl - Lost alpha to be released 26 of April

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MickDick

Knight at Arms
http://www.moddb.com/mods/lost-alpha


That's right.  We're finally going to get to play it.  Practically everyone thought it was in the same state as Half Life 3.

Some testers have decided to ruin years of our hard work and have leaked an unfinished render-test build of Lost Alpha to the public. The beta dates back to November 5, 2013. This leaked version is not finished and not prepared to be released by any means. It contains render bugs that we've been working on since last year among the other ones that prevent smooth gameplay.
It is stolen copyrighted material and it is illegal to download it.
Modders are forbidden to use any of its contents until official release.
Links to the leaked files won't be tolerated here nor the discussions about it. Any support for the leaked version won't be given either.

This unfortunate event crosses out any chances to release LA as an official addon to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. LA will be released as an addon for free.

In this situation we've decided to release the official version of Lost Alpha on 26th of April 2014.
On Chernobyl disaster 28th anniversary you will get the most recent version of LA. It won't be completely finished as we wanted it to be but at least stable and finishing the game would be possible. This can be called "early access", which means patches, updates will be added in the future. If you feel like supporting us, you can donate on our main webpage, just click on the paypal button in the upper right corner of the screen. All donations will be used for our upcoming project, which we will announce later this year.

On this day there will be official presentation of LA in Warsaw during 'Park in The Zone' event.


While I am glad to finally get to play it, I am a little disappointed at those who did this.  It sucks that they won't be able to sell this now, as they seemed to be into trying to strike a deal with the former GSC Game World and Sergey Grigorovich the owner of the franchise.  It would've been a sufficient reward to be paid for your work naturally, but now it must be released for free, which is good for us I guess.  It seems like they were actually really close to finishing it all up too, considering they're releasing a stable version and you're able to finish it, though I suppose we'll see on the 26th won't we?

In the meantime on the same page I linked to there is a 9 minute preview of the game.  And if you liked the Lost Alpha and are miffed they cannot release it and be paid for their work, you can donate to them and for their future projects here:  http://www.dezowave.com/
 
It won't be completely finished as we wanted it to be but at least stable and finishing the game would be possible. This can be called "early access", which means patches, updates will be added in the future.

So pretty much like all other Stalker games.  :P
 
Anybody playing this? put a few hours in and thoughts so far....
Gameplay....seems way too easy, at first I thought it was because I'm comparing it to other mods or even vanilla SOC although it's years since I played that but the AI is actually slightly screwed, I'm playing on master and I killed most of the military in Cordon with pistol and shotgun quite easily, then reading on the official forum I found this thread on AI too easy....
http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=community&s=forums&s_game_type=xr&thm_page=1&thm_id=22381&sec_id=19
also worth noting one of the devs explains unlike other STALKER games you're not supposed to kill anyone unless they fire first as it has consequences :?. Also exploring without following the storyline means you find hardly any STALKER activity going on you really have to follow it which also prevents you getting out of Cordon (road blocked due to landslide) So I'm at Agroprom now and up to this point it all seems a bit quiet in the Zone,  it's mostly running around only a couple of encounters with bandits, not even the traditional shootout at Garbage but instead a dead easy mission that gets you a scoped weapon, so it's kind of a mixed bag for me, probably wait for a patch in the traditional manner...
Performance......
Flickering skies on DX9 full dynamic lighting is completely distracting, you can run it on DX10 which gets rid of it but needs a console command, it's somewhere in another thread at the GSC forum, apparently it will be available in the menu in a patch also gives a slight FPS increase, I started on 20 FPS now I'm up to around 30 also by reducing view distance and grass density by about a quarter, no AA, some suggest turning off grass shadows but it looks really bad, flat and a bit weird mainly because grass shadows also includes most or all of the trees.
 
there will be a patch this afternoon, though it was supposed to be released yesterday it was postponed to today.

I've come across a lot of bugs.  Most of them not gamebreaking, but I have dealt with a few that broke the main storyline not letting me progress, giving me the only option:  Kill everyone

Yes, you can just kill everyone essentially and still progress in the story, thank god.  But I really wish I could experience the missions, which they seem to put a lot of work into, such as ingame cutscenes, animations, dialogue, etc.


p.s.  forgot to mention my experience.

This is definitely the stalker game we've all been waiting for.  But it was released a bit early.  The devs said so themselves, that this game wasn't finished yet.  I'd say they had maybe 2-3 months to go to finish the game (bugfixing and AI/A-life tweaking), and whatever time it would take to get GDC onboard, if they decided to at all. 

The game is absolutely gorgeous.  There's tons of the new maps (That are absolutely MASSIVE, i might add, and there's so much fun to explore) and missions added, and many many other features.  There are some AI fixes currently out that help fix the wonky AI (in the same thread you posted no less).

Cannot wait for patch.  if it is successful i will simply start a new game.  gladly.
 
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