I love STALKER. It's my favorite single player FPS franchise. I make these videos out of love. The reason I'm critical is because we were marketed an Alife 2.0 system and instead got a generic spawn system. What we have in the game isn't even on par with the original A-life 1.0 system that was refined for Call of Pripyat. I don't think it's wrong to expect a system that as a least on par with CoP's system. Thought the kicker is, again, it was marketed as A-life 2.0, an even more refined version of CoP's system, which is not what we have here.
Highly agreed and the enemies awareness and accuracy need huge reevaluation, like it’s hard to explain but they’re too aware and not aware enough at the same time, given the scenario 😂😂😂
I´m liking the new changes to A-Life 2.0. A little janky, yes but I play with mods that eliminates aimboting from NPCs and gives me better stealth opportunities. Maklanes Better Gunfights, Maklanes Better Weapons Feeling (changes stats and ballistics for weapons to be more "realistic") and Maklanes Better NPC Range together with long range aggression fix. More fair encounters. The aimboting and long range shots from several hundred meters away is a high priority fix for sure that needs implementing.
@@niklaskarlsson8833 There's a pattern I bring up that you probably noticed if you watched this the whole way through. Persistence and spawn. When spawns happened in the older games they were generally in a different region or far enough the the player never noticed). Right now, it's only within a 250m radius of the player. Anything outside of the player is empty space. We need persistence. The previous games relied on a persistant simulated world of NPC's roaming the zone until death. They were tracked. Since they were persistant and tracked, we had features such as faction relations, rankings (top stalkers), statistics tabs. NPC's were given a set of commands and objectives they could do in their online/offline states that played into these PDA tabs and ultimately created dynamic, random events by chance. Made every playthrough feel unique
@@THEJimmiChanga I get what you are saying 100%. A-Life 2.0 is by no means fixed, that is clear. But this is the first step to improve it. Also, saw another review of the patch yesterday. And that guy followed a group of Ward soldiers out in the wild. Then left them. And when he went back to Zalissya he found all the same guys again. Names and everything. Either way, I´m enjoying my experience alot more then I did at launch.
I thought it fixed me being the boogieman for Malachite despite helping them, because I didn't get the side quest saying I was. So i completed it and pushed on. An hour later i needed to go there to drop off loot and they all hated me for having the nerve to defend their base. I get it man
@quake9405 alife is in its absolute infancy fight now. At least their making steps forward with draw distance, while simultaneously getting the game to run better.
An even bigger issue is how you can just slap a medkit on yourself and instantly be back to full health. On top of that, they're so abundant that you're not likely to ever run out of them even if you never buy them. It completely breaks combat balance. Luckily, mods can easily correct that by slowing down the rate of healing and reducing the amount of loot.
They have the map, the POIs, the weapons, the NPCs, the mutants, the story, the atmosphere/environment, and some of the scripted stuff is really good, they just need to implement the actual A-life system. At first I figured they were rushed and needed to get it out and that they would follow it up with an update a few months from now, this seems to be the way modern games work. If they're spending dev resources implementing band-aids it makes me concerned that they aren't planning on actually putting A-life in... I like some of the scripted stuff: the poppy anomaly is interesting, the shah's notes about charging people to hide from emissions is interesting, the one setup, the guy who tells you to check a stash and you find a note and when you go to confront him you find another note. That's cool from a story perspective to experience once or twice. But the things that keep us coming back are the exploration and A-life. Also: I'm tired of not being able to see anything. It's constantly storming or foggy or night with particles and leaves cluttering the air, tons of underbrush that only obscures the players view but all NPCs can laser beam through. Some areas look really great, most of the time I'm trudging through thick brush while its storming at night and it's so incredibly annoying. I get the anomalies on the road but they don't seem to move and the fact that there is so much foot traffic from everyone in the zone but no new paths to follow across the land is also cringe. There's no point in following roads because there tends to be tons of anomalies on them, it'd only take a few people bypassing an anomaly to make a path that others would follow.
This.. This game has so much potential. It's the whole reason I've been able to sink 100 hours into it with no ALIFE backing it up. I know some people are upset of my criticisms but their warranted when we were sold on ALIFE 2.0 being an improved version of CoP's alife 1.0, and instead given ALIFE 0.25. However, I've given credit where credit is due and stated there's a lot of fun to be had. As you said, the atmosphere, the characters, the original locations, and the map in general is superb. Without ALIFE it just feels like a theme park when moving through it.
I definitely plan on covering each patch moving forward. I also started 1 challenge series and 1 unique video within Stalker. One in Stalker anomaly's warfare mode as the Bandits. Another in Stalker 2, which will be a single video of me taking a new character and going straight to Pripyat without interacting with any quests on my way up. It's going to be a lot of work juggling 3 different games (Stalker anomaly, Stalker 2, and Starfield) but I aim to please.
Why like 98% of yt even the big channels talking about "a life is here it changed everything". Is stalker a game like starfield where the most are just clickbaiter? I mean here are like the only true videos about a life all this other big channels where talking about they are the biggest stalker fan don’t even know what a life is, they really mean it’s in the game now.
