Refunded after 110 mins.
Not happy about needing framegen+FSR performance for 1440 ultrawide on a 7900 XT+9700x.
Was wondering why pressing 6 did nothing the entire prologue before I had an EPIC STORY MOMENT where you get given the bolt.
I think it was an exceptionally dumb decision not to have easily accessible healing available before you reach the first town.
I turned on GOD GAMER mode and ran it hitless up till there. #pureskill
A-Life 2.0 is complete cap, what got me to ragequit was barely fighting through a bandit squad, then pack of dogs spawning directly behind me before my first CTD.
/10, back to gamma
They paid an Azov member as a voice actor and also one of their employees volunteered for a fascist brigade and got deservedly killed.
If you want to play this game, pirate it.
I was afraid the game would end up beinmg full of Nazi brainworms. Given the whole culture around the war and the game’s popularity and recognition outside Ukraine I figured even if the devs were normal there was still a good chance of them being voluntold to shove fash shit in to it.
not a novel observation on my part, but it’s interesting to track the portrayal of the military from SoC through CoP
there’s probably an essay on cultural expressions of the Euromaidan in there somewhere
That’s a very good point! I’d never considered that.
after
itand a couple of hours of it, i gotta say im quite surprised that the faction that is associated with the Ukrainian military seems to not be portrayed in a good light at all lol, they’re shitty cops who keep trying to keep the good stalkers down and you get plenty of opportunity to fight them
Honestly, all the ukraine shit that ended up tangentially attached to this installment’s development is why I stayed my ass with Fallout; I don’t want to deal with slobber nazis in my post-apoc
Its genuinely quite shit
- Game doesn’t run on a 4080 super and doesn’t even look good enough to warrant the performance it looks like any copy paste unreal 5 dreck. Frame pacing is all over the place so even high and capped framerates feel awful
- UI may as well be from far cry completely misses the aspect of what made the original games interface so good
- stealth is broken enemies see you from miles away through foliage then aimbot your brain and has that stupid 360 degree ubisoft enemy can see you ring that i hate
- mutants eat bullets makes bloodsuckers frustrating rather than scary
- game has forced on mouse accell and smoothing with no option to disable without messing in the configs
- no muzzle flash lighting or shadows cast from the torch which were very big features of the original game
- buttons don’t register sometimes and need to be pressed twice weather this is to open or close inventory/pda or even worse to fucking quicksave where many times i realised it didn’t save at all cos i have to press it twice
- difficulty modes copy modern game difficulty make you weaker and enemies bullet sponges and has nothing similar to the original trilogies master difficulty
- first encounter with a poltergeist went terribly unlike in shoc where you meet one in that bunker and it ynow levitates the object then throws it to give you time to identify and move… This one the physics object moves AFTER IT HITS YOU so you only see it reacting BOUNCING OFF YOUR BODY and they are impossible to avoid like completely aimbot buckets
- english va is somehow worse than in the originals
- its made by nazis
- a-life 2.0 is reported currently as broken so its just a random enemy spawner ring around the player which is another significant staple of the original games
- stupid animations for inventory and PDA that really don’t need to exist and just get in the way
- Even breaking open crates for stuff feels bad the model just disappears into a few particle effects rather than ynow actually falls apart into physics objects like the fucking original games managed to do
- fuzzy ass image like every fuzzy ass UE5 game
Positives:
- guns sound nice and have good animations
If ur getting the game pirate the gog version but its not worth it just play the originals. The design language adopted for this game was to make it more like a ubisoft game than take what made the originals so impactful.
I got the list above from the prologue i didn’t need to play anything else
RDR2 needs to be punished for its crimes in convincing devs that forced animations for basic actions was a good idea, even if it was mildly cool in that game cause it did almost everything like that.
(it probably doesn’t originate there either but its the most famous current example)
I disagree and wish more games did it. I am annoyed at how quick the animations are for eating and healing in this game.
I was hoping it would be closer to Tarkov honestly. The extremely long healing/eating/drinking/reloading animations really go a long way in an FPS to establish “this is a human with a body that is very fragile” which also establishes stakes very well.
In Tarkov it leads to a lot of interesting decision making that doesn’t really come up in any other shooters. Instead of kill everything - loot. It becomes start gunfight - get shot - try to get a safe spot because this healing animation is going to take 20 seconds - kill enemy - realize you were shot in the stomach and are dying of thirst - check containers/pockets for something, (anything please god anything) to drink - decide if its safe to drink - finish healing - realize you didn’t repack you mags - die to the next person who comes up on the pile of bodies because you’re out of ammo.
I get that I am probably in the minority but I love that shit.
