This game is based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which is loosely based on the film, Stalker, which, in turn, is very loosely based on the wonderful novel, Roadside Picnic. There's even a poster for the film Stalker in the bar.
@@TheTadek2001 The term comes from a 50 year old Russian novel called "Roadside Picnic" and essentially describes illegal treasure hunters in an exclusion zone. "Stalker" isn't just a reference to the GSC games. It's a promise of danger, adventure and riches, but that meaning seems to be lost outside of Russia, because who reads 50 year old books, right?
It was clear on the beginning of the video, when he doesn't have any Idea on why the character throw "garbage". TBH, i don't want to see him playing STALKER, since he'll get wrecked and bash It anyways.
To give you some perspective, this game is but one of many ripoffs of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a single player game, but because the features lend so well to an MMO, people have been trying to make S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque MMO's for a while. Everything you praised in this game was not achieved by the devs. They ripped it off straight from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.
I think this game was originally called STALKER Online before getting rebranded over and over. It was called SZone at one point and then had a different name when it first came to Steam. Like it went from being a fan made game to a cash grab by re releasing the same game over and over pretending it's new.
To be completely fair, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series also did not do everything on their own. The entire setting was taken from the (way better imo) book "Roadside Picnic".
Even the term Stalker is borrowed from "Roadside Picnic" and the wish granter was taken from the movie adaptation. The book came first and it had 50 years to inspire mainly Russian speaking people. That said, if you tell a Russian he plays a Stalker in a game, he might think of danger, adventure and treasure, but not necessarily about a difficult FPS game. RPGs are also pretty popular over there, so it just makes sense to make an RPG in the same setting. Also, Stalker at its core was a difficult FPS with no leveling mechanics, you depended almost entirely on loot and everything wanted to kill you. If you want more "MMOs" like Tarkov or DayZ, yeah, it translates very well to MMOs.
@Skeleton War @@fonesrphunny7242 I know, but most of that can be chalked up to being a derivative work. It's clearly inspired by Roadside Picnic and Stalker, but what I mean by calling this a wholesale ripoff is that this game is not just meant to evoke the Stalker games, everything from the mechanics, the art style, is copied over wholesale.
Not ripped off at all, the game was made originally MUCH earlier than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl back when it was still called szone. Apparently just because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. came out to be one of the most popular games of all it means that they plagiarized everything?
A STALKER rip-off... I remember trying to play this shit. Remember it being shit. And also remember how one of my classmates was whaling in this game and boasting about it lmao.
-old and hardcore =/= shit- -STALKER is an excellent first-person, atomsphereic, horror, shooter game. It has plenty of charm and the modding community is still releasing great mods to this day. Perhaps you should give it another go.- ignore lol
@@silverreaps6803 go play them, they're janky as fuck, but there's also a large and active modding scene, some of the best mods of all time are made there.
I like how you stalker fan boys won't stfu. People who mostly play RPGs aren't going to know about Russian survival sims and fps games. Not everyone likes what you like, drop your ego.
"Think Fallout without Power Armor" - So... how I normally play Fallout games. But I think "Stalker" would have been a better comparision. Because it even looks like a cheap version of Stalker.
@@daltonwallet8650 i mean yeah, thats how most assets work. not like a .obj is gonna be like "nah man i dont fuck with that Unity shit" or smthn. assets arent picky.
As noticeable on the name this MMO is based on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Franchise and the book Roadside Picknick. The garbage or screws are a detail from the book to trigger Anomalies.
Josh, the reason both Anomaly Zone and Stay Out share the same map is, they were the same game at one point. Long ago a game called Stalker Online was being developed that was based on...Stalker, the cult (and awesome) fps series that came out in the late 2000s. While being developed, a split over the game occurred and depending on who you believe, the code/databases was stolen. So now you have two groups, each developing a game called Stalker Online. The original group sued the group that broke away and won a court case, so they held all the rights to their game. They changed their name to Szone because they worried GSC who develops the single player games would sue. The second group who lost, continued to work on revamping their game, but they were still calling it Stalker Online. Eventually it went in front of a judge again, this time the judge ruled since the game underwent what he deemed "significant" changes and gameplay alterations, they weren't really the same game. So both developers were now free to keep developing their respective games. Szone then changed its name to Anomaly Zone, Stalker Online is still called Stalker Online when it comes to its Russian launcher/servers, but on the steam relaunch and for the US and EU launch, they changed their name to Stay Out.
Hi Josh, just wanted to say I liked the video but you say that you can not see how many bullets are left in your clip. You are actually able to see how many bullets you have left by looking over you hot bar at the bottom right corner above slot 9 and 0. You can see the big number counting your shots left in the clip, the number to the right saying the maximum size of the clip, and above there, there's the ammo type and to the right of that there's how many bullets that are in you inventory, and then there's the icon showing that you are holding a gun. Just wanted to point this out in case you missed it post editing. Otherwise, really good video like always! :)
Just a few small notes: - Those shots you have heard aren't ambient, it's actual NPC guards shooting down mutants that come too close. - You can still switch to first person view, it's F4 by default. - There are multiple ways to get out of starter city, but walking up to gate and just getting out isn't one of them. Quest designers trying to subvert expectations and perhaps being a bit too tricky with it for starting zone. Good that you still found a few things worth a praise! :)
@@ena_ina Very hardcore shooter series on the PC, it's worth playing if you enjoy atmospheric and immersive gameplay, but it's brutally hard as well. There are 3 games in the series, but it excels with it's modding community, some standalone mods that add all maps from all 3 games and makes them into a huge sandbox freeroam experience with new mechanics of their own.
@@ena_ina basically horror survival shooter, you make money by scavenging supplies from dead enemies or artefacts from anomalies, but there are mutants all around. It's not that hard once you play it for a while but the more you play the more you see that it's held together with duct tape and vodka
Everything even remotely decent about this game, all of it - is stolen from STALKER series. It's a decently popular game even outside post-USSR, surprised you never heard of it.
