These are few thoughts regarding the PC Game Road to Vostok. Odds and Ends if you will. We started this as a rough list of things that we wished we’d known when we first started playing, and perhaps against our better judgment it’s since evolved into a few notes of what we consider helpful.
There is absolutely no way we figured any of this out ourselves. We draw heavily (heavily) on the general gestalt and community consensus from reddit (r/RoadtoVostokGame) and the Steam discussion forums. The website and other places also refers to a discord but generally those things give us heartburn.
We’ve also found, amongst a rising tide of AI slop “wikis” and Google Gemini’s delirium (although an SKS rifle could be interesting) some invaluable gems which we discuss below.
At time of writing these notes are based on early access version 0.1.1.3 and our experience with the demo. This is what we thought it might be helpful to know.
In some particular order.
Main Menu Music
Set it to On. To begin with you’re going to be here an awful lot so you may as well have Limbo play something atmospheric while you breathe out sharply and consider if you really want to click Load Game. (You do). Or New Game (You Will).
Graphics Settings
Not really too much to tinker with here.
We never really paid too much attention but after a semi recent Wolfenstein (New Order & Old Blood) playthrough (absolutely the wrong warm up for this game) and a gnawing sense of motion sickness from we learned we had to look at this sort of thing a bit closer. Turns out we like a reasonably wide FOV (usually about 110 degrees or so). For Road to Vostok we’ve maxed the slider, not sure what that actually corresponds to degree wise, and we ramped down the head bob and turned Interpolate (mouse smoothing) off.
We run native render resolution and have sharpness around 2/3rds or so. We personally opted for MSAA 8x with SMAA on. Some people really don’t like SMAA and some others also prefer less of sharpness filter. We can’t really tell the difference with any of these settings and we should probably spend a bit of time really digging into what these actually are in case we want to write something like a Substack.
We turned off Map and FPS on the HUD. If you really want to flex for FPS and performance statistics try your number pad Enter key.
What we would note that is that while we have a reasonable video card we’re running a pretty standard 75hz white collar peon monitor, so setting the Output Dynamic Range (via our NVIDIA app) to Full looked like it was causing so called Black Crush. Pitch black at night times and inside unless your 27% Narva is on. We were able to sidestep this a bit with the Exposure and Contrast settings, but then it washed out the daylight / outdoor scenes a little too much.
Even for Finland.
“Limited” Output Dynamic Range it is until we spring for a monitor who’s temperament isn’t defined by wage_feudalism.xls. Unless you absolutely must play as someone who is night blind and probably had restrictive conditions on their driver licence before All Went Sideways in Finland.
Rebind Interact to F
The default is middle mouse button which is context specific to open doors and search containers, cupboards, garbage and bodies. It works reasonably well, but F “feels” a lot better and is easier to use. It’s also faster, and we personally want to keep the mouse and mousewheel focused on fucking up weapon handling. Don’t bind to E as you will definitely need that for leaning. From memory this is our Doom (2016) / Doom Eternal (nope) binding for the rare occasions we needed to press a button like normal baseline human as opposed Doom’s default way of overcoming locked doors which generally resembled an Insight Learning Experiment performed by a rather compact abattoir.
See elsewhere for our fringe views on other rebinds.
Do the Tutorial
It’s not great, not terrible. But it’ll get you across some of the basics such as searching containers, equipping yourself and loading /unloading magazines into your weapons. Come back later and enjoy the MP7!
Main things to not skip over would be learning how to load and reload the Shotgun and the Mosin rifle.
For the Shotgun:
Ctrl - Open the breach (Prepare Insert)
Left Mouse Button - Load a shell (Insert Cartridge)
Ctrl - Close the breach
R to rack the slide and chamber the shell (Reload)
If you’re reloading from 0 this is sometimes easy to forget so get in to the habit of checking with a round count.
In combat once you’ve fired you’ll need to “manually” rack the slide after every shot to chamber the next shell.
It’s a little counter intuitive as most games rack the slide automatically for you, and combined with how intense the early firefights (read: A fuckwit bandit and his AK bursting out of the sauna) can be while you’re still getting to grips with weapon positioning, leaning and iron sights it’s something that can easily be overlooked in the panic.
The Mosin is very similar except that if you’ve emptied the entire internal magazine you don’t need to cycle the bolt (R / reload) to fire again after you’ve reloaded.
Weapon Slots
There’s two. Just in case you’re not across this you can actually take submachine guns like the mp5 variants in the secondary slot - you’re not just restricted to pistols. Surprisingly the KP-31 is also considered a secondary.
Start
Standard Start
Don’t go near the “Darkness” (Random) start (from memory this appears to be a nod to the “Black Road” start for a Stalker mod (Misery?)). There would be a stronger minority report for an Ironman start for new players if it didn’t also lock you into a random start.
Summer
You’re going to start in Summer. Yes there’s an argument that some aspects of Winter (see elsewhere) are actually better for beginners but managing your Body Temperature and frozen supplies is an additional starting complication that we don’t feel you need.
