I bought it but got a refund. I was a huge fan of the first game and enjoyed CoP well enough, though it felt like a completely different game that only shared aesthetics with the SoC.
I think I played for about an hour and in that time it felt like I was being led by the nose through the "quests". I don't know if the world opened up after that a linear "curated" experience isn't what draws me to that game. The first anomaly you went through had an obvious path so you didn't have to throw bolts, (I'm not sure that was even in the game unless I just missed it).
I'm a tard who plays PC games with a controller and there didn't appear to be aim assist which I know is lame but is also standard at this point when you use a controller in FPS (or it is there and I just suck terribly). Also the inventory interface was rough with the controller with some seriously counter-intuitive control scheme decisions.
The game was pretty enough and ran fine but just felt kind of cheaply slapped together compared to the obviously lovingly crafted first one.
And really minor complaint that there was no Russian voice available. I know there us Ukranian voice and its close enough to Russian that it doesn't matter for atmosphere, but it feels unnecessarily petty considering you know everyone who worked on the game probably spoke both.
I watched a friend stream it (my PC can't run it lol) and what really bothered me is how they fucked with the story.
In the prologue they establish that the anomalous artifacts found in the zone lose their anomalous energy if taken outside the zone, and that basically means that stalkers shouldn't exist, period.
The entire reason that stalkers exist is because of the artifacts, people try to sneak past the military cordon to get into the zone to retrieve the artifacts to sell to the outside because the artifacts have all kinds of extremely useful properties. Just think of how useful an item that purges radiation from the body or heals wounds rapidly might be.
If artifacts become useless outside the zone then they would have rapidly depreciating value and there would be very few stalkers going into the zone outside of government, scientific and military stalkers. It undermines the entire setting on a fundamental level.
And to make things even more absurd, Stalker 2 establishes that scientists were trying to figure out how to recharge artifacts and the project got canned due to safety reasons, despite the massive benefits of such a project.
The game opens up after you get through the prologue, the presentation is great and I could accept the game's flaws and lack of A-Life (devs said it isn't working yet) but I can't forgive the bad writing and worldbuilding.
It's pretty clear that the game was made by a different team with different ideas and their ideas are not better than their predecessors.
Whaaat. I saw a few reviews that said the game was super busted but that is somehow even more dumb. Yes, if artifacts are useless outside the zone, no one pays for them, and thus no one hunts for them.
Thankfully you can just play Anomaly.
I thought I was going crazy because no one was talking about this. Not even the negative reviews on Steam mentioned it, even though story and worldbuilding is a core part of the Stalker series. And it's stuff you learn in the first couple of hours of gameplay too.
Some reviewers even praised the story as being great which I can't understand in any capacity. Did these people even play the previous Stalker games or are they just tourists? Or are people just willing to accept slop so long as it has the right brand?
If the story and worldbuilding wasn't there then the Stalker series would have been nothing more than fancy boomer shooters with environmental hazards and no one would have gotten so invested in the series.
I honestly wouldn't call the story* the main selling point of these games, though I watch the ending of the original Stalker now and then because it still gives me chills.
*Story as in the narrative of the character you are playing and what happens to him during the game. As opposed to "Story" in the big picture sense of just being a lone adventurer in a harsh and unforgiving land, which is very well done.
But yeah that's a horrible retcon and it basically ruins the setting. Yikes.
Maybe it's not the main selling point but it is what's keeping the series from being Generic Post-Apocalyptic Shooter #532.
If you removed all the story and worldbuilding and just left in the environments and core gameplay would you have something interesting? I'd say it wouldn't be near as interesting.
I might be biased though since I'm very interested in media writing and worldbuilding which is also how I notice the kind of ridiculous changes they make.
Or Chernobylite.
Why do they always have to fundamentally ruin a story with a sequel? I don't understand it. There are so many ways to tell a new story without changing the one that came before.
Modern writers don't seem to be able to really look at the big picture and understand why things are the way they are. They have to retcon story and worldbuilding aspects to insert their own ideas even if it ruins what came before.