@@jonathansoko1085 not really. I've read the "source material" and it's quite a bit different. Like ice-cream and sorbet - they are the same only on the surface.
Aaaah Sergej Titov, creator of Big Rigs, where „you‘re winner“ no matter what, and with physics that would make Dr. Hawking cringe. Truly a man who always stays true to his QoL standards.
I think he managed to improve. This is, at least, a game where there's collision besides the ground and a way to lose, and I'm willing to bet that all the levels are in there and don't crash when you try to load them.
@@oldking8276 yeah, the War Z, later renamed for legal issues to Infestation: Survivor Stories. In addition to it's purchase fee, it had an in-game cash shop where you could buy weapons for real money that you would lose when you died. You got locked out of playing for 1-4 hours if you died (of course, you could pay to remove the unlock). It also got removed and refunded by Steam a couple time because Sergei is a pretty terrible person in addition to being one of the worst developers. Unfortunately the game sold relatively well.
I love the idea of a STALKER MMO. Like, the idea of becoming an actual Stalker and working with other Stalkers or on your own to try to bring back artifacts from the zone in search of fortune sounds absolutely awesome to me. I just wish it was actually executed properly...
Try stalcraft it is literally an stalker mmo but good tons of content and easy to run because it has Minecraft style graphics plus it's free still has good player counts and I constantly get in gunfights with people
Yeah Stalcraft is the best you’ll get rn but I stopped playing it entirely because the balance is wonky as hell, can’t progress past the Dump without some Russian doorknob shitting all over you with a gun that you can’t compete with and armor you can’t penetrate
@@GooberLoofer420 yea it can be rough best you can do in the dump is rat to get enough resources to get to the bar and it opens up alot more form there
there's always a bit of silver lining to take away: the setting and aesthetic of the original is so good, other people will stop at nothing to copy it without any consideration nor commitment.
@@sashavoid6106 TBH the fact that he hasn't even heard of it, made this video more entertaining for me. It was funny watching him come up with comparisons without a single mention of STALKER, despite it being a very well-known franchise. But even better, listening to him praise some of the atmospheric elements and really enjoy them, tells me he'd like STALKER if he played it. Because not only did they rip those things right from STALKER, STALKER did them ten times better.
the game was originally a stalker mmo but then the creators noticed "hey we not have the rights of the stalker franchise they gonna fucking kill us" then they renamed it to s-zone and the rest is story
I like that even when you’re playing an awful game you’re still willing to point out some positive aspects instead of just biasly slamming every part of a game you don’t like
8:45 I actually love that, that a beginner quest seems way too easy, so the player will look around the back rooms for loot/optional quest items. And you find something utterly horrifying. Actually kind of a cool quest idea.
I’m my opinion being able to swap the over the shoulder camera is very important for over the shoulder shooters. Having a button to easily swap between them is extremely nice to have to effectively 3-peak around a corner and line up shots. Except that only really matters in fast paced games, so the devs were really over estimating the usefulness in this game.
14:27 - the guy asked "Where are you running already, listen to me, I'll explain where you have to go." - did you take quest and run around and he was supposed to explain something more to you? If so , it's really cool game mechanic if he caches you afterwards to finish the explanation where to go. But might be just a random text from npc.
"Why do designers always overstretch, and focus on the bells and whistles like faction reputation or seven levels or wearing a suit skill before they've made the game stable and the opening experience smooth?" Designers usually can't do anything about a game's stability. It takes a programmer to investigate why the game is crashing and change whatever piece of code is causing the game to crash. Also, the game might have been perfectly stable when most of the systems were implemented. Crashes typically become more common and hard to track down the later you get in development as more and more features come into the game and have to play nicely together.
Also, every bug fix causes more bugs. Bugs are like hydra heads. The difference is that the power of the new heads is determined entirely by the universe's RNG, so you can quash one massive bug and have a few tiny new ones spawn but you can also quash one tiny bug and get an army of massive ones.
@@PosthumanHeresy This is a funny way to think about it, but in practice you should be able to fix bugs without causing more bugs most of the time. If any change you make tends to break something, it's a sign that your architecture isn't structured well and you probably need to do some heavier refactoring as opposed to just applying a quick and simple fix.
@@daltonwallet8650 That also isn't up to designers. Often times game designers need to make the best of what they have. Very rarely does a game get all the resources designers ask for in order to make it exactly the way they had planned.
This is obviously another attempt at making Stalker Online. There have been many, and there will be many more. People love the Stalker universe and people love multiplayer survival games. This is just one of many attempts that will go nowhere.
5:50 reminded me of something. There's a quest giver NPC in City of Villains that can see through time. The problem is that they often have trouble knowing where in a series of events you actually are. One time he starts trying to give you a quest, only to realize he already gave you it a while back. Later on he says you'll have to go through this long chain of complicated quests and events in order to find someone's location... But since he can see the future, he already knows where your target is and just tells you.
I know this has probably been said before but this video really reminded of TotalBiscuits (R.I.P) old content which i am honestly happy to see. He was one of my favorite creators back in the day and having similar series emerge in his general style/tone is cool to see.
If the game absolutely has to put a timer on the death window at least make the default selection go to town. Even the oldest MMOs know better. Anarchy Online in it's early days stopped letting death loops happen by resetting your bind point when you switch factions. So many complaints forced them to do it.