I had the same thought of this issue yesterday - too bad they respawn after being wiped out. Ill keep playing Gamma for a while before i jump back in. Sad because i LOVE Stalker 2
Some pointers... 0:00 Unarmoured vehicles don't make good cover in this game. They can fire through it. So can you as a matter of fact. This actually is pretty realistic. Automobiles don't make good cover unless you hide behind the engine compartment. I believe the AI in this game is also supposed to have a sort of suppressive fire mechanic, where they may light up your last seen position. That being said, their pinpoint accuracy here is pretty absurd. That definitely should be fixed. A good AI system sometimes requires making the AI oblivious at the right times. Even if they could shoot through cover, they shouldn't be able to know exactly where you are behind it. 0:50 This might need more testing done. I believe Offline AI is supposed to simulate "squads", not "individuals". It seems to be this way in previous titles too. Probably a necessary form of optimisation, as simulating every individual would be incredibly taxing on the CPU. For next time, I recommend you test this on an actual squad with 3 or more guys in it, following a patrol path. 2:00 Scripted spawns may be annoying, but they did as a matter of fact ALWAYS exist in previous titles. Remember the Circus Anomaly from Call of Pripyat? A fire poltergeist constantly spawns there. The Stingray wreck also has a respawning electric poltergeist. In Shadow of Chernobyl, the Agroprom Underground has that one bloodsucker encounter that constantly respawns. They also have the Bloodsucker Village, which is constantly spawning bloodsuckers in. 9:40 A-Life is a complicated system that does a multitude of things. The core feature is AI persistence, where NPCs have online and offline states. However, it does also include the ability to spawn things. These spawns are usually quite seamless, because they are often done out of bounds, where the player won't typically notice, but the sequel is now one cohesive open world, rather than a bunch of cells with loading screens in between them. It may not be able to obfuscate these spawns as well as it used to in order to maintain that illusion.
This is all fair pushback 0:00 I get that vehicles CAN be penetrated, however, in fairness that's why i stepped to the side to show that it wasn't just penetrating a part of the vehicle, but instead the entire vehicle from back to front. There's only a few high caliber guns in existence that could achieve something like that. 0:50 I explain later in the video that I have tested larger squads. In my experience they end up disbanding after following them for 5ish minutes, then dissappearing when I walk away. However, the distance until the disappear has been increased. Their still not persistant 2:00 I do actually remember there being scripted enemies, and I think I mentioned that briefly (not 100%). My gripe with the brain scorcher instance in this case is it's just a normal POI in this game outside of the collar side quest, therefore I feel it shouldn't have any scripted spawns, especially the same 3 poltergeists in the same 3 spots, spawning in minutes after you leave. It's immersion breaking in my opinion. I wasn't a fan of the electrical poltergeist spawning back in at the Stingray in Zaton, and only went to the circus anomaly one time per playthrough so didn't notice the FP respawn, so fair enough. They hid this well enough though such as the claw anomaly where snorks would ambush you from the hiding holes. Theyd respawn but it was believable as it was one of 2 hiding holes in that area. The problem in S2 is, it's at most POI's whereas it was sparse in the previous games. 9:40 I think the main problem right now is, when this happened in the older games, it was sparse and generally in a different region than the player. At the very least far enough from the player that they would never notice. Right now, there's no persistence in my testing outside of bases and scripted NPC's and the spawns happens constantly, within a 200-250m radius of the player. It makes encounters rather jarring. I do urge you to encounter a group, run outside of the 250m radius and come back. I've tested this thoroughly and almost every time they've despawned. My next video will be compilation of various instances like I did in my "Stalker 2's a.i. is a mess" video.
Exactly. When I played GAMMA I wasn't even interested in or following the main story. I was just enjoying the struggle for survival and it all felt as though my actions had real effects on the world. If I cam across friendlies under attack, I would assist them and move on. In Stalker 2, I can achieve the same thing by simply dumping some of my ammo on the ground, running a little ways off until they all despawn... SAME result. Nothing I did one way or the other affects anything in any way and is just a waste of ammo if you do engage the spawn. This is why I have zero fear of traveling from one side of the zone to the other. All I have to do if I encounter anything is simply sprint a relatively short distance and they disappear. Most of us know there are ways to get into pripyat without advancing the story to that point. With the current system there is absolutely no reason to be scared of going there even if you're in rookie gear. There is simply nothing in the game that is all that threatening with a little running unless you absolutely must "go through" some baddies for some reason. Your demonstration of the exact same scripted baddies respawning at POI's is was good example of why it destroys the immersion. What should happen is that once the original scripted baddies are cleared out, random chance rolls should happen every so often to determine if something has reoccupied the POI and what exactly that something is. Factors like what kind of area it is, a swamp vs an outpost for example, would affect the % chances of various mutants or humans would appear, with something like an outpost being heavily weighted in favor of humans. Being an outpost or a base would affect the number of humans. Anyway, Stalker2 is an early access at best and a complete betrayal of the fanbase at worst.
I totally share your sentiment. I'm slowly making my way through the game and loving it, despite the numerous bugs. I overlooked it and kept going because I am having a good time. But I am currently now heading towards End Game and OMG it gets so much worse. The constant crashes, almost endless spawning enemies in full gear with laser accuracy that demolish your gear durability so quickly and bugged quests. I just want to finish the game and then Ill wait till more patches come out then jump back in. A-life has still got a long way to go and there are still so many things missing from the game like night vision
How interesting you play and showcase the problems at the exact same locations i have tried playing this pos after doing the whole reinstall thing, cause its still faster than the patching process. After that i had to figure out why the shader compiling was getting stuck. Then finally came across this place, cleared it out twice, got the collar off of the soldiers then went on. Honestly i enjoyed the game more before the patch, i cant run 10 steps without encountering enemies now.