The worst part is that none of this was even necessary. The writers wanted protagonist man to get a special artifact outside the Zone and go into it to uncover its mysteries (which is pretty much what happens in the current story) and they could have kept this story with some minor alterations to avoid damaging the worldbuilding.
I'm about 25% of the way through the story so I don't know the full details. Is it possible that artifacts lost their charge since the Wish Granter disappeared and that's why they loose their energy outside the zone?
That shouldn't really have anything to do with the artifacts. Let me give you some background lore on why the Zone exists.
After the Chernobyl NPP melted down and the exclusion zone was set up, scientists set up secret labs in the Zone to do secret research.
Part of this research is the C-Consciousness project, which attempted to fix humanity's flaws (eliminating greed, cruelty, anger, etc) by attempting to alter the noosphere (an invisible field affected by and affecting human cognition).
They did an experiment to attempt to alter the noosphere which backfired horribly and ended up damaging it, and that is what resulted in the creation of the Zone and the anomalies within it.
Even after C-Con is destroyed due to Strelok's actions in SoC the Zone remains as the damage to the noosphere appears to be permanent.
The Wish Granter is not directly related to the anomalous phenomena inside the Zone, it's a trap built by C-Con to deal with intruders.
Oh come the fuck on.
Whelp, that just killed any remaining urge I had to get the damn thing. I'll stick with the original, thanks.
The fact that they deliberately went with the Ukrainian spelling on the title told me everything I needed to know about it and how much it was banking on "we are poor Ukies doing our best uwu" to dodge criticisms.
Like, the original games were janky beyond jank, but they still had a lot of soul and clearly they were trying to make something well beyond their ability. This comes across as a cheap nostalgia grab (copying things from the original without understanding why they were like that) using the War as a huge marketing gimmick for them.
And at the end of the day, its still a broken buggy mess. So it has nothing over the originals (which you can fix easily with decade old mods) except a massive price tag, absurd harddrive space, and a seemingly absent or broken A-Life system.
I have seen a few replies in the stalker reddit about "they are in a warzone!!!" used as an excuse for the jank.
Tbh I think when your average redditor thinks about Ukraine in their minds eye they picture the whole country being little more thana cross between ww1 trenches and The Road.
If its anything less than that, then their insane bloodlust and desire to genocide the Russians isn't as valid. They need them to be actively turning the country into rubble to allow them to act the way they do.
I get pissed every time I launch Steam and "Chornobyl" is the first thing I see. It was "Chernobyl" for my entire damn life until this stupid game released and it will always be. Get fucked, revisionists. I don't care how petty this is, I refuse to play this game for this reason alone.
Its much worse because its a literal sequel to a game with Chernobyl in the title to begin with.
I feel the same way about chinks and the use of Q as "ch". Just fuck right off with that. Using a naked q where there should be a k is bad enough.
I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of a stalker purist who only plays with a controller.
I've stopped playing games at a desk and just play from a couch. The PC is hooked up to a TV. My Mouse is a wireless keyboard with integrated touchpad that doesn't work for action games. I haven't found a good couch-mouse solution but now that I transitioned to a trackball for work that might be more doable.
I played the old stalkers from a desk but after decades of gaming and riding a desk for my job I can't bring myself to sit at a desk for my entertainment.
So get a standing desk.
I used an ironing board as a standing desk to play Path of Exile. It isn't great on the shoulders.
Still waiting for it to download. Why the fuck is it 150 gb?
Uncompressed sound files, if I had to guess.
CoD made it acceptable in the industry to just ignore the optimization step and just let your game be 300 gigs.
It's absolutely criminal how big these newer AAA games are, which rival the size of totally modded out games, but look far worse. My fully modded out GTA 5 folder with HD asset overhauls for the roads and buildings, and tons of vehicle add-ons, is still under 300gb.
Somehow they figured that since storage space is cheaper than ever, they could just skip the optimization step. People wonder why AAA games are so jank nowadays.
According to gameplay footage (from dunkey) you get to throw bolts when the game fully opens up.
For me, and for what I've heard about their "innovative AI technology", I don't think I would like it. I dislike that sort of "AI spawns in a radius around you" thing.
