Things i miss most: 1. Good old human AI 2. Flashlight shadows (have no idea why are they missing) 3. Longer day 4. Darker nights 5. Slower day/night cycle 6. Wet ground after rain 7. Choosing how long to sleep in bed 8. Better performance 9. Night vision
They said to be working on (performance costing) AI fixings. Longer day / cycle mods available. Darker Nights: ReShade or NVidia Freestyle Better performance comes with updates both game and driver. Or... Hardware. And night vision: You can do your own with ReShade or Freestyle, but surely some mod incoming. I advise you to just wait longer and keep your eyes both on game updates AND mods. Good hunting, Stalker!
@@RoyalPredator But you say they're working on it like you've been in their office and looked at their work and you talk about mods players made. Those mods don't mean anything in this situation. They put the work on the players. I mean granted some of these things don't require too much work and/or it is matter of choice but still. I just don't like it when people talk any good of any company or just parrot what a company says to other people. I just don't trust them and I think for most of them, they don't wanna make good games, create worlds and tell stories but they just want money and nothing else. I honestly find small passion in the STALKER 2. I certainly can't say it is as soulless as an EA or Ubisoft game but it is certainly as soulless as it gets when you consider it among games with less budget.
@@dosdoğruyup Their latest patch (15Gb, jeesh!) is mostly about performance patches. So first things first they try to fix the most important stuff. I'm not even sure that they will release feature improvements later on.... CDPR did with cyberpunk, but their "efforts" are mostly ridiculously off demand and just stupid.... So a way lesser team as GSC? Who knows? I wouldn't bet. Meanwhile I am a former developer, I'm also a modder ofc. We do fix things if possible. So I replied with some tips for the fella in hope he (and others) get some temp solution in the meanwhile. We good? ;)
@@workhorse7134 No. It isn't. It does not hold a candle to Witcher 3, or Cyberpunk 2077. I enjoyed 2077 more when it came out. I didn't instantly think about 15 different necessary mods to make the game feel better. How is there no night vision? Why do all artifacts feel the same? Why is the gunplay so despicably poor? Why am I shooting nerf darts out of a shotgun at a chimaera and spending 35 shotgun shells? Why is artifact hunting the most boring experience on Earth? Why did I have to install a mod to detach the scope from Valik Lummox's garbage piece of shit AK to put on a normal AK because the normal AK has better stats?
@@workhorse7134 It's an unfortunate and bitter truth but modders have always been the bread and butter to sandbox games. They never come out good these days.
im a LONG time stalker fan and S2 seriously made me sad for awhile. i refuse to play it again until its fixed/important series features are added. Got a refund thank god.
Honestly you guys have so much fuckin rose tinted glasses. And it's always the virgins who've never felt a woman's touch thinking calling something fallout 4 is an insult
People were praising this half baked game I don't know if they are on copium or just have shitty standards. Some say just the graphics are upgraded but it just looks like another generic unreal engine looking mess to me. After years of waiting Stalker 2 is just massive disappointment, I had my doubts when I saw they are using unreal engine and here we are.
Yeah, it’s understandable the community wanted this game to be good and succeed but pretending won’t get us the sequel we wished for. The original games lived off unique gameplay, atmosphere, and some cool technical features for the time. That’s the identity they should’ve probably built upon.
I feel the exact same way like wth am ı the only one who didn't like this game at all? Is something wrong with me? Did ı have unreasonable expactations or smth? But yeah ı didn't really enjoy it and just did a slightly altered Gamma 0.9.3 completeionist playthrough after finishing Stalker 2 which was a lot more fun.
Just an FYI most of the devs from the original Stalker games went on to the Metro series. All of the immersive features in Metro were meant to go into Stalker 2 as far as the original creators were concerned.
It hadn't occurred to me till now, but this is a far cry game in terms of both visual and mechanical aspects. And one of the recent ones, because even Far Cry 2 back then felt more like stalker.
when I first played STALKER 2 I immediately thought "this feels like a ubisoft game" obviously no thanks to the missing A-Life and lack of general atmosphere, just felt super bland and soulless
Fallout 76 гораздо лучше. Джунгли; ядовитое болото; длинный хребет вдоль всей карты; шлаковая бездна; ядовитая долина; центральная луговая часть; западная лесная часть. Помести персонажа в случайную точку мира Фаллаут 76; поверни камеру на 360 градусов; и игрок сможет указать регион где находится эта точка. Помести игрока в случайную точку мира Сталкер 2; поверни камеру на 360 градусов; в 90% случаев игрок скажет "непонятное плоское место, трава и чахлые деревья". А в Фаллаут 76 не только проработанный открытый мир, там еще много интересных уникальных локаций. В плане игрового дизайна Фаллаут 76 на несколько голов выше Сталкер 2.
Oh about the blinking icon to lead you to goals? They will always add that. Corporate game creation rule number 7: Dumb down the masses using dumbed down mechanics.
Even though it would’ve been perfect! The originals already had dynamic NPC dialogue and anecdotes around the campfire, crazy they didn’t make that into a core feature but then made a trailer completely built around the same idea.
@@SaintJulesDaythere's at least one dynamic campfire dialogue I encountered, but it might be the only one.... When you come back from the poppy field the stalkers relaxing on a campfire will comment about some philanthropist stacking the energy drink stash or about someone greedy looting it all. They even comment if you fill it but keep the note that explains the purpose of the stash. Makes it feel like a good 20-40% of the time in the game's development went into the poppy field because it's beautiful and memorable.
Disappointing isn’t it, modern AAA game development has obvious problems. Unreal Engine seems to be a common factor. All the demos promise so much however the developers aren’t able to get close in a final release. It’s maddening
Yeah, development of big titles has gotten very expensive and I guess Epic are trying to counter some of that by providing features out of the box. But if we look at most of those recent UE5 titles, it doesn’t really seem to work out so well.
While it is disapointing, GSC is not a AAA developer and expecting Stalker 2 to have the quality of a AAA game, especially in the conditions they are working under, is a little unfair. What they pulled off is still incredible and has the foundation to end up a legendary game, on par with the first three Stalker games, as long as GSC sticks with it.
Dude they made this game during a war, did u not see the end credits where they honor the dead people because of the war? Its a miracle this game doesnt have micro transactions or is as bad as a ubisoft game or as boring as starfield
"No cooking, crafting, harvesting mutants, changing filters, washing dirty socks". Reminder that it's Stalker 2 not my favorite busywork simulator mod. Game mechanics are half-baked, too many bugs and graphics are sometimes beautiful, mostly meh. There is a lot of work to be done but the skeleton of a great game is there.
Why should any player kill a mutant then? At least when we kill a stalker we have the chance of reselling their gun and taking their ammo. There's no incentives at all for mutants other than bullet sponges.
@@pira707 That's good, player should avoid killing mutants - they are just animals. He's rewarded when they have some loot in their lair or he's on a mission to kill them.
It’s one of the many oversights that are also a step back, like the flashlight. The PDA in the originals was a pancake but it didn’t pause the game. Practically, they did what we later got with the Anomaly 3D PDA, just with the cheapest implementation for the time.
Metro is started when part of the first Stalker team desided to build their own game. It feels to me that Metro is build based on continues experience, and on the other side Stalker 2 team is almost all new people. By the way another part of original Stalker geme started company Vostok games (I think it's renamed).