That does actually sound interesting since it will be adding dimensions to one of the more interesting parts of the gameplay.
Having animations for checking the map or doing busywork only is just a dev jerkoff session gone wrong though IMO.
Extreme
Reminder that GSC had a donation page for Azov, and when contacted by Russian fans (of which they have many) that they should at least explicitly warn Russian nationals about donating to Azov because that is against the law of the Russian Federation and could land those who are unaware in jail, they refused to do so. Shows how much respect they have to their Russian fans.
Chornobyl
Is that another thing like Kiyv vs. Kiev? Or just typo and I’m reading too much into it?
Yeah
I pirated the game, changed some settings, then the game had to compile shaders again. Found out that’s a bug that makes it do that every single time and it takes like 5 minutes after opening the game. Decided to wait for it to be fixed before ever starting a new game because that did not bode well for what else I could expect.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that we just don’t live in an era where games are finished when they’re released.
I’ll look to play the game in a year or two after it’s been officially patched and after a COMPLETE mod comes out to fix that.
Back in the day there were also unfinished games. SiN, Driver 3, etc… Even popular games like GTA SA felt like they were unfinished.
The thing is, back then if you released a game unfinished or with bugs, it was over. A patch required to fix a game would take a lot of time to download, and doing that on consoles was basically impossible. Nowadays they just rush development, treat employees like shit, and keep releasing patches until the game is fixed. Ubisoft is well known for this shit.
I agree, it definitely happened in olden times too. But it was certainly a lot less frequent.
Just wait till we get to the era where bug fixes are dlc locked
Just play Paradox games, they’re really ahead of the curve on that one.
Shame. I love the original games, even played SoC right at release in 2007, and played Anomaly with my own curated mod list for years.
I haven’t played it myself because my PC is still an i5 4690k and gtx970 lol but I was looking forward to it eventually
I would be optimistic if it weren’t for the complete lack of a-life, it was the thing that really made stalker special but who knows what modders may be able to do in the future.
It’s amazing how easy it is to make gamers believe that fucking dogshit is a video game genre lol.
“Slavjank” is understandable and forgivable if you’re making video games during the global financial crisis, but you’ve got no regional excuse in the 2020s for making games that don’t work and require 6 months of patching, you’re just every other dishonest video game company at that point.
You gotta be an indie game studio of like max 5 people now to get the loveable jank excuse.
Slavjank started during the 1990’s, and became popular by the 2000’s. And the Studio that made Stalker 2 had to deal with the Russo-Ukranian War, so if the game is bad and broken, I blame Zelensky
I think it is actually pretty alright. It’s a beautifully realized world, it is very atmospheric and moody. The story so far has been pretty lame (I think they are going for a “oh no the zone is getting commercialized we punks need to fight against it” kind of plot, which is kinda meh as far as where they could have taken the story), although there is some character to it (but there’s also a pretty regressive streak to the whole thing, with there still being no female stalkers or any real diversity to speak of).
The more pressing and obvious problems the game has are balance and the complete absence of A-Life. Supplies are much too plentiful, while repairing any of your equipment costs way too much and without roaming bands of mutants and stalkers the game really does lose a lot of what made Stalker special (endlessly respawning enemies is hopefully just a bug).
there still being no female stalkers or any real diversity to speak of
this one’s just for the boys, blyat
well i would have hoped the boys would have grown up a little in the fifteen years since the last game
well, let’s not raise the bar too far now
I think they are going for a “oh no the zone is getting commercialized we punks need to fight against it” kind of plot
That’s close to what the original Roadside Picnic novel that inspired the games does, the Zones there have always had companies sending in people to retrieve shit and sell it
This sounds like an excellent homage to the original, which IIRC was a buggy dumpster fire for quite a bit after release.
I’m not a stalker guy, just came into the thread to reccomend the short novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatski brothers, which is the story that directly inspired the setting in the stalker games (though from what I gather the games are VERY different)
The games are also based on the movie Stalker by Tarkovski. I think, I could be very wrong, the artifacts and other stuff are based on the book. The monolith that grants you “wishes” is based on the movie. And other stuff is either made up or based on real-life things.
The game is a toned down version of the book. It’s much less deadly than in the book, undead are missing and other stuff.
I think the wish granter is in the book too, the main thing the movie changes is not having all the minor artifacts as a financial incentive.
I tried it. Died too much, quit.
I’m like 8 hours in and comparing it to Gamma makes it feel real bad. Even if the performance was fixed, it’s just not on the same level feature and depth wise.
I’ll just be playing Anomaly, if I get the itch for a stalker game. that, or metro exodus for the millionth time. what a good game exodus was.