I complained a lot about missing A -Life. The patches were enough to make it at least playable, or so I thought. I just cannot get over how awfully bad the combat is. You get very quickly dropped to low health, then you get immunity for few seconds to pop healing meds. It's game'y as hell and making fights with mutants so stupidly boring. They just run to you, drop all your HP, realize you are immune now, run away, you have to heal or you die when the enemy comes back, repeat infinitum. Most boring gameplay loop next to popping energy drinks every 5 seconds while running. What were they thinking??? This is like elementary bad game design.
That's one of the things I've been playing with is draw distance. It seems like now spawns have been pushed back to roughly 200-250m however draw distance, on epic settings, is still not to far from 100m. It creates a scenario where they can see you, but you can't see them
thinking of other open world games i have played, for example, witcher 3 had hand placed spawns everywhere, so you would meet the same enemy each time you returned to that same location. but for one reason or another, it didn't feel as stale as it is in stalker 2. probably because most of it did make sense, you would see bandits at bandit camps, drowners near water etc. but most importantly, probably because witcher is not stalker, where a-life is such an important game defining feature. i think with stalker 2, they could at least have made it so that POIs have multiple possible randomized spawns, after the player had visited the POI for the first time. it's the best compromise i can think of if they can't get 'real' a-life working.
@anthonychase6906 I think the big take away here is they've managed to increase encounters, as well as increase draw distance, all without impacting performance. If anything the game runs BETTER. So it's a small victory, but alife is in its absolute infancy right now.
That's not the issue. The issue is they can see you and laser you. I had an NPC spawn in a rust bucket like this and he kept shooting me, but I couldn't shoot him.
Yeah, a lot of people don't seem to realise that most non-military vehicles can easily be penetrated through by most conventional firearms. Paul Harrel has a good video demonstrating this in a a video titled "Personal protection: Using a car as cover". The AI is programmed to engage in suppressive fire when the player is out of sight, and since this truck was the last known position he was seen at, they are going to light up that truck. However, their pinpoint accuracy, I suppose is a little ridiculous.
What you didn't see is me reposition out of sight to that truck. They tracked me behind cover from a distance then proceeded to shoot through the entire length (front to back) of this rig. It's why i stepped out to show they were shooting through the back all the way through the front. That's a hell of a feat for a bullet outside of high caliber weapons.
Yeah... so just sit there and keep eating bullets and nit pick about everything. Stalker 2 is still the most atmospheric and immersive game I've played. There is still way more good stuff here too. And nothing matches. Fallout is bland
I've found after you leave SIRCAA, the game is really bugged. From crashes in Rostok to npcs soft locking quests. Might be wise to wait for another update to progress.
Thanks for this vid. Too many out there just saying the patch "made things better" when a lot of us want to know the actual state of everything. It bums me out that a lot of people won't get to experience what a-life should be since they'll play the game in it's current state then move on.
Can confirm I was not. I have the full unedited clip. This video was more for the patch 1.12 so I didn't want to bog it down with long clips of A.I. instances. I'm putting together a video specifically for the ALIFE/A.I. in S2 where these clips will be shown in their entirety. Leaving them in a video like this unedited causes the video to perform poorly.
@THEJimmiChanga sometimes you get shot and the compass won't mark them but I agree that pach 1.1.2 is just their first iteration of A-life. It's hard having to be limited by the hardware.
I will never be like the first STALKER, imagine covering 64km² of npc. Xbox serie S has not the ressource, and even hight end cpu would have a hard time. UE5 is not good with AI.
I think it may be able to create the illusion of a-life but I agree that it will never match what the old games did, especially scaled up for the game world they made.
When I see that is my question do they really have a life 2.0 and just put it out because performance to bring it later again in the game or was it a whole lie and they didn’t even developed a life 2.0 because this game was released way to earlier?
@@trashman8080But why they first mean it don’t works because of glitches and now they say it don’t work because they did disable it? Is that not suspicious to say 2 different things?
@@selina0 It's the two things actually, they not only encountered too many glitches but also saw how extremelly performance's sucker is A-Life in a 60+ km² world in a game already baddly optimized, so they disabled it just before the launching. My Theory is that they worked the past month only on optimizing so they could implement the first fraction of the system without making our rigs melting to the ground. Unfortunatelly this game still have a long road ahead.
@@reblaw89It’s my first stalker game I don’t buy it without a life. And the older games could be too old, gun gameplay of a so old game could be horrible too.
Very good points, it's ok even important to be critical when you love a game. The devs are listening and already mentioned this was only first a-life 2.0 fix, so hopefully things will improve with time and more patches.
@muralboletube yes I didn't get it. I was promised a functional game, with a-life. Instead I got a buggy mess of a "game", that after the last 2 patches and 60+hrs in won't even run. So yeah, I did not receive stalker 2, instead I bought alpha access apparently
if you spend your time nit picking what YOU think should be happening, just like movie critics that will never enjoy a movie for it being a movie, you are NEVER going to enjoy games. so pick a different hobby/pastime. you complain that bullets pass through a rusty old rotten truck ???? you complain about anomaly beats spawning in an anomaly area, while not know what or why they even exist. give up, because unless a dev explains every single thing to you, you will just see everything as a nit pick.