Selling an unfinished game, following by a disaster update, a month in silence, hiding behind the fanboys praising whatever they spit at them. Then they will want to sell expansions with the reputation they are creating nowadays. Good luck greedy people at GSC. 60€ is all you gona get from me
I'm an idiot that has never played a Stalker game, I got excited for this one, I have an Xbox and never had a gaming computer. I paid $98 usd for the ultimate version. I was loving the game, then the bugs started, failure after failure, immersion breaking details constantly being underwhelming. I consider myself an average joe when talking about games and I am very disappointed how this turned out. I feel like I paid $98 for a game to play on my phone.
I thought “finally a big RUclipsr finally reviewing the game and not just glazing it with eyes half closed” then saw the channel size and was blown away with the quality.
Here is my point of view: ive never played a STALKER game before, it somehow flew under my radar despite being an avid gamer for the last 20 years. I HAVE however played metro 2033, last light, and exodus. I love the metro series. I picked up STALKER 2 on gamepass after hearing so many people talk about it, and its all i have played for the last month. It feels like i am 15 again experiencing fallout 3 for the first time, but with gorgeous graphics on my OLED TV (not compressed yt clips) and actually super well done satisfying gunplay. I have the same sense of wanting to go back to curiously walking around to see what adventures i can find, like fallout 3 did for me 15 years ago. It makes sense to me that long time STALKER fans might be disappointed, but from a person coming from my background, this game is incredible and i wouldnt want it any other way. Im not the type of person to play games where a core game mechanic is dying repeatedly, that annoys me. But here i am still returning to STALKER 2 even though i have died over 150 times so far. I dont care that i die all the time, i want to keep exploring. GSC have truly made something special with this game, and im sad that some longtime STALKER fans dont feel that way.
"...but with gorgeous graphics on my OLED TV"... says all that needs to be said and it really is just about the gyst of your long comment. ... And that's rather curious given you've tasted (and loved) actual quality within the same genre in the past, it being the Metro series: Better visuals, better and more cohesive gameplay systems, quality assured in regards to bugs and performance, a story that doesn't flipflop on itself throughout the entire game... and yet somehow here you are letting the "prettiness" do all the talking on this one.
As someone who hasnt really played the older Stalker games I like stalker 2 a lot. But I can see how someone who has played the older games a lot might be disappointed. I really wish these modders would just work for these game companies because they do such a good job.
Little clickbait-y title IMO, but thx for stating it's an unfair and superficial analysis both in video and description. After over 100 hours of playtime I agree with your point on old marketing, flashlight, radiation mechanic and UI and that UE5 is trash. Still tho I don't get your comparisons. Stalker 2 is an open world game on budget of 100 mil, developed over 14 years, being cancelled when studio closed in 2011 for 3 years, through covid, invasion of their country, moving to another country and members of their studio being in active military duty and/or still working remotely from Ukraine. Comparing graphics to 16 years of work of modders from all around the world, on already done gaming trilogy is silly. Comparing it to Silent Hill 2, 18 hour long linear remake of an old game is silly. Comparing animations to Starfield, a 400 mil game made by 7,5 billion company with four studios in both USA and Canada is silly. Comparing faces to Last of Us, a 220 mil character driven game made by subsidiary of Sony is silly. Comparing characters animation to Dying Light 2, another postapocalyptic open world game is actually on point, well done. Comparing PDA, an electronic device that works as your map, journal, upgrades screen and task manager to some drawn map on a piece of paper In Metro or SH2 , or same 2D UI from old games compressed on texture of 3D model by modders (see the first comparison) is silly. Comparing gas masks visuals, a feature that was never implemented in any official Stalker release, to another game made by another studio is silly. I'm not trying to completely defend the game, there are many things wrong with it but the atmosphere, story, gunplay, world building and yes, many visuals are amazing. Some of people hating on it are just as blindfolded as people calling it a masterpiece, and all both sides are doing is stopping any meaningful discussion or critique. Either way a very silly video, but I hope that someday you'll enjoy Stalker 2 as well, being official release patched up or heavily modded. Good hunting stalker.
Lets be real. Stalker 2 is a generic console shooter with a lazily put together stalker skin on it. It has a terrible pc port and the only reasons for the scale of the hype it got are: 1. The war (which i still find incredibly distasteful to use as a marketing angle) 2. Microsoft backed xbox exclusive for the losers that still engage in console wars Im pretty sure a lot of real stalker fans already knew what was coming or were at least highly sceptical once the game got announced for consoles. Edit: Great video. Nice use of fallout and metro for the analysis. Enjoyed the stalker vs stalker comparisons (cop vistas to this day can still be absolutely gorgeous) and nice editing. Not too flashy but still stylish
Yeah, it’s thoroughly sad but that’s been my point of view as well. The reason I didn’t even think about buying on release day (though I checked Steam reviews right away) was I had a feeling it would end up exactly like this. Big promises of a sequel, trailers that were almost exclusively cutscenes, vague talk about features without ever showing off a proper demo. It was an almost formulaically bad release. Feels strange now to think I was ever worried about mods becoming irrelevant :|
@SaintJulesDay Yeah exactly. The fact their prelaunch promo was basically just nostalgiabait with cinematic trailers, paying off youtubers and constantly reminding us they were working on the game during a war was a clear giveaway the game would turn out to be a dumpsterfire on launch. Its such a shame cause we could have gotten something great with all the tech available nowadays. Oh well at least we have the originals and mods
@@SaintJulesDay Same here. The gritty trailers made this my most anticipated game ever and when we started seeing gameplay trailers running at 30-60fps, i got the feeling it wasn't going to be good. I no longer get excited for games because 90% of the time they have performance issues, bugs, etc
I will never understand why people get mad when comparisons to the mods are being made. Yea sure modes are IMMENSELY different from the games, as the names would suggest "total conversion" "overhaul". But still they're from the community and stalker franchise has always been more about its community rather than it is about itself. It is a cult classic for a reason. we love GSC and how they pulled of an actual game of this size during wartime and we appreciate that. but that wont stop us from criticizing its design, shortcomings and all. Simply because we love them and critique is the best way to achieve growth. stalker modding is at an insane level and you could argue that it had already became part of the stalker franchise's identity as much as the book/movie are. today we are making comparions to bethesda ubisoft and various UE5 flops whilst we needed it to do it against metro or the mods and thats the main disappointment for me
A wonderful perspective, I agree. We can all be on GSC’s side and still think the game is lacking. The team has gone through a lot to get to this point, but the point can still be subpar. I personally would’ve loved to at least see some genuine ambitions, like the stuff we know from Oblivion Lost, all the big plans they had that couldn’t make it into the original ShoC. I don’t really see anything like that in S2, just a game that wants to appear like a STALKER game.
Comments about Stalker2 looking bad are wrong. It looks good enough to make a great game. Sometimes it even looks awsome. The problem are not in graphics, but in gameplay. The story is boring but clear sky and COP stories were dull too. The real issue is that the zone feels empty and you can travel anywhere , even at night, and never have to worry. It's lifeless, it's safe, so it removes the main aspect of the trilogy, that feeling of relief and joy when reaching the camps after a scary walk in the woods. There is more minor issues (useless loot, too much supplies, too much cut scenes...) but the lack of danger and the emptiness are really annoying.