Oh my god I remember when this game was called sZone Online and me and a friend tried to play it because "omg online STALKER!!!" and we kept getting killed by giant spiders and giant dogs and the interface was a mess to follow
I played this game many moons ago when it was szone, so here's some context regarding this and Stay out(also known as Stalker online). This basically started out as a single project called Stalker online, there were issues with the development team and they split into two seperate projects, both claiming legal ownership over the source code and game assets. One side of the split became Szone, the other continued as Stalker online. Both have taken quite different development paths, szone focused on more traditional MMO designs, like having pets/companions, where Stalker Online focused primarily on pvp and gun mechnics. Both titles had to change their games respective names for legal reasons for inclusion on Steam, Szone became Anomaly zone and Stalker Online became Stay out. Both titles are inspired by the book Roadside Picinc, the 1979 Stalker movie and GSC's S.T.A.L.K.E.R games.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but man, that guy really improved. One day we might get a game from him that's at least better than shovelware quality!
I remember this one from quite back when it was called Szone. I think this was an attempt at making a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mmo without actually calling that since the ones who made it didn't have the licence. I think this was actually more of a fan project if anything.
13:35 "how would I describe this game?" ...i love these. I love how when someone tries to describe a game whose direct ancestor they have no idea about, that description comes out as a weird combo of at least 3 very disparate things.
17:30 just yesterday I've played Rimworld properly for the first time. I think this is how it would look in third person to watch my guy fight a maneater ram and repeatedly fall unconscious from its attacks.
Dying and having the game crash on you is like a cartoon character being crushed by an anvil, only for them to then be crushed by a piano immediately after
"Pressing Q throws some garbage..." Oh, he's never heard of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. before... those are your bolts you throw to check for ...anomalies... in The Zone...
Great video as always! You can see the ammo counter though. It's that small green bar above the bigger bluer number bar. You'll notice you have 10 max ammo, and when you shoot it goes down and when you reload it goes up. The super small blue gun icon seems to show you how many rounds you have left, still, should be made more obvious.. I think.
A lot of the crashing, not all of them, can be avoided by setting the affinity on the CPU to just one core (assuming you have one with at least 2 or more). The XRay engine was never optimised for multithreading and it creates all kinds of problems for it. Then the rest is just up to bugs and other features and there's not much you can do about them except hitting that quick save button a lot.
"My skill level is too low to put on trousers" ...well... it's a russian game, of course you need a specially trained skill for that, why do you think all the gopniks only wear the lvl1 pantwearing jogging pants?
Love this series, truly I do. Hey Josh, got a suggestion for next in line. Mabinogi; a fundamentally broken 'kawaii-desu bullshit' game with a terrible cash shop, yet exceedingly unique style. I think it would be fun to see you pick it apart.
Honestly, with games like these, I always feel like it's a new studio or group of people who get into wanting to make an MMO. They spend a good year or two on it, get a good thing going, but then realize that either their team size or team strength is going to require another three years to get a good MMO rolled out. So they either quit out of frustration/lack of patience or they fear that putting in the five plus years just isn't going to be worth it in the end and quit while rolling out what they have in the hopes that maybe someone will spend money somewhere, either through cash shop or donations, and they can recoup at least some of their losses.
Free tip for anyone who wants to make a game where you need to "level up in wearing trousers." I can get the value in this, you want to earn power upgrades and not have characters smurfing their accounts with high-end gear, fine, but there _is_ a better way. Have skill levels CAP stats. Just as an example, say starter trousers provide 5 DEF, and better trousers provide 10 DEF, but you aren't intended to use them until you have level 5 in "Wearing Trousers." Fine. Still let people put them on. They do, and they get. . . 5 DEF. Each time they level up "Trouser Wearing," they get +1 DEF out of it, until they reach level 6 in it, where they've already reached 10 DEF and won't get any more from those Trousers. But if they find a pair of 11 DEF Trousers, they will get the full benefit right away. Basically, you can _use_ anything you can find, but it won't make you _stronger_ until you've also _earned_ that benefit.
@@hhsdhhsss1522 New Vegas Dead Money + Fallout 1/2 minus the jokes + Call Of Duty-grade realistic environments and arsenal. That's what Stalker looks like to me from the speedruns I've watched of it. I'm not trying to attack Stalker, I'm comparing it because it's not THAT far from Fallout, no matter how much people try to say it's nothing like it. (Except the bugs. No one can bug like Bethesda and you can defend Stalker as much as you want on that part.)
Just thought I'd point out that the game actually did tell you your ammo count. (you could see it going down in the bottom right above the slots that appeared to be skill slots) The UI element was entirely too small, tho'.
9:19 There is a HUD element that has the bullets displayed, bottom right above what I assume is the action bar, the first number deplete when there are fired at the dogs, second is the capacity and the last one is how many left. I will give that it's a smaller than I'd like compared to any other bullet count indicator for a FPS, but it is there or does the it's size just mean it doesn't really count.
Even better. "Spawn camped by a zombie dog..." and then before he says out of ten, it cuts to a black screen. 10 seconds later, show the patreon people.
Most of the comment section: "Whaaaatttt?! How have you never heard of the moderately popular series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? All of the cool kids are playing it."
Tbh, if you're establishing yourself as a gaming authority, you should have heard of it. It's moderately popular amongst the general populace but XKCD-level popular with people actually deciding the future of gaming.
@@PosthumanHeresy except all of his content pretty much revolves around MMO’s, so since STALKER isn’t an MMO it wouldn’t surprise me for him to not know anything about it. STALKER is an incredibly niche game.
@@lipsontajgordongrunk4328 Presenting yourself as an expert means you need to know how to google and read a page that you screenshot to put in your video.
I should have taken the user reviews into consideration on Steam. I never usually listen to critics so jumping into this with optimism was really the best thing I had going for me. I really thought I was an idiot for not understanding the complexity of the ammo usage and stamina and even the world building through text. Thanks for showing me I wasn't alone in this experience xD Edit: i just realized that I played Stay Out. Not this one.. further proving your point made towards the end.
Not seeing ammo on the HUD is not really a failing, rather that's a great feature IMO. Issue is when you choose to NOT have a hud to show ammo remaining, and also do NOT give any means to figure out how many bullets you have... Example of how to do it right would be Insurgency: Sandstorm. where you hold down the reload key and get an visual indicator of how much ammo is left ( roughly, no numbers, just a visual bar of the magazine and fullness ).