This guy is one of the few people on youtube taking the time to explain what is and isn't working about a-life in this game with an actual understanding of it. This is a pro-consumer move so quit with the toxic positivity. Just because you don't understand how fundamentally different it is from a generic spawn system doesn't mean those of us who do have to pretend everything is oh so great just so people like you don't get butthurt over valid critique.
Its gonna get there, if not for game devs, the mod-ing community will get it there eventually. Stalker 2 has single handedly saved 2024 from being such an embarrassing year for newly launched AAA games that have mostly gone WOKE. And legend has it,,,, GO WOKE GO BROKE!!!
Didn't the "anti woke" crowd get mad because the developers added black people? Literally, you claim that if a game does bad, it is "woke" and repeats your stupid slogan, and when a game does well (or you like it), it suddenly is anti woke.
Bro doesn't understand that soft skinned vehicles dont stop rifle rounds like 5.56 or 5.45. The game has a decently realistic take on what is cover and what is concealment. Tell you what, plenty of real fighting still in Ukraine. Pick a side, pick up an AK. Hide behind a non armored vehicle and then draw some fire. Tell me how that goes too I'm really curious(I already know the answer).
It shouldn't offer full cover, but it should offer concealment. The fact that they can pinpoint his location and shoot dead on through it means it's not acting as concealment.
"Getting laser beamed through a whole truck".... 1) Its rusted out, that is more concealment than it is cover, 2) You aren't moving from that area so they are going to shoot at your last know position. 3) You can clearly see tracers going past you. I don't know man... this just seems silly to me.
starting to get tired of all this slamming on stalker for a stupid A-life system. That’s the only complaint I’ve heard out of people and they’re acting like it’s ruined their life. Shut up and enjoy the game it’s better than 90% of shit we’ve gotten in the past 4 years
So you're not a fan of the old games. That's cool but people have different expectations. It's hard to get upset about losing something you haven't experienced after all. Personally I don't want another open world fps with a spawn system which is why I haven't bought it. If they get a-life working right it's an instant purchase because it's a fundamental part of what makes the old games so great to me.
They marketed ALIFE 2.0 as an improved version of Call of Pripyat's ALIFE 1.0. They sold us on this, then proceeded to pull it from marketing mere days before launch. What we got was ALIFE .25. It pales in comparison to what was offered in the original trilogy. Stalker's core base that came from the 3 original games have a right to feel slighted.
yeah man the game has like some real issues i agree but given the circumstances and the constant patches i rly am sure this game is gonna be the best stalker it was the same with cyberpunk everyone was bitching abt a random glitch they saw on a stream and now everyone loves it
@ i’m not disagreeing with that man but like given their circumstances and microsoft probably pushing the game out early aside from that u have ti give the devs props for what they’ve made even with the shitty bugs
@ a year from now it’ll probably be a true and decent stalker game and i’m only giving these devs a pass bc of the circumstances that they were under have some sympathy and appreciate a game for what it is dawg
@@sluggerbutter To this comment, I just feel bad for those who bought the game. We also need to stop stating the circumstances. The game was developed for the most part in a very safe environment outside Ukraine. I support the devs and sympathize but it doesn't have to justify the state in which the game was released. I am glad it is on game pass and will not complain but this trend of selling broken games needs to stop though.
On console after the 1.1 update the game is terrible. They didn’t fix anything for console all they did was patch the exploits and add groups of NPC’s walking around the map randomly fighting each other. Every think that was bugged or broken before the patch is exactly the same or a little bit worse. 1800 fixes it’s bullshit
Every game that’s released today is broken and unfinished it takes a year or two of patches bug fixes and updates to get to the game that they originally sold us,I don’t want to buy a game for £70 and then wait two years for it to be the game I paid for that is a scam. It’s the reason that every single game released has a day one patch that’s because they’ve released that game unfinished and broken and that patch is the fix and add stuff they didn’t have time to put in the game or fix because they had a release date to aim for. Update so now I’ve just got a 9 GB update on my Xbox started the game and my hood completely disappeared this game is more broken than fixed
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
I love STALKER. It's my favorite single player FPS franchise. I make these videos out of love. The reason I'm critical is because we were marketed an Alife 2.0 system and instead got a generic spawn system. What we have in the game isn't even on par with the original A-life 1.0 system that was refined for Call of Pripyat. I don't think it's wrong to expect a system that as a least on par with CoP's system. Thought the kicker is, again, it was marketed as A-life 2.0, an even more refined version of CoP's system, which is not what we have here.
I agree it was a promised feature really no excuse
Highly agreed and the enemies awareness and accuracy need huge reevaluation, like it’s hard to explain but they’re too aware and not aware enough at the same time, given the scenario 😂😂😂
I´m liking the new changes to A-Life 2.0. A little janky, yes but I play with mods that eliminates aimboting from NPCs and gives me better stealth opportunities. Maklanes Better Gunfights, Maklanes Better Weapons Feeling (changes stats and ballistics for weapons to be more "realistic") and Maklanes Better NPC Range together with long range aggression fix. More fair encounters. The aimboting and long range shots from several hundred meters away is a high priority fix for sure that needs implementing.
@@niklaskarlsson8833 There's a pattern I bring up that you probably noticed if you watched this the whole way through. Persistence and spawn. When spawns happened in the older games they were generally in a different region or far enough the the player never noticed). Right now, it's only within a 250m radius of the player. Anything outside of the player is empty space.