For me,most crucial was Alfie,in comparison with OG games, it's not 2.0, it's 0.2,zone just feels much worse than trilogy,so I stick with anomaly now,hope things will change
I just sent a link to this video to GSC. You hit the nail on the head! I started playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, got a little ways in, and then I just stopped playing, because it felt like something was missing. It wasn't drawing me in the way the original trilogy did. I couldn't place what it was, so I blamed it on A-Life being broken and decided not to return until they fixed it. That was back at launch. Then, I saw your video. Your comments on, and examples of, lighting and shadows hit me like a bolt to the forehead. THIS IS IT!!! Gods, I really hope they watch your video. I begged them.
This is what being in the GAMMA server does to your brain. I've got to strongly disagree with over 70% of the video. 3D PDAs, gas mask heavy breathing, crafting, oh god no. Thank the Monolith that none of that is in the game and that STALKER 2 is genuinely more STALKER. I guess you're disappointed because you wanted to be from the start.
I think it’s fairly obvious from the video I wanted S2 to be a great successor. Only GSC can give us an official continuation, a fresh story. But what’s actually on offer here? All I see is a pretty broken release that’s even missing things we had in the originals. And I’m not even a GAMMA player, I’ve built my own mod packs since Misery, I even list them all. I think we can expect more.
@ Perhaps I came off with some hostility in my comment. That was not the intention, but I do want to stress that it's not a universal desire of fans to canonize misery, which is what I thought was fairly obvious that you were asking for. But for everyone? Not at all! I think Misery is pertinent to a specific minority, and good for you guys for it. But there's a reason Anomaly is divisive and at the core of the issue is that it did just that: canonize misery. The "modders will make the game great" mindset is already pessimistic and often starts with insatisfaction with the base game before it is even fully played. I mentioned the GAMMA server because everyone there seemed to be perpetually disappointed with EVERYTHING about STALKER 2 even years before release, saying "mods will fix it" as consolation I suppose. This mindset then leads to very specifically tailoring the game to what you want with mods while thinking that everyone else wants the same thing. But please stop and think about the bigger picture. I like that the base game is straightforward, bloat free, simple, and FULL of handcrafted content. I've probably played 400 hours at this point on different platforms and still can't get enough all of it vanilla still. But this strong yet simple foundation of a base game is what allows for mods to branch out. Sure, let misery come, let the CoCs, NLC7s, Gammas, Gunslingers, and all others do their thing. Let them branch out, but start with a simple yet strong base. It's been 15+ years of the OG games branching out into specific niches so give S2's community time to make special things of their own. In the meantime, embrace a positive attitude, and actually play STALKER 2, for that first playthrough try to see it for what it is, not what you want it to be. I assure you, just like one suffers more in imagination than in reality like Seneca said, many of our disappointments come from our prejudices.
Frankly ı can't agree. I didn't even like Gamma until ı started heavily modifying it myself and was (and still am) of those guys that kept screaming ''start with the OG trilogy vanilla first! don't even touch the mods before that!'' But Stalker 2 disappointed me by making my predictions true. Before the game launched ı was thinking stuff like forced lumen shit is gonna kill performance making everything depend on DLSS and god awfull thing that is Frame Gen. Seamless open world is gonna make A-life basically impossible which we saw with A-life not being there at all. If it has the same amount of equipment, content, stuff as CoP it'll be too less and in turn actually cause a inverse bloat where you loot the same things over and over again wondering making late game problem of CoP where you don't even loot stashes, corpses etc. because you know you are going to get another sausage and bandages again instead of something new and exciting. Stalker 2 feels bloated in a way that its wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle. There should've been more and they could've achieved it without copying mods either. There could've been weaponry boosted by artifacts that give it different propities giving more reasons to ''junk'' artifacts and lower tier weapons, maybe you could craft a cloak via bloodsucker skin or make a potion out of its meat that gives you temporary invisibility giving a reason for mutant hunting and a reward for defeating higher tier mutants. Because there aren't anything like this they made it artificially longer by making quests give you jack fucking shit in terms of money and making repairs super expensive with them being tied to the items value making it literally better to use Skif's Makarov for lesser zone and Garbage like wtf. Worst though is the bugs and the performance. The whole ''its not a bug its an anomaly'' thing is only funny when a body is weirdly glicthing and levitating off the ground not when the game forces me to use the console command 5 times throughout my playthrough to continue playing. And as ı've said before DLSS and Frame Gen dependancy is horrible and even with those on the frame rate is trash and somehow even with those off you can get up to whooping 30MS of input latency ... in an FPS! ıdk why ı ranted so much in some random comment, guess ı can't understand why am ı the only one who seems to not have enjoyed it at all making me wonder if somethings wrong with me or if I just have too high expectations or smth.
As a 40yo huge long time fan of Stalker, Metro and Fallout agreed 110%. Been playing Stalker 2 for a couple weeks now I find myself going back to GAMMA. While I do agree Stalker 2 shouldn't be Misery, Anomaly, or GAMMA it honestly feels more like True Stalker for those who don't understand it feels more like Far Cry or any generic open world action FPS.
It feels like Far Cry 2 which is a good thing. It feels nothing like Far Cry 3 and the rest of the dumbed down sequels that followed. Stalker 2 is the best single player shooter in years.
I thought I was crazy as a massive stalker fan having played all the games and Anomaly an ungodly amount when I saw the steam reviews and other reviews being so postive. I was so disappointed, I felt so down, I haven't felt like that since I was a kid. Happy to see that other fans of the series that others are feeling the same way. I tried to get into the game 3/4 times and I think it's just not going to happen :(
I feel you! I’m also just mainly disappointed with how it turned out, especially with those weird promises around A-Life, first they marketed it, then it disappeared from the website, then we got the excuses. We’ll have a home with the mod community for many years still, and maybe GSC will pull this barge around some day. Thanks for your comment!
There are a lot of things to be disappointed about in Stalker 2 but you chose to compare the least disappointing one of them all, visuals. And cherry picking screenshots then showing them to prove it is just pathetic. Behind all those lens flare and bloom and billboard grasses cranked up to maximum density, Anomaly still looks like a DX9 title, Fallout 4 still looks like a barren land with grass stattered here and there. Any sane man who played the game would say Stalker 2 definitely looks way better than those two titles, might be a bit worse than Metro Last Light on the worst cases and way better than Metro Exodus in the best cases. The game uses ray traced lighting which is why the rooms are way dark than it should be. Lighting and reflection is definitely broken due to the fact it is hardware lumen raytracing is broken so it falls back to software ray tracing, hence the poor performance and lighting. Typically light bounces around multiple times and more the bounces more accurate is the raytracing. Hardware raytracing can achieve a good balance by limiting number of rays emmited and number of bounces and let the denoiser fix it. But software raytracing is way slower so to get playable fps, number of rays emitted as well as bounces must be reduced drastically, resulting in blurry oil paintings in reflection and rooms being way darker than it should be. You can enable ray reconstruction by downloading the dll and pasting it in the stalker folder. It gives you an option ingame to enable it. But since its already limits the number of rays and bounces, the only improvement you will see is clearer blobs of reflection. Flashlights can cast shadows but since lighting is broken they haven't implemented the raycasting flashlight. All other games mentioned in the video implemented fake shadows (except Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition where they went full raytracing) which you can enable in Stalker 2 as well with a mod which looks as fake as it does in the other games. As for lightings indoors, again lighting is broken but closed rooms are essentially pitch black. When you go inside the auto exposure correction goes overdrive to atleast let you see whats inside. Even nights are dark but auto exposures just increases the brightness to maintain the same brightness at all times. You can easily adjust the gamma to your preference and once its calibrated majority of the problem go away. Infact majority of the rooms are too dark even for flashlight and ideally if lighting was working as intended, point lights from lamps and other background sources would bounce multiple times to illuminate the room, where right now its only taking place once or twice. Facial animation is same as all the other games, even Unreal 5 titles. In open world sandbox titles, you can't expect every single actor to be motion captured. They probably will implement neural faces when it becomes available but honestly I prefer the current animations over better animations in uncanny valley esque faces. What game is lacking is in other animations which are a bit stiff but it really didn't bother me a bit. Otherwise I agree fully on the interface. I know its just a superficial review, but probably don't compare visuals by watching youtube videos. Stalker 2 has the problem of having too much detail on mundane items which they could have scaled down to have better performance. Stalker has a lot of problems in performance, optimization, bugginess, AI, economy, loots and balancing. But apart from raytraced lighting, its perfect in terms of visuals. Maybe wait a year before buying the game, if you want perfect visuals.