Arm Stamina
Having your weapons up in the ready position drains arm stamina and affects your aim. The mouse wheel system here is rather intuitive. This didn’t really cause us too many problems (eventually) but we do remember being quite overwhelmed in our first few firefights (we still get overwhelmed) and either redlining it with predictable results or not even being able to fire as the lowered weapon position acts a de facto safety.
We sometimes occasionally forget this when trying to snipe at distance, unwisely increasing the volume of shots we take to counteract the wilder and wilder swaying. Good thing .308 is easy to find and cheap (It Is Not).
Garbage Containers
The Individual Garbage bags in a pile are not individual loot containers as far as the game is concerned. We are very thorough stupid.
A Tremendous Thirst
And where the fuck is all the water.
You’re going to be quite thirsty.
At first we were concerned by the speed at which your health and energy meters decline but after looting a few houses in the village we realised that we’d be fine. There’s a few sentences from one of the trader quests which hints at water pollution so this might be something that gets expanded on later as a the narrative and background lore gets built out. Unlike Hugh you’re not going to be able to drink beer instead.
Alternatively: lean in.
Shorter Runs
After a few initial runs of looting, horrible death, cabin, looting you’ll start to get something of a feel for what you’re doing, or the first few pangs as the loot goblin mentality starts tightening its talons around your dopamine pathways. Generally, a shorter run that secures needed resources or rarer items is better than a longer run that exposes you to more risk, and a greater chance of losing everything that you’ve been able to successfully collect so far.
In any case, every time you visit a shelter the map resets which, for example, means that effectively if you turned back instead to secure the evening’s inventory rather than risk the grey crack-house down by the lake, the crack- house will be waiting for you next run with theoretically whatever it would have held had you pushed on. Or any case that’s what we think - the RNG, statistics and psychology nexus here could be quite interesting so someone smarter than us should write about that.
Take a Minute
“He studied the blue floodplain out there in the silence. A vast and breathless amphitheatre. Waiting. He’d had this feeling before. In another country. He never thought he’d have it again.”
A lot of criticism gets thrown around regarding our local bandits who have their peaceful countryside strolling rudely interrupted by a glimpse of a complete stranger hundreds of metres away in an abandoned house.
From a glance through the intervening copse of trees, the faded kitchen curtains, and around the open cupboard door, this marksman clearly sights the four exposed pixels of the sleeve of your less than sartorial brown tactical fleece and confirms that You A’int From Around Here.
The bandit’s rusted heirloom Markov pistol coughs once - a single report that you barely perceived much less understood before the void took you.
Or at least it feels that way.
From what we’ve read here the AI’s vision distance on a clear day is 200 metres and our general sense is that they will immediately engage at that distance if they sight you.
Obviously we’re still in early access and we’ll see changes to the game, but we have heard that the long engagement distance is staying and we’d actually be sorry to see it go.
One of the major elements of the atmosphere is the near oppressive, constant crawling apprehension. At any moment the (far too) quiet could be disturbed by that awful supersonic whipcrack of that first bullet, kick starting that old familiar refrain of “is this going to be it?”.
We may be slightly highly strung or perhaps just not understanding that early game phase is in fact from the horror genre.
Now, early access jank and AI aside, what we’d recommend here is to just take a minute. This is not a run and gun in the vein of some of the other shooters we’re fond of.
When we’ve taken a second after opening the door to leave a building, or before making a run across open ground we’ve been better for it. When we’ve checked the view from the windows while looting the room, we’ve been better for it. When we’ve decided to take a few more moments to circle or flank the next village crack house we want to visit rather than just walking right up the garden path, we’ve been better for it.
When we’ve barrelled out with alacrity Jani has without fail blindsided us with his kam-74u which somehow inexplicable still works despite his itinerant lifestyle, generally low conscientiousness and non-existent respect for his (let alone other people’s) property
Say it with us:
When you get sloppy, Vostok gets stroppy
Every time we’ve cleared 7 out of 8 rooms and give the final one a half hearted lazy glance is when we’ve regretted it. In fact, we’ve now caught ourselves the minute we recognise complacency drifting in as the immediate cue to double down on our rules (see elsewhere).
Now we’re absolutely not saying that the current build (0.1.1.3 as time of writing) is perfect and that anything others find annoying is a skill issue or an early access artifact or part of a deliberate design philosophy revealed only to the lead (previously sole / soul) developer Antti Leinonen in the shifting lights of the aurora borealis that we could never comprehend. The local banditry at times often resemble early counter-strike era aim bots or Olympic pistoleers.
Having said this however, the vast majority of our deaths had something to teach us. Even that completely bullshit one. For the most part we could see how we ended up at the Main Menu and we could see what we did or didn’t do wrong, and after a few more runs we started to spot the lucky escapes that by right we shouldn’t have slunk away from.
Over time we picked up a much greater sense of perspective from watching the AI. Sprinting through open areas is incredibly, incredibly visible and near immediately draws your eye to the movement and noisily moving through a building opening doors very quickly signals your position. With a bit of patience we’ve also found ourselves in a position to take the first shot on some wondering clown taking a break from the big top.
Continued in Part II against our better judgement.