We need persistence. The previous games relied on a persistant simulated world of NPC's roaming the zone until death. They were tracked. Since they were persistant and tracked, we had features such as faction relations, rankings (top stalkers), statistics tabs. NPC's were given a set of commands and objectives they could do in their online/offline states that played into these PDA tabs and ultimately created dynamic, random events by chance. Made every playthrough feel unique
@@THEJimmiChanga I get what you are saying 100%. A-Life 2.0 is by no means fixed, that is clear. But this is the first step to improve it. Also, saw another review of the patch yesterday. And that guy followed a group of Ward soldiers out in the wild. Then left them. And when he went back to Zalissya he found all the same guys again. Names and everything. Either way, I´m enjoying my experience alot more then I did at launch.
All 1.1 did was soft lock me out of main quests on 2 different playthroughs
I thought it fixed me being the boogieman for Malachite despite helping them, because I didn't get the side quest saying I was. So i completed it and pushed on. An hour later i needed to go there to drop off loot and they all hated me for having the nerve to defend their base. I get it man
Thought I was going crazy, thanks for explaining. I love this game but god, it would be a better idea to start playing it one year from now.
@quake9405 alife is in its absolute infancy fight now. At least their making steps forward with draw distance, while simultaneously getting the game to run better.
yeah since the patch every battle feels like pain ^^
An even bigger issue is how you can just slap a medkit on yourself and instantly be back to full health. On top of that, they're so abundant that you're not likely to ever run out of them even if you never buy them. It completely breaks combat balance. Luckily, mods can easily correct that by slowing down the rate of healing and reducing the amount of loot.
They have the map, the POIs, the weapons, the NPCs, the mutants, the story, the atmosphere/environment, and some of the scripted stuff is really good, they just need to implement the actual A-life system. At first I figured they were rushed and needed to get it out and that they would follow it up with an update a few months from now, this seems to be the way modern games work. If they're spending dev resources implementing band-aids it makes me concerned that they aren't planning on actually putting A-life in...
I like some of the scripted stuff: the poppy anomaly is interesting, the shah's notes about charging people to hide from emissions is interesting, the one setup, the guy who tells you to check a stash and you find a note and when you go to confront him you find another note. That's cool from a story perspective to experience once or twice. But the things that keep us coming back are the exploration and A-life.
Also: I'm tired of not being able to see anything. It's constantly storming or foggy or night with particles and leaves cluttering the air, tons of underbrush that only obscures the players view but all NPCs can laser beam through. Some areas look really great, most of the time I'm trudging through thick brush while its storming at night and it's so incredibly annoying. I get the anomalies on the road but they don't seem to move and the fact that there is so much foot traffic from everyone in the zone but no new paths to follow across the land is also cringe. There's no point in following roads because there tends to be tons of anomalies on them, it'd only take a few people bypassing an anomaly to make a path that others would follow.
This..
This game has so much potential. It's the whole reason I've been able to sink 100 hours into it with no ALIFE backing it up. I know some people are upset of my criticisms but their warranted when we were sold on ALIFE 2.0 being an improved version of CoP's alife 1.0, and instead given ALIFE 0.25. However, I've given credit where credit is due and stated there's a lot of fun to be had. As you said, the atmosphere, the characters, the original locations, and the map in general is superb. Without ALIFE it just feels like a theme park when moving through it.
Loving your coverage of stalker 2 and the previous games A-Life, not too many people going as in depth as you do, keep em coming and ill keep watchin!
I definitely plan on covering each patch moving forward. I also started 1 challenge series and 1 unique video within Stalker. One in Stalker anomaly's warfare mode as the Bandits. Another in Stalker 2, which will be a single video of me taking a new character and going straight to Pripyat without interacting with any quests on my way up. It's going to be a lot of work juggling 3 different games (Stalker anomaly, Stalker 2, and Starfield) but I aim to please.
Why like 98% of yt even the big channels talking about "a life is here it changed everything". Is stalker a game like starfield where the most are just clickbaiter? I mean here are like the only true videos about a life all this other big channels where talking about they are the biggest stalker fan don’t even know what a life is, they really mean it’s in the game now.
I had the same thought of this issue yesterday - too bad they respawn after being wiped out.
Ill keep playing Gamma for a while before i jump back in. Sad because i LOVE Stalker 2
Sigma opeth and stalker enjoyers unite, still life supremacy
@ heck yeah! 🇸🇪
Some pointers...
0:00 Unarmoured vehicles don't make good cover in this game. They can fire through it. So can you as a matter of fact. This actually is pretty realistic. Automobiles don't make good cover unless you hide behind the engine compartment. I believe the AI in this game is also supposed to have a sort of suppressive fire mechanic, where they may light up your last seen position. That being said, their pinpoint accuracy here is pretty absurd. That definitely should be fixed. A good AI system sometimes requires making the AI oblivious at the right times. Even if they could shoot through cover, they shouldn't be able to know exactly where you are behind it.
0:50 This might need more testing done. I believe Offline AI is supposed to simulate "squads", not "individuals". It seems to be this way in previous titles too. Probably a necessary form of optimisation, as simulating every individual would be incredibly taxing on the CPU. For next time, I recommend you test this on an actual squad with 3 or more guys in it, following a patrol path.