Also I may be disappointed by S2 as well, but that comparison with Anomaly is nonsensical. A landscape screenshot of a heavily modded Anomaly during sunset looks nice, but when you look closer you see it is ultimately a mod derived from a 2009 game with copious amounts of makeup applied to it. At 4:57 you can clearly see the low poly door with very pixelated textures. And you can see this everywhere. You've got shiny shaders and guns taken from CoD MW and whatnot, but then you have level geometry and character models with polygon count from a 2007 game. It's very ununiform, while S2 is visually consistent, even if it means having 4K textures on objects that don't need 4K textures.
Of course it’s a subjective thing, what you find appealing in a game could be special to you, some like the look of Terraria, I think it’s an ugly game. But for that part of the video, the point isn’t that Anomaly with specific mods “just looks better”, my question is, why does S2 look so horrible while even the original engine can be made to look great.
Not many, I’ve always leaned towards the free play ones. I tried a few that I don’t remember the names of, something with “story” in the title where you started in the cordon military checkpoint, like a prequel story. But besides that, it was Stalkersoup, CoC, Autumn Aurora, and from the ashes of Call of Misery, we got Anomaly I think.
Did you people forget about piracy? Just download the cracked game, try it out, then don't bother playing you don't like it, simple. No money wasted, it's your fault you keep paying the developers for shitty products. If you want things to change for the better, speak with you wallet, don't give a single cent ever.
I never played stalker, tried Stalker 2 and felt like a mix between a Ubisoft game and a Bethesda game, exactly what you said. So, what stalker should I play then? Anomaly? Stalker anomaly, is that it?
STALKER Anomaly is free, and in my opinion is one of the best routes to go if you're interested in the series. It combines assets and maps from all games. Did I mention its free?
Well, I played Stalker 2 and I would say the game for me was far from disappointment. Sure I missed some mechanics, fancy animations and the graphics indeed could be better but the developers created A HUGE world full of interesting things to do. Totally agree with you regarding UE5. I feel like this engine doesn't provide developers with the full freedom and limits a lot of things they want to implement. I would much rather prefer if they develop / upgrade their good old x-ray :) Hope future game updates and modding can bring us what we both expected from Stalker 2! Thanks for the video, was interesting to listen to your feedback!
Thanks for your comment! It’s good you had a good time with it, totally fine. Let’s hope for some Cyberpunk/No Man’s Sky level update roadmap from GSC and see where they can take it.
I’m gonna give them a pass because of the war. Most people forget that. Stalker 2 should need another year of polish but they didn’t get that. Also Fallout 4? Eww….
The right course for GSC would’ve been to just not release the game in a state that doesn’t meet standards. We can all excuse delays but a release like this, cross-platform, at full price, not so much.
As always...leave it to the modders to fix their shit for free and make a better game. What I would like to see in the game: - Weapon disasemble & maintenance mechanics similar to Anomaly or Metro: Exodus - A lot more modular wepon attachments like dual (short,long range) sights (In stalker 2, attachments don't come off on any unique weapons) - A-Life actually working and AI improved - The character in the game having personality and more difference in appearance - Mutants having IQ > 0 and being deadly horrible creatures that will fuck your shit up - The developers stoping to make the game a propaganda tool
… but after all: i enjoyed playing the game. It was truly the best singleplayer experience i had for a long time. I was so immersed not missing all the issues you mentioned. I didnt feel ANY need of change in the mechanics.
Agree. Complaining about the ui and how you open the map was confusing and not well explained why that was a issue and looks like a neat pick. Also I didn’t fell the graphics were bad or the animations(like something was missing). The only thing that I agreed was about the gas mask that could be more interesting but not having it doesn’t make that much difference but alife does.
Agreed. These negative comments are weird and it's like they aren't playing the same game as me. Easily the best single player open world shooter on console since Far Cry 2.
@@grimoireweiss5203 It's nothing more than propaganda. Because the devs are Ukrainian, NPCs will love it no matter what. If Russia never invaded Ukraine nobody would be glazing this game.
Let’s hope they can. STALKER is such a unique franchise, there’s a reason it has such a lively and persistent mod community. Even after 16 years of other games, people still love to play them, nothing has managed to take its place, not Fallout, not Metro, not EFT. I think what GSC has to pull off is closer to a No Man’s Sky than a Cyberpunk but let’s hope for the best.
I doubt it because Cyberpunk on release at least had a great story that you could enjoy if the game worked without gamebreaking bugs, and while I couldn't finish the Stalker 2 story because of performance, many people say it's shit compared to the games before it.
@@exoticdachoo007 Personally I liked the story more in Stalker 2 since it actually has a story. Like the OG trilogy had some nice lore, but the story in itself never interested me much, very bland, very straight forward.
I think you are being way too hard on Stalker 2. Stalker 2 can be enjoyed at leisure even on veteran difficulty. Stalker Anomaly takes hard work to enjoy. Stalker SoC is similar to Stalker 2 in that it is accessible. I get that there are flaws on release and soft-locking bugs, but these this are being worked through in patches and the community has made mods for performance. So I get that you are well versed in the Stalker Series, but why not just relax and enjoy the ride. Look man, I love Far Cry 2, but there is not going to be anything like it again and it has more sequels than I can count, and it's near impossible to mod. So just put Stalker 2 into perspective.
I appreciate your positive look. Seems we just have different taste in the games we enjoy and how we like to play them, what we like to see - that’s fine.
I pretty much agree with what you said in this video, obviously there are bugs and performance issues that better be addressed. But, I've been playing it for over 100 hours now, haven't completed it yet, and I don't wanna stop.
I agree that STALKER 2 has a lot of issues, I was salivating towards STALKER since 2003 demo releases. But, fact is, its never gonna be anomaly or any other modded STALKER CoP. Its going to be STALKER. Radiation in most modded CoP survival games are unrealistic, you aint gonna drop within a second walking into a radioactive field, thats not how this works. The guy in 1986 who literally walked into the room to check the exploded reactor lived for days before succumbing to his injuries. I think GSC always had a good balance between reality and gamey mechanics. The art style is also fine, STALKER was never a looker, it always was a drab looking world, the lighting and unreal issues are there yes I wont deny this, but the art style, is on point. In fact STALKER 2 does not even look like an unreal game, that's a good thing. Can they fix the lighting system? Of course, and they probably will go back to baked in light maps, as they have hinted towards such would give you 40 fps extra performance because nanite is awful. But I do not get these other critiques because they are wishes for an entirely different game.