I'm generally not a fan of that either, though in some cases I have seen games manage to pull that off in surprisingly convincing ways, to the point to where I wouldn't have any idea that it was doing that if I didn't have some knowledge about what was going on under the hood.
I'm thinking of maybe holding off until the modding scene catches up a bit, simply because of how spoiled I've been with STALKER mods in general for however many years now.
I'm a tard that plays shooters with a controller and a mouse. Fuck WASD. Left hand = Controller, Right hand = Mouse, if I need to Jump or Grab, I quickly transition to 2 hands on the controller, baddies show up, back to precision aiming with the mouse.
I'm so sorry to hear that. Did you talk to a doctor about it?
Nah, I gave up and refunded once the lies in regards to the A-life was obvious, gutted the system for a far cry/skyrim encounter system instead of A-life.
The design is not great.
People spawn behind you in areas you've just cleared in a way that absolutely murders immersion. It doesn't feel like you're in a world that has people moving around, it feels like you're in a world composed of inhabited points of interest with a barren wasteland in between, with the game occasionally rolling some dice and spawning guys just behind you. The developers apparently saying they have a good system in place but it's just broken right now is an obvious 'dog ate my homework' level lie.
The economy is a joke. Every guy you fight obviously has infinite ammo... except when you kill them, you find they had a partial magazine in the gun and less than ten extra rounds in their inventory. On top of that, their guns are almost always in such poor condition they're totally worthless, yet they never jam on the AI, only on you. They're also visibly wearing armor, but that armor lootable less than 1% of the time. It all adds up to a feeling that the game is constantly rewriting reality to keep you from making money too fast. The repair costs for your gear once you've upgraded a couple times is so high you'll be running in the red every time you go out.
The day/night cycle is very fast, and the game is not particularly fun at night: it's just too damn dark to see anything, your flashlight has a maximum range of about 15 feet, the enemy is almost impossible to see beyond that range, and there are no flashlight upgrades or night vision in the game. I suspect the AI entirely ignores nighttime vision penalties.
There's paid fast travel between bases, but with how valueless the in-between space is, this is a game that would benefit from unlimited fast travel between all discovered locations. The amount of time it takes to run from spot to spot is the primary factor in whether I'm willing to explore a spot I haven't been to. That goes double if I'm trying to bring back enough gear to afford my repair bills.
Haven't played in a while but I recall getting night vision was a highlight in the first game. There the first set you got really sucked and the later sets get better, not sure if that was vanilla or mods though.
Having none at all seems like a major oversight.
Also the point of interest thing is what turned of off of CoP. SoC had these open maps where stuff just happened. CoP had neat circles on the map pointing out to where stuff happens and nothing in between but terrain.
I'm enjoying it, it's neat seeing some old locations from the previous games. It's a hit buggy here and there with so far 2 crashes to desktop when being killed by one of those invisible tentacle faced bastards.
One bug I have is for whatever reason the shops when they went friendly in the first town, now just give me money with no transactions. (Which is nice for the upgrades and ammo but takes away from the struggle of trying to make money haha)
I'm running it on high with decade old hardware (with the exception of the video card) and it launched with epic settings to start with no issues. Intel i7 4400k, 32 gig ram (ddr3), Radeon 6800xt
There's a brief 1 or so hour intro and then the game opens up. You refunded the game because it had an intro? Lol.
It's still stalker. The OG stalker survived for so long because of mods. This one will get better with mods and it's already pretty cool. Performance isn't great though. You need a $2000 PC to run it smooth
If a game's intro is dragging on too long without properly engaging you, then that is a massive mark against the game and not the player. Especially if its over a fucking hour by your own admission. Kingdom Hearts 2 is still famous 20 years on for its horrendously long prologue and that's maybe 45 minutes if you never played it before.
At least the originals most of us got for 5$ or less before needing some other guy to fix it for us, and those games were breaking new ground in a lot of ways to justify being so broken.
Ehh, you do now that the reason why we got great mod for the last one was because someone stole the source code and then release it, which means that we need the same level of access in order to get that and in which case you might wonder why not just build it from scratch (I mean the engine they are using is the standard UE5 and the little I can see it does not seem to be that customised...)