2:00 Scripted spawns may be annoying, but they did as a matter of fact ALWAYS exist in previous titles. Remember the Circus Anomaly from Call of Pripyat? A fire poltergeist constantly spawns there. The Stingray wreck also has a respawning electric poltergeist. In Shadow of Chernobyl, the Agroprom Underground has that one bloodsucker encounter that constantly respawns. They also have the Bloodsucker Village, which is constantly spawning bloodsuckers in.
9:40 A-Life is a complicated system that does a multitude of things. The core feature is AI persistence, where NPCs have online and offline states. However, it does also include the ability to spawn things. These spawns are usually quite seamless, because they are often done out of bounds, where the player won't typically notice, but the sequel is now one cohesive open world, rather than a bunch of cells with loading screens in between them. It may not be able to obfuscate these spawns as well as it used to in order to maintain that illusion.
This is all fair pushback
0:00 I get that vehicles CAN be penetrated, however, in fairness that's why i stepped to the side to show that it wasn't just penetrating a part of the vehicle, but instead the entire vehicle from back to front. There's only a few high caliber guns in existence that could achieve something like that.
0:50 I explain later in the video that I have tested larger squads. In my experience they end up disbanding after following them for 5ish minutes, then dissappearing when I walk away. However, the distance until the disappear has been increased. Their still not persistant
2:00 I do actually remember there being scripted enemies, and I think I mentioned that briefly (not 100%). My gripe with the brain scorcher instance in this case is it's just a normal POI in this game outside of the collar side quest, therefore I feel it shouldn't have any scripted spawns, especially the same 3 poltergeists in the same 3 spots, spawning in minutes after you leave. It's immersion breaking in my opinion. I wasn't a fan of the electrical poltergeist spawning back in at the Stingray in Zaton, and only went to the circus anomaly one time per playthrough so didn't notice the FP respawn, so fair enough. They hid this well enough though such as the claw anomaly where snorks would ambush you from the hiding holes. Theyd respawn but it was believable as it was one of 2 hiding holes in that area. The problem in S2 is, it's at most POI's whereas it was sparse in the previous games.
9:40 I think the main problem right now is, when this happened in the older games, it was sparse and generally in a different region than the player. At the very least far enough from the player that they would never notice. Right now, there's no persistence in my testing outside of bases and scripted NPC's and the spawns happens constantly, within a 200-250m radius of the player. It makes encounters rather jarring. I do urge you to encounter a group, run outside of the 250m radius and come back. I've tested this thoroughly and almost every time they've despawned. My next video will be compilation of various instances like I did in my "Stalker 2's a.i. is a mess" video.
Exactly. When I played GAMMA I wasn't even interested in or following the main story. I was just enjoying the struggle for survival and it all felt as though my actions had real effects on the world. If I cam across friendlies under attack, I would assist them and move on. In Stalker 2, I can achieve the same thing by simply dumping some of my ammo on the ground, running a little ways off until they all despawn... SAME result. Nothing I did one way or the other affects anything in any way and is just a waste of ammo if you do engage the spawn.
This is why I have zero fear of traveling from one side of the zone to the other. All I have to do if I encounter anything is simply sprint a relatively short distance and they disappear. Most of us know there are ways to get into pripyat without advancing the story to that point. With the current system there is absolutely no reason to be scared of going there even if you're in rookie gear. There is simply nothing in the game that is all that threatening with a little running unless you absolutely must "go through" some baddies for some reason.
Your demonstration of the exact same scripted baddies respawning at POI's is was good example of why it destroys the immersion. What should happen is that once the original scripted baddies are cleared out, random chance rolls should happen every so often to determine if something has reoccupied the POI and what exactly that something is. Factors like what kind of area it is, a swamp vs an outpost for example, would affect the % chances of various mutants or humans would appear, with something like an outpost being heavily weighted in favor of humans. Being an outpost or a base would affect the number of humans.
Anyway, Stalker2 is an early access at best and a complete betrayal of the fanbase at worst.
You can go to pripyat early?
I totally share your sentiment. I'm slowly making my way through the game and loving it, despite the numerous bugs. I overlooked it and kept going because I am having a good time. But I am currently now heading towards End Game and OMG it gets so much worse. The constant crashes, almost endless spawning enemies in full gear with laser accuracy that demolish your gear durability so quickly and bugged quests. I just want to finish the game and then Ill wait till more patches come out then jump back in. A-life has still got a long way to go and there are still so many things missing from the game like night vision
How interesting you play and showcase the problems at the exact same locations i have tried playing this pos after doing the whole reinstall thing, cause its still faster than the patching process. After that i had to figure out why the shader compiling was getting stuck. Then finally came across this place, cleared it out twice, got the collar off of the soldiers then went on. Honestly i enjoyed the game more before the patch, i cant run 10 steps without encountering enemies now.
I complained a lot about missing A -Life. The patches were enough to make it at least playable, or so I thought. I just cannot get over how awfully bad the combat is. You get very quickly dropped to low health, then you get immunity for few seconds to pop healing meds. It's game'y as hell and making fights with mutants so stupidly boring. They just run to you, drop all your HP, realize you are immune now, run away, you have to heal or you die when the enemy comes back, repeat infinitum. Most boring gameplay loop next to popping energy drinks every 5 seconds while running. What were they thinking??? This is like elementary bad game design.