It's been my favorite guessing game since I started watching these 'worst MMO ever' but to day I finally I got one. "spawn camped by a dog... out of ten"
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"My skill level is too low to equip trousers"
I see they have implemented vodka accurately, at least.
It's a Wal-Mart shopper simulator.
Lmfao...you're first Walmart outfit....must be sweatpants!
🤣🤣🤣
ROFL
Need more likes, this one.
This game is based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which is loosely based on the film, Stalker, which, in turn, is very loosely based on the wonderful novel, Roadside Picnic. There's even a poster for the film Stalker in the bar.
Roadside picnic gang
Tarkovsky was a true artist
The movie and the book are fantastic.
I heard the native & alien and was like. Oh. Roadside picnic.
i have played the game, that game and watched the movie, but still have to read the book
It's STALKER rip-off, the game even crashes every few hours or so. The true STALKER experience
But can the game beat itself?
Tbh crashing every few hours is very Fallout too
8:24 a poster with the word "Stalker"
@@TheTadek2001 The term comes from a 50 year old Russian novel called "Roadside Picnic" and essentially describes illegal treasure hunters in an exclusion zone.
"Stalker" isn't just a reference to the GSC games. It's a promise of danger, adventure and riches, but that meaning seems to be lost outside of Russia, because who reads 50 year old books, right?
stalker without the fan patches that is
you need to play STALKER if you tought this game was inspired by Fallout
read roadside picnic
@@abandonall they’re completely different though. the game’s a far cry from the book
It was clear on the beginning of the video, when he doesn't have any Idea on why the character throw "garbage". TBH, i don't want to see him playing STALKER, since he'll get wrecked and bash It anyways.
@@Mersak168 nothing better to do than gatekeep, a pure stalker fan
@@nicolas4514 Just doing god's work here son.
To give you some perspective, this game is but one of many ripoffs of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a single player game, but because the features lend so well to an MMO, people have been trying to make S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque MMO's for a while. Everything you praised in this game was not achieved by the devs. They ripped it off straight from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.
I think this game was originally called STALKER Online before getting rebranded over and over. It was called SZone at one point and then had a different name when it first came to Steam. Like it went from being a fan made game to a cash grab by re releasing the same game over and over pretending it's new.
To be completely fair, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series also did not do everything on their own. The entire setting was taken from the (way better imo) book "Roadside Picnic".
Even the term Stalker is borrowed from "Roadside Picnic" and the wish granter was taken from the movie adaptation.
The book came first and it had 50 years to inspire mainly Russian speaking people. That said, if you tell a Russian he plays a Stalker in a game, he might think of danger, adventure and treasure, but not necessarily about a difficult FPS game. RPGs are also pretty popular over there, so it just makes sense to make an RPG in the same setting.
Also, Stalker at its core was a difficult FPS with no leveling mechanics, you depended almost entirely on loot and everything wanted to kill you. If you want more "MMOs" like Tarkov or DayZ, yeah, it translates very well to MMOs.
@Skeleton War
@@fonesrphunny7242
I know, but most of that can be chalked up to being a derivative work. It's clearly inspired by Roadside Picnic and Stalker, but what I mean by calling this a wholesale ripoff is that this game is not just meant to evoke the Stalker games, everything from the mechanics, the art style, is copied over wholesale.
Not ripped off at all, the game was made originally MUCH earlier than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl back when it was still called szone. Apparently just because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. came out to be one of the most popular games of all it means that they plagiarized everything?
"It's like Fallout without power armor."
Oh god, he's never heard of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. before.
Fallen Earth also comes to mind.
Yep, It hurt.
Comparing S.T.A.L.K.E.R to Fallout is like comparing Dark Souls to Skyrim
@@nicoredje Man, I miss Fallen Earth...
I thought this straight away...
Its S.T.A.L.K.E.R but mmo :o
Thought the same xD
When this first showed up on my feed I was like: "oh shit there's a S.T.A.L.K.E.R MMO?"
But then I noticed the show...
There is at least 3 S.T.A.L.K.E.R MMOs and also a lot of clons at the same theme
@@bersy3867 It's a great setting, but mmo seems a weird fit.
@@bersy3867 Szone-online, Stay out, Stalker online, and Anomaly Zone
@@Souls_p_ Szone and Anomaly Zone is the same game. Stalker online and Stay Out is the same game too.
@@bersy3867 Yeah ik that but they kept changing names
Since this look like stalker mmo- the throwing garbage is for detecting anomaly
A STALKER rip-off... I remember trying to play this shit. Remember it being shit. And also remember how one of my classmates was whaling in this game and boasting about it lmao.
Shut up 😡
@@tori9365 Please explain how this game is not bad then
@@Noizzed are you DUMB? it's a great game!
-old and hardcore =/= shit-
-STALKER is an excellent first-person, atomsphereic, horror, shooter game. It has plenty of charm and the modding community is still releasing great mods to this day. Perhaps you should give it another go.-
ignore lol
@@kleskthewarlock He didn't mean stalker is bad. He said THIS game is bad
"You can improve your shirt wearing skill up to level 7."
Level 1: Shirtless
Level 7: Shirt
That's How Anomaly Works
playing the anomaly mod in stalker
it literary works like that
the begining is brutal man
I like how you try to compare this to fallout when this is clearly ripping off STALKER
Unfortunately not everyone knows STALKER 😔
I never heard of stalker until now
@@silverreaps6803 go play them, they're janky as fuck, but there's also a large and active modding scene, some of the best mods of all time are made there.
I like how you
I like how you stalker fan boys won't stfu. People who mostly play RPGs aren't going to know about Russian survival sims and fps games. Not everyone likes what you like, drop your ego.
"Think Fallout without Power Armor" - So... how I normally play Fallout games.