It's literally just more of what the original stalker games were. With no visual clutter, no inventory bloat, no "hardcore immersion' aka I breathe heavily in a gasmask and my pda isn't fullscreen etc. When was the last time you played the vanilla games? Almost the entire video is you wishing the game had what huge fundamental overhauls have (that you tailored to your liking on top of that). A lot of people bought it, a lot of people liked it, and the only people on the internet criticizing it for anything other than its optimization and some graphics features (which is valid and is hopefully eventually ironed out) are either russian bots, people who can't run it well so they lash out at everything they saw on youtube (lol), or people like you, who don't even want a stalker game but some other game built from its foundation. Both the og games and its mods are deeply important to me and have heavily influenced my taste in games, and I have many things I like and dislike about their mechanics and visuals, I have played them religiously ever since I touched misery, but for crying out loud, did you enjoy the original trilogy because you were free of bias that came from tailored mod experiences that came out years later? That most people don't play and are a labor of love from the community that has countless layers purely because vanilla was made in the first place? Then we have a problem, because 5 years from now when stalker 2 gets all its new shiny and customizable mods you'll suddenly think it's a unique and gripping experience again, you like the idea of your perfect stalker, not the actual stalker the developers made. And outside of features that are missing from the originals, they did an outstanding job. Do you wish for stalker to be something many people love and relate to? Then ask your girlfriend to play it, or your non-gamer friends, and then ask them to play misery or gamma. What will they like more: the focused and crystal clear story, the dangerous but traversable world (where you can actually see something at night without your flashlight), sprinkled with light rpg mechanics and small unique sidequests, on a hand-made map where nothing is ever the same, OR will they like the 300 different items you have to sort and track in your inventory, the oneshots from mutants, anomalies, random headshots, the constant visual filters and heavy breathing, and the infinite loop and tedium of the money grind on repetitive randomly generated missions and artifact selling just so they can afford to EAT, and worst of all, the insane amout of time it takes to start using a new gun. I love mods, I love hardcore experiences where nothing is easy and I love making my game look gritty or vibrant with reshade, with overly dramatic hbao that makes every object in the game look like it has a personal photographer casting light on it, with dramatic color and contrast corrections, with bloom and lens flare, and wiping my mask every 20 seconds that removes a quarter of my peripheral vision. But stalker 2 is a game not for niche tarkov cbt autists like me, it's not about how depressing and scrappy it would actually be to live there, it's for everyone to experience and for all to see what the zone and its story is, which is why when I recommend to play the og trilogy to my friends I always ask them to play it as vanilla as possible/tolerable. Having such rich history with stalker games for more than a decade now, I enjoyed s2 thoroughly, despite its numerous flaws and terrible optimization. I genuinely do not understand how a fan of the original games can not enjoy stalker 2 if they look past its broken and unfinished state and I hope this wall of text conveys my discontent with your point of view (and half of the gamma discord frankly) clearly enough
Bruh ... the video was mostly about the visuals with even the whole gasmask, interface etc. thing being at most 1/3 of what the video talked about. You kinda went on a unrelated tangent here talking about so many other things. The comment also comes off a accusotary and combative with lots of ''you'' and even stuff like ''Then we have a problem'' so much so that it feels less like a criticique or a reason why you actually prefer this to straight up trying to pick a fight with the video's maker.
@noobguy9973 and my comment is mostly about the gameplay and mechanics, why is that a problem? Also yes, it is accusatory and combative, if he can criticize devs for not putting a gasmask animation into the game as a genuine argument against its design then I can accuse him of having a weird and outlandish opinion. I'm passionate about these games and I wish its community would stop dogging on the devs for doing the same thing the old games were doing. And it's an incredibly recognizable pattern in anomaly/gamma fans (me being one of them), which I'll remind again, are not official games, and their whole point is to NOT be the same as vanilla, but to be a treat for the hardcore fans
@@noobguy9973it’s disingenuous to write off the entire work of a dev team because of small trivial features like no pda or gas mask huds especially when other parts of the game are very well made such as the map and branching paths in the story.
I've got to agree. As a hardcore fan of the originals, since childhood and then mods, etc... i was one of the first to scream top of my lungs when i saw first trailer for stalker 2. I am from Georgia, Eastern europe and i want to state that basically original stalker was a phenomenon in all the ex USSR countries, same as half life was for the west. It was revolutionary. AI, the graphics that hold on even today with amazing textures and lighting effects and general atmosphere that was not that strange and foreign for us. I saw same architecture, buildings, landmarks that basically i could see outside my window but it was different.. broken.. like a parallel reality and that was why milions of people on this side of earth loved these games. Hell even my father who is 50 already and never touched a videogame in his life LOVED these games and has probably over 4000 hours at this point because they are all he has palyed for like 10 years. BUT! When i launched the game and first few hours were pretty amazing, it became stale really quickly. The world is huge (that is not a bad thing) but it is like 60% same looking. same trees, grass, bushes, cliffs... few interesting lcoations but mainly all the same looking factories with really small distinction. I know its going for the realism, i get it but Art style was swept away basically. all of the game lacks character. how to explain it... Like in original trilogy, the specific locations had specific character to them. Because of the map is smaller and you are going through same locations couple of times during a in game day for example, you know approximately what to expect at what location. Which one may be scary - horror fest, (for example cement factory on the Jupiter map always gave me chills, even looking at it from far away throught the sniper scope ) because mutants tend to lair there. so you are already tense while approaching it 10th time because A life is amazing and you never which of many scary things can be there. Or which locations will be good to visit because bandits usually stay there and you can grab some loot or have a quick sweet shootout. i don't know if i explained this enough for you to understand what i mean. Basically because of A life and smaller map, the locations are more distinguished, familiar and have character. and you know what type of atmosphere you are stepping into on in each and every one of them. Also i agree that areas are more interesting because they have visually distinct style. In S2, except for prypiat and swamps area, the map i roamed and explored is like 70-80% copy-paste bushes and trees. They are similar looking. have no character. nothing distinguishes area you ran from 10 minutes ago, from the one you are now after running like freaking MILES. ART style should be a priority, not the photorealistic graphics. Plus optimisation issues, ( on my rtx 4070 ti super and i9 14900kf the game can't run 1440p above 60-80 fps on high without crap DLSS and crappy upscalers that have their miriad of visual artefacts and destroy visuals while moving. and you would think my system is a beast) I know its the devs, not the engine itself that are to blame, but honestly i would prefer if they went with remade X ray engine 2.0 or something similar to retain some of the characteristics the visuals of original games had. And i won't even go into all the small details regarding the - A life system, which is literally non existent.That was what made the games heart basically, so to speak. And couple of hours in, i noticed that enemies literally just spawned behind my FOV liek 30 meters and isntantly went aggro. They later patched this and made the radius of their spawns bigger and called it A life and called it a day... Shame, especially considering the features that the original games had. JUST TO NAME A FEW: The world was truly alive around you. You could stand around and do nothing and witness tons of things happen around you, LIVE in real time. Firefights, AI enemies actually moving around the map and acting like a squad, flanking, camping, sneaking up on you from behind, ( had milions of funny jumpscares because of that, when they shot you the moment you turned around and AI registered they have been seen XD ) falling back and USING ACTUAL COVER if enemy had sniper or long range weapon, Switching WEAPONS AND AMMO TYPES DEPENDING WHAT ENEMY THEY FOUGHT, and distance they fought at. Mutants feeding animations, dragging bodies of their prey to more secure location to feed, AI stalkers talking, bantering, dynamically moving around the map, not just from point A to point B, looting and CHANGING WEAPONS if they found that they were better on the dead body than what they had already equipped. i can continue for a looooong time but you get the picture. And all these features WERE IN THE ORIGINAL VANILLA TRILOGY... let me make it clear !!! so all the "You've played too many mods and have too high expectations" people don't just jump on the hate train in the comments. i'm NOT going into how the modders basically made one of the best things ever in video game history which is Gamma/anomaly/EFP, ETC. so yeah, i agree with almost everything you've said in the video. And i really do hope that GSC Game World can really put their shit together and patch the hell out of this game and add features, A life ETC. and trully make it worth the legacy originals had and MODS have KEPT from dying and dissapearing into the obscurity for all these years. P.S. I hope the devs are thankfull for the modders since it was them who basically updated the games and made them hit mainstream in the western countries and kept them alive.