Looting is hella boring, too. Game just has no depth at all. 10 hours in and you've seen everything gameplay wise.
its a band-aid on a gaping wound
Military dudes with RPKs kept shooting me in the head from as far away as I could barely even see them with SVU scope....
That's one of the things I've been playing with is draw distance. It seems like now spawns have been pushed back to roughly 200-250m however draw distance, on epic settings, is still not to far from 100m. It creates a scenario where they can see you, but you can't see them
thinking of other open world games i have played, for example, witcher 3 had hand placed spawns everywhere, so you would meet the same enemy each time you returned to that same location. but for one reason or another, it didn't feel as stale as it is in stalker 2. probably because most of it did make sense, you would see bandits at bandit camps, drowners near water etc. but most importantly, probably because witcher is not stalker, where a-life is such an important game defining feature.
i think with stalker 2, they could at least have made it so that POIs have multiple possible randomized spawns, after the player had visited the POI for the first time. it's the best compromise i can think of if they can't get 'real' a-life working.
They applied first aid but have yet to fully treat the damage
@anthonychase6906 I think the big take away here is they've managed to increase encounters, as well as increase draw distance, all without impacting performance. If anything the game runs BETTER. So it's a small victory, but alife is in its absolute infancy right now.
Appreciate the video but can we make sure that this gets reported to GSC via support pages to ensure they get this sorted put in futute patches?
They know the state of alife
''how are they shooting through this rig'' it's a 30 yo rusted out truck......a 22 would have passed through it.
That's not the issue. The issue is they can see you and laser you. I had an NPC spawn in a rust bucket like this and he kept shooting me, but I couldn't shoot him.
Yeah, a lot of people don't seem to realise that most non-military vehicles can easily be penetrated through by most conventional firearms. Paul Harrel has a good video demonstrating this in a a video titled "Personal protection: Using a car as cover". The AI is programmed to engage in suppressive fire when the player is out of sight, and since this truck was the last known position he was seen at, they are going to light up that truck. However, their pinpoint accuracy, I suppose is a little ridiculous.
@@xxfalconarasxx5659 it’s a bug, not a feature lol
What you didn't see is me reposition out of sight to that truck. They tracked me behind cover from a distance then proceeded to shoot through the entire length (front to back) of this rig. It's why i stepped out to show they were shooting through the back all the way through the front. That's a hell of a feat for a bullet outside of high caliber weapons.
Yeah... so just sit there and keep eating bullets and nit pick about everything. Stalker 2 is still the most atmospheric and immersive game I've played. There is still way more good stuff here too. And nothing matches. Fallout is bland
GSC should never have made Stalker 2 an open world in my opinion.
Or used UE5, which I think is honestly the worse decision.
They gave ai ESP, which is why they're so accurate with their grenades.
The respawn of those poltergeist is annoying, there's no sense of permanence that way.
I've found after you leave SIRCAA, the game is really bugged. From crashes in Rostok to npcs soft locking quests. Might be wise to wait for another update to progress.
Thanks for this vid. Too many out there just saying the patch "made things better" when a lot of us want to know the actual state of everything. It bums me out that a lot of people won't get to experience what a-life should be since they'll play the game in it's current state then move on.
did the texture ghosting get worse or am i trippin
In the opening clip he was being shot from behind.
Can confirm I was not. I have the full unedited clip. This video was more for the patch 1.12 so I didn't want to bog it down with long clips of A.I. instances. I'm putting together a video specifically for the ALIFE/A.I. in S2 where these clips will be shown in their entirety. Leaving them in a video like this unedited causes the video to perform poorly.
@THEJimmiChanga sometimes you get shot and the compass won't mark them but I agree that pach 1.1.2 is just their first iteration of A-life. It's hard having to be limited by the hardware.
I rather take even more of a performance hit and have proper a-life then not ..persistant alife with wandering nocs that are saved and tracked ..
I will never be like the first STALKER, imagine covering 64km² of npc. Xbox serie S has not the ressource, and even hight end cpu would have a hard time. UE5 is not good with AI.
Yeah I keep saying it can never have a life & the existing ai is far more crude than in the og games. It won't get fixed, ever.
I think it may be able to create the illusion of a-life but I agree that it will never match what the old games did, especially scaled up for the game world they made.
At least they are fixing stuff. It's not Bethesda thank God
When I see that is my question do they really have a life 2.0 and just put it out because performance to bring it later again in the game or was it a whole lie and they didn’t even developed a life 2.0 because this game was released way to earlier?
they do have it, but what they got working now is a fraction of what it should have been. The rest is either disabled for performance or broken.
@@trashman8080But why they first mean it don’t works because of glitches and now they say it don’t work because they did disable it? Is that not suspicious to say 2 different things?
@@selina0 It's the two things actually, they not only encountered too many glitches but also saw how extremelly performance's sucker is A-Life in a 60+ km² world in a game already baddly optimized, so they disabled it just before the launching. My Theory is that they worked the past month only on optimizing so they could implement the first fraction of the system without making our rigs melting to the ground. Unfortunatelly this game still have a long road ahead.
@@reblaw89It’s my first stalker game I don’t buy it without a life. And the older games could be too old, gun gameplay of a so old game could be horrible too.
Yes they shouldn’t be able to shoot to trucks and walls. I’m new to stalker
Very good points, it's ok even important to be critical when you love a game.