But I think "Stalker" would have been a better comparision. Because it even looks like a cheap version of Stalker.
Fallout is a different class of a game
Fallout class A
what is this game called Owell class -ZZZZZZZzzzzzzz......... oops sorry fell asleep there
That's what I was thinking 😝 Fallout has power armor.
Credit where credit is due, the STALKER devs made assets that you could literally put into any game, just about any engine. It's actually amazing
@@daltonwallet8650 i mean yeah, thats how most assets work. not like a .obj is gonna be like "nah man i dont fuck with that Unity shit" or smthn. assets arent picky.
I really hate using power armor. It has really neat cool design, but actually using it sucks. Always.
As noticeable on the name this MMO is based on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Franchise and the book Roadside Picknick.
The garbage or screws are a detail from the book to trigger Anomalies.
Also present in the original russian movie.
Josh, the reason both Anomaly Zone and Stay Out share the same map is, they were the same game at one point. Long ago a game called Stalker Online was being developed that was based on...Stalker, the cult (and awesome) fps series that came out in the late 2000s. While being developed, a split over the game occurred and depending on who you believe, the code/databases was stolen. So now you have two groups, each developing a game called Stalker Online. The original group sued the group that broke away and won a court case, so they held all the rights to their game. They changed their name to Szone because they worried GSC who develops the single player games would sue. The second group who lost, continued to work on revamping their game, but they were still calling it Stalker Online. Eventually it went in front of a judge again, this time the judge ruled since the game underwent what he deemed "significant" changes and gameplay alterations, they weren't really the same game. So both developers were now free to keep developing their respective games. Szone then changed its name to Anomaly Zone, Stalker Online is still called Stalker Online when it comes to its Russian launcher/servers, but on the steam relaunch and for the US and EU launch, they changed their name to Stay Out.
"Mom I want STALKER-"
"We have STALKER at home"
Josh's fallout at home
Cheeki breeki at home:
I can't believe this is my most popular comment on youtube.
@D H How do you do, fellow kids?
Hi Josh, just wanted to say I liked the video but you say that you can not see how many bullets are left in your clip. You are actually able to see how many bullets you have left by looking over you hot bar at the bottom right corner above slot 9 and 0.
You can see the big number counting your shots left in the clip, the number to the right saying the maximum size of the clip, and above there, there's the ammo type and to the right of that there's how many bullets that are in you inventory, and then there's the icon showing that you are holding a gun.
Just wanted to point this out in case you missed it post editing.
Otherwise, really good video like always! :)
Just a few small notes:
- Those shots you have heard aren't ambient, it's actual NPC guards shooting down mutants that come too close.
- You can still switch to first person view, it's F4 by default.
- There are multiple ways to get out of starter city, but walking up to gate and just getting out isn't one of them. Quest designers trying to subvert expectations and perhaps being a bit too tricky with it for starting zone.
Good that you still found a few things worth a praise! :)
I do love my S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but I got a feeling I won't love this.
You won't trust me
what is stalker? is it worth playing?
@@ena_ina Very hardcore shooter series on the PC, it's worth playing if you enjoy atmospheric and immersive gameplay, but it's brutally hard as well.
There are 3 games in the series, but it excels with it's modding community, some standalone mods that add all maps from all 3 games and makes them into a huge sandbox freeroam experience with new mechanics of their own.
@@ena_ina basically horror survival shooter, you make money by scavenging supplies from dead enemies or artefacts from anomalies, but there are mutants all around. It's not that hard once you play it for a while but the more you play the more you see that it's held together with duct tape and vodka
@@jobe554 How is it a hardcore shooter, though? I know the labs and ending parts of SoC and CS are hard, but does it really make the game hardcore?
Everything even remotely decent about this game, all of it - is stolen from STALKER series. It's a decently popular game even outside post-USSR, surprised you never heard of it.
Especially with the actual ocean of STALKER inspired games coming out right now.
I can't wait for stalker 2 when it releases
Stalker itself is derivative tho so this is a stretch
@@jonathansoko1085 not really. I've read the "source material" and it's quite a bit different. Like ice-cream and sorbet - they are the same only on the surface.
@@RATGODORIGINAL Stalker is still a derivative concept
Aaaah Sergej Titov, creator of Big Rigs, where „you‘re winner“ no matter what, and with physics that would make Dr. Hawking cringe. Truly a man who always stays true to his QoL standards.
I think he managed to improve. This is, at least, a game where there's collision besides the ground and a way to lose, and I'm willing to bet that all the levels are in there and don't crash when you try to load them.
Didn't he also try to cash in on the Walking Dead and Westworld hype by making a terrible zombie game followed by a western?
@@oldking8276 yeah, the War Z, later renamed for legal issues to Infestation: Survivor Stories. In addition to it's purchase fee, it had an in-game cash shop where you could buy weapons for real money that you would lose when you died. You got locked out of playing for 1-4 hours if you died (of course, you could pay to remove the unlock). It also got removed and refunded by Steam a couple time because Sergei is a pretty terrible person in addition to being one of the worst developers. Unfortunately the game sold relatively well.
I love the idea of a STALKER MMO. Like, the idea of becoming an actual Stalker and working with other Stalkers or on your own to try to bring back artifacts from the zone in search of fortune sounds absolutely awesome to me. I just wish it was actually executed properly...
Ray of hope mod is coming "soon" depending entirely on your definition of soon of course
Stalker battle royale loot extraction.
Try stalcraft it is literally an stalker mmo but good tons of content and easy to run because it has Minecraft style graphics plus it's free still has good player counts and I constantly get in gunfights with people
Yeah Stalcraft is the best you’ll get rn but I stopped playing it entirely because the balance is wonky as hell, can’t progress past the Dump without some Russian doorknob shitting all over you with a gun that you can’t compete with and armor you can’t penetrate
@@GooberLoofer420 yea it can be rough best you can do in the dump is rat to get enough resources to get to the bar and it opens up alot more form there
So it's Stalker, but online, but all the problems are somehow even worse.