Absolutely, thanks for sharing your perspective! Even ignoring all the fantastic games and mods of the last 16 years, just putting Call of Pripyat against S2, the contrast is immense. The vision of the Zone back then seemed to be a world that feasibly exists _without you,_ a place with a life of its own. The memes used to be how STALKER was a hardcore series, uniquely immersive, with a punishing difficulty - somehow, that eroded with the release of S2.
@@ia285 Bruh Our culture, traditions and mindset is like 90% more EU and western oriented and have almost nothing in common with asia. All of the georgians are going to tell you we are on the edge of eastern europe.
@@sandroedilashvili3651 geographically most of Georgia is in Asia, like 97%. Most of the population lives in the Asian part. Genetically Georgians are closer to even Iranians than to Ukrainians or Romanians. Culturally Georgians are distinct but have more in common with other Kavkazis followed by other North West Asians. The only thing "European" about Georgians is that they follow Christianity like Europe. But then again Armenia is also Christian but doesn't larp as European the way Georgians do.
Bruh i am Georgian. I literally live in a capital. Why are you lecturing me on the things about my people and MY country? that you, as it appears have got no freaking idea about except some wikipedia page copy pastes. what are you proving here? wtf
It's the world itself I started to find disappointing. Even after the patches it feels lifeless compared to the originals. Most places look the same, there's less enemy variety, less AI variety, more shallow NPC interactions. Aside from the larger map and graphics it doesn't feel like a step forward.
Anomaly is a Tarkov knockoff that completely ruins the atmosphere of the zone. It's a game for Twitch streamers more than fans of the Stalker games. All graphics mods look like graphics mods, because if they had professional art direction, they would be games. The attention to detail to the environments in stalker 2 is astonishing.
I think GSC is willing to support this game for years with new DLCs etc. I don't agree with you on visuals at all though. Visuals are magnificent to me, especially storm moments. Never ever seen Storm implemented like that in any game. Only problem with visuals is rendering capabilities, upscaling and performance issues as well as UE5 strange rendering pipeline. If you have supercomputer and would just like to assess graphics and immersion of the world Stalker 2 is 10/10 for me. Now there are things that I dislike, like characters not wearing a mask most of the times so we see how generic they are. Some animations as well as NPC combat . Further believe it or not, I've found parkouring in stalker 2 to be quite engaging and fun. Maybe significant mods can create obby like maps or some stuff like that :D
I appreciate your input, I generally want to be optimistic about the game’s lifetime, too, I tried to formulate this careful hopefulness with the end of the video. Right now, GSC seem to be focussed entirely on game-breaking bugs and performance but maybe they’re moving to more substantial changes after that.
As a Stalker fan, if that game was not so bad optimized (I have a 4050, I could play high 60 fps, but due to 6gb I got lags in 1-2 hours of playing) and If A-life was ALIVE Gameplay in burned forest was horrible. Any 15 meters- new group of enemies. That’s why it is 7/10, could be 9/10 If that game don’t have that stalker atmosphere and almost perfect exploration and stashes, it would be like, 5/10
It absolutely uses ray traced lighting. That's exactly why the interiors are so dark. It's also a big part of the reason that there are performance issues, because you can't turn off the ray tracing.
1. The visuals need improvement. 2. The ai needs to be overhauled. A lot things that the old ai used to do, such as mutants eating bodies, simply doesn't occur anymore. 3. The fanboys seriously need to calm the fuck down. I don't think it's a good thing that this is basically a 2007 game with a 2024 coat of paint. If we want the gaming industry to be revitalized and not remain in the current slump it's in, then we need to demand that developers implement new ideas and give us new things to do. They don't need to completely change the game, but they need to build upon what's already there. I'm not saying Stalker 2 is a bad game, but it can be a lot more than it is.
Beautifully said, brother. Did you also love the radio music that always played at Skadovsk and Yanov? That became my favourite part after a while when I first played it. Little piece of home.
I knew I was going to hate it so I wish listed it and hope for the best. Dying Light 2 let me down. Starfield was a massive disappointment. There is little innovation these days in the AAA scene.
Yeah, I see a lack of direction, creative vision, and ultimately polish. I wonder what their game design document had, if it was actually ambitious and they just failed to realise it or if you could read it and it’d sound just like something out of Ubisoft.
i am getting tired of youtubers who have absolutely no idea how Unreal engine 5 works, make videos on this topic for clicks UE5 is just a blank canvas you can paint anything you want on it, it's all on the devs, not ue5 You can modify it, rewrite it's source code, add any system of function you want to it Look at The Finals using UE5, one of the most optimized and good looking shooters ever made, i have 140+ fps on max settings at 1440p using rtx 3070 there, and even when everything around you destructs you have 0 stutters, because devs know what they are doing
I’m saying I’m disappointed, not that UE5 is a bad engine. The disappointment comes from trailers that look incredible, UE demos that promise the world, and then a notable number of releases having major problems. I’ve seen many UE tech demos and showcases and it’s impressive work, I’m all for progressing dev tooling. I’m just highlighting this disconnect between what’s promised and what’s delivered. If we have to agree that it’s all on the devs, that’s fine.
UE5 provides cheap, fast and easy solutions (Lumen and Nanite for example) and studio executives WILL made devs use them. We can see this in almost all UE5 games with only few exeptions :(
I have a few things to say as someone who has the game. Someone with a 4070ti and high end cpu / hardware. First of all i had no issue running the game for the most part on first few weeks. I had maybe a few moments of memory leak but sadly i expect this from every company now. Secondly the game is stunning to play. I don't know who you were watching but it is possible they had issue with rendering during the uploading of their content. Ultra and high graphics are amazing. I feel immersed. I really love it. A good video to watch does comparisons: ruclips.net/video/IxA-wzay1mw/видео.html&lc=UgwiU7ewCCqdHAVnxjt4AaABAg. I think the Ui is whatever, simplistic, informative it gets the job done. I think you get a geiger counter when you get irradiated as well to show when you are being irradiated. Also its just good game design and feedback to the player to be like "hey man, get the fuck out of the radiation ridden swamp". In regards to the pda. You mentioned anomoly as a comparison for good pda usage. the vanilla titles never implemented this. This was just something the mods picked up. I hope however its gets picked up by modders in stalker 2. All in all this comes off as nit picking at things, from my perspective of this video you haven't played the game? You kept showing other people's videos so i assumed you took a stance to not play the game. In your closing you mention what makes a great game for stalker, appealing and interconnected mechanics - the radiation and hunger impacting player movement and vision (i could go on) meanigful player engagement (my assumption is you mean how the player reacts to the world around them) - alot of stalkers will treat you as untrustworthy , sometimes even telling you to "fuck off", the anomalies impact vision and other senses depending on the type Deep narrative writing - the deep narrative is there but to explain it would ruin the story, what your stance is on the zone. What do you think of the zone, who do you side with? who is using you? who isn't? I love Gamma, I like SoC, but i really fuckin like stalker 2. It ticks all the boxes. it needs work on a-life and i think there are still memory leak issues. Its doing a great job, and the updates are insane.