The devs are listening and already mentioned this was only first a-life 2.0 fix, so hopefully things will improve with time and more patches.
All the people that worked on this should be sent to the front lines for taking my money and time with nothing but lies and promises.
"for taking my money and time with nothing but lies and promises". So you paid for the game and didn`t get it?
@muralboletube yes I didn't get it. I was promised a functional game, with a-life. Instead I got a buggy mess of a "game", that after the last 2 patches and 60+hrs in won't even run.
So yeah, I did not receive stalker 2, instead I bought alpha access apparently
0:15 FMJ ?
if you spend your time nit picking what YOU think should be happening, just like movie critics that will never enjoy a movie for it being a movie, you are NEVER going to enjoy games.
so pick a different hobby/pastime.
you complain that bullets pass through a rusty old rotten truck ????
you complain about anomaly beats spawning in an anomaly area, while not know what or why they even exist.
give up, because unless a dev explains every single thing to you, you will just see everything as a nit pick.
This guy is one of the few people on youtube taking the time to explain what is and isn't working about a-life in this game with an actual understanding of it. This is a pro-consumer move so quit with the toxic positivity. Just because you don't understand how fundamentally different it is from a generic spawn system doesn't mean those of us who do have to pretend everything is oh so great just so people like you don't get butthurt over valid critique.
Its gonna get there, if not for game devs, the mod-ing community will get it there eventually. Stalker 2 has single handedly saved 2024 from being such an embarrassing year for newly launched AAA games that have mostly gone WOKE. And legend has it,,,, GO WOKE GO BROKE!!!
Didn't the "anti woke" crowd get mad because the developers added black people? Literally, you claim that if a game does bad, it is "woke" and repeats your stupid slogan, and when a game does well (or you like it), it suddenly is anti woke.
@@In_The_Base by "anti woke" you meant "Normal"...Gotcha! also having something against any particular race is called racism and I deplore it equally.
Bro doesn't understand that soft skinned vehicles dont stop rifle rounds like 5.56 or 5.45. The game has a decently realistic take on what is cover and what is concealment. Tell you what, plenty of real fighting still in Ukraine. Pick a side, pick up an AK. Hide behind a non armored vehicle and then draw some fire. Tell me how that goes too I'm really curious(I already know the answer).
It shouldn't offer full cover, but it should offer concealment. The fact that they can pinpoint his location and shoot dead on through it means it's not acting as concealment.
"Getting laser beamed through a whole truck".... 1) Its rusted out, that is more concealment than it is cover, 2) You aren't moving from that area so they are going to shoot at your last know position. 3) You can clearly see tracers going past you. I don't know man... this just seems silly to me.
starting to get tired of all this slamming on stalker for a stupid A-life system. That’s the only complaint I’ve heard out of people and they’re acting like it’s ruined their life. Shut up and enjoy the game it’s better than 90% of shit we’ve gotten in the past 4 years
So you're not a fan of the old games. That's cool but people have different expectations. It's hard to get upset about losing something you haven't experienced after all. Personally I don't want another open world fps with a spawn system which is why I haven't bought it. If they get a-life working right it's an instant purchase because it's a fundamental part of what makes the old games so great to me.
They marketed ALIFE 2.0 as an improved version of Call of Pripyat's ALIFE 1.0. They sold us on this, then proceeded to pull it from marketing mere days before launch. What we got was ALIFE .25. It pales in comparison to what was offered in the original trilogy. Stalker's core base that came from the 3 original games have a right to feel slighted.
yeah man the game has like some real issues i agree but given the circumstances and the constant patches i rly am sure this game is gonna be the best stalker it was the same with cyberpunk everyone was bitching abt a random glitch they saw on a stream and now everyone loves it
plus cyberpunk took ALOT longer to fix up, there were no "useful" patches for what felt like a year or more with that game
Would it be so hard to say the game is early access? This game offers less in terms of gameplay than Call of Pripyat let alone mods like GAMMA 😂
@ i’m not disagreeing with that man but like given their circumstances and microsoft probably pushing the game out early aside from that u have ti give the devs props for what they’ve made even with the shitty bugs
@ a year from now it’ll probably be a true and decent stalker game and i’m only giving these devs a pass bc of the circumstances that they were under have some sympathy and appreciate a game for what it is dawg
@@sluggerbutter To this comment, I just feel bad for those who bought the game. We also need to stop stating the circumstances. The game was developed for the most part in a very safe environment outside Ukraine. I support the devs and sympathize but it doesn't have to justify the state in which the game was released. I am glad it is on game pass and will not complain but this trend of selling broken games needs to stop though.
looks like normal stalker to me
On console after the 1.1 update the game is terrible.
They didn’t fix anything for console all they did was patch the exploits and add groups of NPC’s walking around the map randomly fighting each other.
Every think that was bugged or broken before the patch is exactly the same or a little bit worse. 1800 fixes it’s bullshit
Every game that’s released today is broken and unfinished it takes a year or two of patches bug fixes and updates to get to the game that they originally sold us,I don’t want to buy a game for £70 and then wait two years for it to be the game I paid for that is a scam.
It’s the reason that every single game released has a day one patch that’s because they’ve released that game unfinished and broken and that patch is the fix and add stuff they didn’t have time to put in the game or fix because they had a release date to aim for.
Update so now I’ve just got a 9 GB update on my Xbox started the game and my hood completely disappeared this game is more broken than fixed