I feel only shame for my country.
Ruskie or Ukrop?
@@andreyfisher7068 Ruskie
Don't.
@@comfywizard I would call it a work of art if it was something else than "stalker, but worse"
there's always a bit of silver lining to take away: the setting and aesthetic of the original is so good, other people will stop at nothing to copy it without any consideration nor commitment.
It's relatively amusing watching someone who has never played STALKER, review such a blatant ripoff.
I hope he did play STALKER but it really doesnt seem like
what would change if he played this game?
@@maxclint7931 Given that he compared this game to Fallout, making no mention of stalker at all-- doesn't seem like he ever did.
@@sashavoid6106 TBH the fact that he hasn't even heard of it, made this video more entertaining for me. It was funny watching him come up with comparisons without a single mention of STALKER, despite it being a very well-known franchise.
But even better, listening to him praise some of the atmospheric elements and really enjoy them, tells me he'd like STALKER if he played it. Because not only did they rip those things right from STALKER, STALKER did them ten times better.
@@Deadener And STALKER took them straight from Roadside Picnic. But they did well with implementing them into game format I guess.
Josh: "I got spawn camped by dogs, that's not even funny"
Me: dying of laughter
Nice colons bro!
My god... they're LEARNING!
This game wears its S.T.A.L.K.E.R. influences so clearly on its sleeves that at 8:26 it even has a poster of the original Stalker film by Tarkovsky :p
the game was originally a stalker mmo but then the creators noticed "hey we not have the rights of the stalker franchise they gonna fucking kill us" then they renamed it to s-zone and the rest is story
The silence during the dog spawning kill is golden as words cannot describe how bad it is.
"I cannot put on the pants.
I do not have the skill to do this."
😂😂😂
Maybe it was a button fly and he was wearing oven gloves...
I am quite a busy person, but I really enjoy playing these in the bg while I work :)
Yes mmo reviews are great when you don't want to spend hours on every mmorpg yourself
I'm in the middle of binging the entire series, so imagine what a pleasent surprise seeing this popping up in my subscriptions!
Should’ve said pooping up since this game is complete crap
Lmao
This isn't in te stalker series though lol its a ripoff
@@KHA0T1X he meant the worst mmo series
i love this series as well 😄
I like that even when you’re playing an awful game you’re still willing to point out some positive aspects instead of just biasly slamming every part of a game you don’t like
This is like that time he played the Black Desert rip-off without having played Black Desert lol.
8:45 I actually love that, that a beginner quest seems way too easy, so the player will look around the back rooms for loot/optional quest items. And you find something utterly horrifying. Actually kind of a cool quest idea.
I’m my opinion being able to swap the over the shoulder camera is very important for over the shoulder shooters. Having a button to easily swap between them is extremely nice to have to effectively 3-peak around a corner and line up shots.
Except that only really matters in fast paced games, so the devs were really over estimating the usefulness in this game.
14:27 - the guy asked "Where are you running already, listen to me, I'll explain where you have to go." - did you take quest and run around and he was supposed to explain something more to you? If so , it's really cool game mechanic if he caches you afterwards to finish the explanation where to go. But might be just a random text from npc.
"Think fallout, without power armor"
*You have alerted the horde*
"Why do designers always overstretch, and focus on the bells and whistles like faction reputation or seven levels or wearing a suit skill before they've made the game stable and the opening experience smooth?"
Designers usually can't do anything about a game's stability. It takes a programmer to investigate why the game is crashing and change whatever piece of code is causing the game to crash. Also, the game might have been perfectly stable when most of the systems were implemented. Crashes typically become more common and hard to track down the later you get in development as more and more features come into the game and have to play nicely together.
Also, every bug fix causes more bugs. Bugs are like hydra heads. The difference is that the power of the new heads is determined entirely by the universe's RNG, so you can quash one massive bug and have a few tiny new ones spawn but you can also quash one tiny bug and get an army of massive ones.
@@PosthumanHeresy This is a funny way to think about it, but in practice you should be able to fix bugs without causing more bugs most of the time. If any change you make tends to break something, it's a sign that your architecture isn't structured well and you probably need to do some heavier refactoring as opposed to just applying a quick and simple fix.
It also doesn't help when your game assets are all stolen from a single player game.
@@daltonwallet8650 That also isn't up to designers. Often times game designers need to make the best of what they have. Very rarely does a game get all the resources designers ask for in order to make it exactly the way they had planned.
@@benpielstick I'm sorry, you what mate? Are you justifying the fact that this game is entirely stolen assets there with 'game design hard'?
This is obviously another attempt at making Stalker Online. There have been many, and there will be many more. People love the Stalker universe and people love multiplayer survival games. This is just one of many attempts that will go nowhere.
Shut the hell up!
@@tori9365 sut
@@rockmanisasome no
Imagine how easy it could be if they stuck to the graphical quality of Stalker.
respawn? leveling... done goofed already :/
I LAUGHED the entire time you respawned from the dog revenge, I’M freakin dying over here
The having/adding new mechanics before polishing/fixing the old ones has always drove me nuts
Moral of the story, don’t steal toys from children*.
I've recently picked up a game called Neocron Evolution. It seems like a game that would be right up the alley for one of your videos.
That stint of being spawn-camped by the dog was genuinely hilarious, I think the silence throughout that scene really drove home the hopelessness xD
5:50 reminded me of something. There's a quest giver NPC in City of Villains that can see through time. The problem is that they often have trouble knowing where in a series of events you actually are. One time he starts trying to give you a quest, only to realize he already gave you it a while back. Later on he says you'll have to go through this long chain of complicated quests and events in order to find someone's location... But since he can see the future, he already knows where your target is and just tells you.