Some stuff S2:HoC needs: portable repair items that can be used in the field, headshot multiplier damage for all enemies, ability to harvest mutant parts just like the old days, functional sights on grenade launchers, make the M26 underslung shotgun straight-pull bolt-action, make the M26 able to use all shotgun ammo types, give the M26 the same damage and range stats as the sawed-off, boost M26 mag capacity to five rounds, boost the pump shotgun's mag capacity to eight rounds (seven in the tube plus one in the chamber) since it has a 20" barrel with a flush-fit mag tube, and bring back the ability to "dodge" pseudogiant pseudostomps with perfectly-timed jumps just like you could do in S:SoC. Edit/Note: And A-life! Gotta have A-life! 12:25 That gas mask is set up in left-handed configuration.
Funny that there is a single torch in the entire Skyrim that casts shadows while the rest of the torches don't. So maybe they will add a flashlight that casts shadows in a dlc, but you will have to find it in a cave.
The lighting seems to be focused around HDR and it looks much better with it. Also increasing GI to the maximum level (which steals half FPS) improves visuals considerably. Even on High level it looks better than previous parts of Stalker. The lack of glow from fireplaces can be explained too - increasing reflectivity of surfaces plus HDR would prevent us from using flashlight almost entirely.
saw your comment on the ai comparison video, totally agree with all your talking points. S2 is so half baked when compared to the earlier games systems. not just the AI, but the inventory (holding f1 and f2 down to use your secondary quick access item is stupid), and the way mutants were integrated into the game. love the comparison you made about F.E.A.R. too. two masterclasses at turning the uninteresting into something very interesting.
It lacks the darkness of the originals, looks too pretty and not enough grit The story wasn't bad but it feels unfinished or rushed, a lot of fan service but no deepening of the lore and I don't like the retcons
Im both a Fallout and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. veteran my two favourite franchise and its so sad that the newer games are a flop. Another unfortunate similarity is a cult like fan base both the Todd cult of the bugthesda Fallout fanficts and now the Stalker 2 ones seems like they cant accept any criticism of the games. Bethesdrones allways yapp and hate on about the OG(Fallout 1, 2) and NV "elitists" while now the stalker fans would like to gut anyone who dares to mention that Anomaly (a free mod by modder fans by the way) did something better thatn S2. I just want good games that are like the originals I fell in love so many years ago(at least S2 looks and feels like the originals unlike "Fallout" 4/76) and defending unworthy lazy developers who makes slop "sequels" are the death of the gaming industry! It being an "industry" is a big source of the problems of course but lets not start that conversation now... Thanks for the video!
I was also surprised by some of the reactions, it seems to have split the community a bit. I think it really comes down to wanting innovation over re-releases and simplified look-alikes. Fallout 4 also more wore the skin of a Fallout game than it actually was one at heart, but it still dared to try stuff like base building and an official survival/hardcore mode. We’ve seen the Ubisoft open world formula that’s just a casual shooter with some minor gimmicks a thousand times now. I could just reinstall Far Cry 5 if I wanted just that. Meanwhile, STALKER has all this immense potential for interesting and unique gameplay and yet they use almost none of that.
@@SaintJulesDay The worst thing is that there are thousands of mods not to mention mod collections like GAMMA they could easily be insipred but they choose not to!
Can people stop blaming Unreal please? It's a tool. Its like blaming a pen for mediocre novel or drawing. Unreal can exceed in everything, but doesn't do it automatically, including graphical fidelity, or AI of animation or game play and so on.
The game was cracked 15 minutes after release so I downloaded that (sorry for not supporting the devs but $60 or more was too unaffordable to me), and I have to say I was dissapointing, not just because of the gameplay, but also the optimisation, the story intrigues me and I want to play more, but I can’t if the game runs like hot garbage on a potato after 15 minutes of playing, and gameplay is straight up bland, didn’t like the gunplay, mutants are too strong (fixed with a mod), it just wasn’t what I wanted from a “Stalker game” and I expected it, but I used to think it could change, I later dug deeper on the Eastern side of the community and look for the leaked version, played the 2021 build and guess what? It’s almost the same, it made me disappointed even more
Welcome to the channel, Lynn! Yeah, I think it’s the opposite angle this time compared to when STALKER was still called Oblivion Lost. Back then, they iterated over wildly different concepts and eventually evolved into the games we know. Ambitions were sky high (fully autonomous NPC AI that can also do quests, drivable vehicles, branching story) but they had to trim it to ever get to release. With S2, it seems to be the usual MVP approach, what’s the minimum that still qualifies as a game, that’s what I see.
I'm sorry, but the landscape under the overcast sky is supposed to look bleak and flat just because that's how the light works. And also because of how the light works, you're not supposed to see the grass shadow while having the sun behind your back (4:18) So I'd be rather interested to see the comparisons for identical or similar lighting conditions because those you've shown tell almost nothing to me.
To be fair Stalker 2 does use a form of ray tracing (Lumen) but it's running in software only. Case in point puddles use a combination of screen space reflections with lumen reflections as a fallback. Those blobs the game fall back on is the simplified game works rays are traced against for both diffuse and specular lighting. Since it's software only the internal resolution is very low, prone to firefly artifacting, temporal smear, light leakage and limited light bounces to name a few. The overall asset quality is high but the lighting breaks too often for the game to look good. Hardware Lumen could allow for more accurate lighting. Unfortunately hardware Lumen has a higher upfront performance cost. In its current unoptimized state there's probably not enough performance headroom, even with the latest PC hardware, upscaling and frame generation technologies.
Thanks for your technical comment, I really appreciate it! I presume GSC originally wanted to go all in on everything UE5 had to offer at the time and as release rolled closer (despite multiple delays), they never switched to a suitable alternative that would fit their hardware budget. With static environments, they could’ve gone with something like The Division, baked lighting for various times of day, and some nice screen-space or planar reflections. There are so many good and proven options out there. But to pick the mix they picked and have campfires, puddles, the flashlight look like that, that’s just rough. And I didn’t even get into the overall performance in my video.
After 77 hours, im pausing my playthrough. it's just repetitive and boring... i was initially enjoying the hell out of it, but something just clicked that it was not the game we wanted.
I mean, the problem of the game is that it's so big. They couldn't make all the cool stuff because the project itself is massive, and because of other problems too. But the core and the atmosphere are great already. They just need to add more lacking content and optimize it a bit.
I honestly completely agree with you. I'm 70+h in and haven't completed the main story, I enjoyed every second of it but still think a shorter, more focused experience would have been better.
Honestly i love stalker 2. It has the stalker feel and its definitely a success for their studio. Anyone who disagrees is either a call of duty movement demon requiring constant action or just a random ass guy who did a few missions and decided that the game is too hard.
I really wonder why you have to append that whole “anyone who disagrees”. If you love the game, that’s completely fine. Why do you also have to repose it as if it’s _the one right way_ to think about it?