Me: Mom, can we cheeki breeki?
Mom: We have cheeki breeki at home.
Cheeki breeki at home:
I know this has probably been said before but this video really reminded of TotalBiscuits (R.I.P) old content which i am honestly happy to see. He was one of my favorite creators back in the day and having similar series emerge in his general style/tone is cool to see.
If the game absolutely has to put a timer on the death window at least make the default selection go to town. Even the oldest MMOs know better. Anarchy Online in it's early days stopped letting death loops happen by resetting your bind point when you switch factions. So many complaints forced them to do it.
Oh my god I remember when this game was called sZone Online and me and a friend tried to play it because "omg online STALKER!!!" and we kept getting killed by giant spiders and giant dogs and the interface was a mess to follow
I couldn't remember the name but i played with a buddy back in those days it was confusing bit of chaos lol
I played this game many moons ago when it was szone, so here's some context regarding this and Stay out(also known as Stalker online). This basically started out as a single project called Stalker online, there were issues with the development team and they split into two seperate projects, both claiming legal ownership over the source code and game assets. One side of the split became Szone, the other continued as Stalker online. Both have taken quite different development paths, szone focused on more traditional MMO designs, like having pets/companions, where Stalker Online focused primarily on pvp and gun mechnics. Both titles had to change their games respective names for legal reasons for inclusion on Steam, Szone became Anomaly zone and Stalker Online became Stay out. Both titles are inspired by the book Roadside Picinc, the 1979 Stalker movie and GSC's S.T.A.L.K.E.R games.
"I got spawn camped by a dog. That's not even funny." The way you sounded genuinely offended honestly *made* it funny lmao
Make Josh play S.T.A.L.K.E.R and then E.Y.E : Divine Cybermancy
My legs are OK
Wait, hold on a minute, did the reviews say this was a Sergey Titov game? The auteur behind Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and WarZ?
Wait what
"OOH! THIS GAME HAS BALLS!"- SomecallmeJohnny in his Big Rigs review.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but man, that guy really improved. One day we might get a game from him that's at least better than shovelware quality!
@@neoqwerty but it will probably still be involved in a scam or something
@@polytanksan5761 Honestly I can't wait for him to get hired for Dreamworld.
I remember this one from quite back when it was called Szone. I think this was an attempt at making a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mmo without actually calling that since the ones who made it didn't have the licence. I think this was actually more of a fan project if anything.
"They have certainly got some audio balancing to do, because getting close to the doctor makes this happen"
... Yeah I don't see an issue here
Yeah right? It is fucking hillarious to come close to the doctor and you just start hearing soviet music.
I actually enjoyed this game alot in something like 2012 when it was named "stalker online" and it was not in steam. Its pretty old game.
13:35 "how would I describe this game?"
...i love these. I love how when someone tries to describe a game whose direct ancestor they have no idea about, that description comes out as a weird combo of at least 3 very disparate things.
Honestly, what i got out of this video is a desire to see Josh play Stalker.
17:30 just yesterday I've played Rimworld properly for the first time. I think this is how it would look in third person to watch my guy fight a maneater ram and repeatedly fall unconscious from its attacks.
This has quickly become my favourite series on all of youtube
9:05 I'm not sure if it comes up later in the vid but there's like. Totes an ammo counter in the bottom corner. It's terribly small but it's there
those rats must be wearing heavy armor if they need 2 bullets to kill them
I mean 9x18mm isn’t a very powerful round. I’d be surprised if you could kill a rat with a 9x18 with one shot in real life 😂
Ngl the dog spawn camping you was so funny.
Dying and having the game crash on you is like a cartoon character being crushed by an anvil, only for them to then be crushed by a piano immediately after
"Pressing Q throws some garbage..."
Oh, he's never heard of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. before... those are your bolts you throw to check for ...anomalies... in The Zone...
Great video as always! You can see the ammo counter though. It's that small green bar above the bigger bluer number bar. You'll notice you have 10 max ammo, and when you shoot it goes down and when you reload it goes up. The super small blue gun icon seems to show you how many rounds you have left, still, should be made more obvious.. I think.
Dear God, I played S-Zone and it was crap. So bad!
4:23 The music fading in and out is beautiful. Maybe there's just in an echo in that dude's booth.
TBC is out for a few days and he still gives us the content we want
A lot of the crashing, not all of them, can be avoided by setting the affinity on the CPU to just one core (assuming you have one with at least 2 or more). The XRay engine was never optimised for multithreading and it creates all kinds of problems for it.
Then the rest is just up to bugs and other features and there's not much you can do about them except hitting that quick save button a lot.
"Hairstyles change your entire face shape and skin, and it got weird name like Bob, William, Psycho" I think it might be picking heads Josh, lol
Getting spawncamped by a dog was a bit ... ruff...
"My skill level is too low to put on trousers"
...well... it's a russian game, of course you need a specially trained skill for that, why do you think all the gopniks only wear the lvl1 pantwearing jogging pants?
17:50 "Commrade...you are barking up the wrong tree if you think you can get past me!"
You can look at the name alone and be like "Okay, it's STALKER isn't it?"
Yup
Love this series, truly I do.
Hey Josh, got a suggestion for next in line. Mabinogi; a fundamentally broken 'kawaii-desu bullshit' game with a terrible cash shop, yet exceedingly unique style. I think it would be fun to see you pick it apart.
As soon as he threw bolts, we knew it was a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ripoff.
Honestly, with games like these, I always feel like it's a new studio or group of people who get into wanting to make an MMO. They spend a good year or two on it, get a good thing going, but then realize that either their team size or team strength is going to require another three years to get a good MMO rolled out. So they either quit out of frustration/lack of patience or they fear that putting in the five plus years just isn't going to be worth it in the end and quit while rolling out what they have in the hopes that maybe someone will spend money somewhere, either through cash shop or donations, and they can recoup at least some of their losses.
I just wanted to leave a comment, that wasn't mentioning STALKER.
Goddammit.
Free tip for anyone who wants to make a game where you need to "level up in wearing trousers." I can get the value in this, you want to earn power upgrades and not have characters smurfing their accounts with high-end gear, fine, but there _is_ a better way. Have skill levels CAP stats. Just as an example, say starter trousers provide 5 DEF, and better trousers provide 10 DEF, but you aren't intended to use them until you have level 5 in "Wearing Trousers." Fine. Still let people put them on. They do, and they get. . . 5 DEF. Each time they level up "Trouser Wearing," they get +1 DEF out of it, until they reach level 6 in it, where they've already reached 10 DEF and won't get any more from those Trousers. But if they find a pair of 11 DEF Trousers, they will get the full benefit right away.
Basically, you can _use_ anything you can find, but it won't make you _stronger_ until you've also _earned_ that benefit.
Everyone: Calling it a STALKER ripoff
My dumbass: *Has never heard of STALKER before*
Ironically, best way to describe STALKER: Fallout meets Call of Duty.
@@neoqwerty no that’s not the best way to describe stalker and you clearly have never played it.
@@hhsdhhsss1522 New Vegas Dead Money + Fallout 1/2 minus the jokes + Call Of Duty-grade realistic environments and arsenal. That's what Stalker looks like to me from the speedruns I've watched of it.
I'm not trying to attack Stalker, I'm comparing it because it's not THAT far from Fallout, no matter how much people try to say it's nothing like it. (Except the bugs. No one can bug like Bethesda and you can defend Stalker as much as you want on that part.)
Do you plan on ever ranking/comparing all the MMOs you've played for this series?
Just thought I'd point out that the game actually did tell you your ammo count. (you could see it going down in the bottom right above the slots that appeared to be skill slots) The UI element was entirely too small, tho'.
9:19 There is a HUD element that has the bullets displayed, bottom right above what I assume is the action bar, the first number deplete when there are fired at the dogs, second is the capacity and the last one is how many left. I will give that it's a smaller than I'd like compared to any other bullet count indicator for a FPS, but it is there or does the it's size just mean it doesn't really count.
Out of all "Worst MMO Ever" videos he's done, he needs to make a video about the king of them all
That cant come anytime soon. I need more first.
World of Warcraft
@@fatcat2015 Or perhaps Final Fantasy 14.
how about Star Citizen?
@@DarthSears as a "worst mmo"? Huh
I know everyone already said it, but i just have to:
"Think Fallout without power armor" -> so basically STALKER
Missed a real opportunity not making it "Spawn camped by a zombie dog, and then the game crashed, out of ten."
Even better. "Spawn camped by a zombie dog..." and then before he says out of ten, it cuts to a black screen. 10 seconds later, show the patreon people.
There's some neat things going on here. That shot of the birds circling over the building was honestly pretty cool. What a shame about the rest of it.
Most of the comment section:
"Whaaaatttt?! How have you never heard of the moderately popular series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? All of the cool kids are playing it."
Tbh, if you're establishing yourself as a gaming authority, you should have heard of it. It's moderately popular amongst the general populace but XKCD-level popular with people actually deciding the future of gaming.
@@PosthumanHeresy except all of his content pretty much revolves around MMO’s, so since STALKER isn’t an MMO it wouldn’t surprise me for him to not know anything about it. STALKER is an incredibly niche game.
@@lipsontajgordongrunk4328 Presenting yourself as an expert means you need to know how to google and read a page that you screenshot to put in your video.
@@PosthumanHeresy you don't need to know all the game franchises to know what good game design is. That's not how it works.
@@kelnhide That's also not my point. My point is you should know the history. There's more to being an expert than mechanical expertise.
What do the merchants DO with the severed dog heads?
Guess you've never played STALKER because you keep comparing this to Fallout.
I should have taken the user reviews into consideration on Steam. I never usually listen to critics so jumping into this with optimism was really the best thing I had going for me. I really thought I was an idiot for not understanding the complexity of the ammo usage and stamina and even the world building through text. Thanks for showing me I wasn't alone in this experience xD
Edit: i just realized that I played Stay Out. Not this one.. further proving your point made towards the end.
I played it a long time ago. It haven't changed at all. Stalker imposter made by amateurs.
Not seeing ammo on the HUD is not really a failing, rather that's a great feature IMO. Issue is when you choose to NOT have a hud to show ammo remaining, and also do NOT give any means to figure out how many bullets you have...
Example of how to do it right would be Insurgency: Sandstorm. where you hold down the reload key and get an visual indicator of how much ammo is left ( roughly, no numbers, just a visual bar of the magazine and fullness ).
Dude, you have never heard about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series? Wow
He's not the smartest. A few videos ago he was complaining about his framerate because he thought the CPU was the same as his graphics card.
@@Highsen WAIT WHAT NOW which video was this?
@@Highsen Forreal which video was that?
@@Highsen Video?
As someone who played Mortal Onlien for several years, I love the random MO references. Its like an Easter egg in every video.
Oh my god. I haven't laughed as hard I did at the dog part in a long time. Holy shit.
Your videos makes the smithing grind on runescape so much more manageable. Thank you :)
I know that grind dude, keep at it.
It's been my favorite guessing game since I started watching these 'worst MMO ever' but to day I finally I got one.
"spawn camped by a dog... out of ten"
As soon as I saw the right-click zooming I immediately got resurging Fallout 3 PTSD.
This game is literally a copy of the game "SO stay out" also on steam.
I'd debate that just on the basis it released a month before "So Stay Out" so it's who copied who? Seems they both lifted the same assets to use.
@@cericat Oh I see, I hadn't notcied that, So stay out was the game I played. I had never heard of Anomaly zone until Josh made a video. Cheers.
I hope you enjoy making these videos, because I love them. Especially when you have good feedback. Keep up the amazing work.