Ive said this 7 years ago and i will say it again. when Black ops 4 got introduced to the scene i knew the gaming industry would crush down and gaming industries would just have Money in mind and not make games for fun. This occurred to because CoD one of the best Multiplayer games back then started to do all this futuristic stuff but the singleplayer campaigns were so bad i cant even remember the intro of it right now.And as years passed by and new highly anticipated games came i knew i was right. Nowadays its all about hyping the game up,making it almost uninstallable if you dont have 23 gazzilion zettabytes of disk space which i dont even have an idea where all this stuff goes to.And dont let me start on the optimisation of games,its like the companies dont care at all for it. No game that came out after 2020 was or will be what everyone anticipates. to end it all, Dying Light 2... after all these Updates these years the game feels like dogcrap.. they couldnt even get the ragdolls right and had these stupid premade animations the zombies do everytime you hit them its ridicilous. but yeah.My rant here is over if anyone read this fully.
Shooting your pistol doesn't light up the wall with its muzzle flash in a dark environment on max settings short of enabling Ray tracing features, 7900xtx... The awful pop-in in the opening area, where you take control of the character: you look towards the anomalies... As you walk closer, things start to pop-in... These were the first two experiences for me, and that's where I hit quit. I'll check back after a few more patches. And yes, the shadows from the flash light... That too was missing... ZERO immersion. Stalker is all about immersion.
9:14 good vid but a few points 1.) Im kinda iffy on comparing open world games to linear ones that allow for more graphic fidelity even though i agree lack of casting shadows was just a dev choice 2.) At 9:06 they over used alot of this sort of static facial animation as a result of it being a dynamic system in alot of areas yes but its not a fair comparison to compare the open world dynamic lipsync with hand keyed animation for story cutscenes in other games, you shoul;d of compared one of the MANY scenes in Stalker 2 with mocap. Thankyou so much for adressing the UI, the shift to boring black boxes from its incredible design of the orignals.
Best review I have seen yet. I think the description of stalker 2 as an assassins creed looking and feeling game is very on point. And why is nobody talking about the colors that they are using for the compas and hud. The yellow and blue is soooo off, it does not fit to the setting at all. Moreover, their curency looks like a cyperpunk currency.
I completely agree with you. I pre-ordered the most expensive version of the game, played all the older games a long time ago, and also played Anomaly. I played STALKER 2 for about two weeks. The first 3-4 hours were amazing, but later it felt like Cyberpunk at release. You see so much potential, but the game itself feels lifeless, with zero soul. I played STALKER 2 with about 30 mods. Nearly all weapons you find are broken, but why don’t they jam in NPCs’ hands? You cannot sell broken weapons? No random side quests? I still haven’t heard any campfire stories. Usually, when I arrive, all the NPCs leave the campfire. Radiation is just for show. The day-night cycle is terrible. Performance is awful, and I played on an RTX 4090. So for now, I’ve just left the game until they finish it. The biggest immersion breaker for me was the British accent in the Eastern European Chernobyl zone. It’s just funny to play and hear NPCs cursing in gunfights with a British accent. I understand why they did it, but it is just immersion-breaking.
One of the less mentioned issues that I encountered was in relation to Ukraine's Soviet past. Due to the war GSC basically removed anything that could be associated with the USSR and specifically Russia (for example the signage in the world has been changed to Ukrainian language). This is terribly immersion and lore breaking. It feels like a STALKER skin suit more than anything. What a shame.
Something that nobody is talking about is how much retconing S2 does that ruin the lore. The map, artifact and characters have been completely changed.
Dude, regarding the vegetation, it seems to me that they removed it on purpose, because if it had been added like an anomaly, the game would not have launched at more than 30 fps, which is obvious
Finally someone with some common sense stalker 2 is NOT a good game. It’s missing so much and the devs literally lied about a life 2.0. And still 3 months after launch we have yet to receive major updates to the ai. This game sucks. They stole our money and ran off with it and I’ll stick to that till I get real a life because I refuse to play this game without proper ai.
I really liked that STALKER 2 UI and gameplay feels more smooth and polished, less jank than that feeling the OG games have, even though I like those too. Plus, the fact that it even got released is cool, given world events and all. On the other hand, I really dislike how UE5 games often end up as demanding and unoptimized messes. I know, I know, you can use the engine well if you put in enough effort... except like 80% of devs out there don't seem to and whereas previously you'd get games that both look and amazing and play well (from Doom 3 to the newer Doom games, honestly one of the best examples), now you basically just need framegen and a beefy GPU.
Amen brother. This is exactly why I want to bring back the Fallout feeling to Fallout 4. So far I'm doing well according to the reviews of my mod users. You mentioned your mods for STALKER. What mods, where? I would like to know, because as I see it, you have a reasonable opinion on things and not because I fully agree with you but because this is reality.
yeah they ruin nights I can't get it dark enough anymore, it happens in many games cause ppl complain" i cant see anything" but i get it the lighting sucks, Metro Exodus was so good
I think for me after nearly 70 hours in STALKER 2, I really wish we got the 2012 version that never got to see the light of day. Not to say what we got doesn't have potential, but in it's purest form, it isn't STALKER the same way the trilogy was, and ideally what 2012 STALKER 2 was going to be. STALKER 2 is more akin to a soft reboot than a true successor to the original trilogy. It has shifted some from the original culture of it. Despair, hopelessness, maybe. But exploring, and perseverance through grit in light of that scary dark world is what the original STALKER was about. For purpose, and ultimately above all, self-reflection and carving your role and name into the zone, regardless of whether or not you were recognized for it. A reflection, maybe, of the environment GSC originally found themselves in through a post-soviet society and its collapse in the 90's. It was grim, the collapse led to a lot of economic struggle, government corruption, increases in the crime rate, and other bullshit... sound familiar? But there was a longing to push through in spite of that. Whether or not the story beats in the original trilogy wholly reverberate this idea is up in the air... for all we know, they also just did it because it's cool as shit. And I wouldn't blame them, that's how you should make something you're passionate about in the first place. But in that regard, one difference being, STALKER 2 does not reflect the what became the original's idea as much. Whether or not it's due to the new publishers, Microsoft's involvement, or the politics of the Russo-Ukrainian war, I'm uncertain. Probably a mix of all of them. Regardless, it has all no doubt affected the development of the game in some way. And this all happened midway through that, is the thing. Because of that, STALKER 2 is something that struggles a bit to find its identity, in my opinion. Not that it doesn't have one, but it is most certainly not the exact same one the original STALKER had. In it's struggling emphasis on immersion and graphical fidelity, it lost features like A-Life, complex group and individual enemy AI, expanded mutant variety (planned in 2011), performance (ffs I have a 4080 and I don't get past 30 in settlements without framegen, that should not be a fucking standard for something you can run and you know it), and so much more. And the artstyle especially, it just doesn't have that same... eastern European GRUNGE. I largely dislike how I can even see the eyes of stalkers wearing gas masks, it feels wrong, I shouldn't be able to see their eyes. It's not unsettling enough. I feel like I'm not supposed to know. The textures are almost smoother. I dislike how the grass basically all looks the same everywhere compared to E3 2021 trailers, the use of color looks nothing like even the that build of the game which, so many argue "pre-rendered"... but like, why then? If it sacrificed so much of that identity in doing so. Yeah, you can argue STALKER 2 still has those themes, like oh you go around with a gun shooting stuff up for coupons, but its parts of its attitude in writing and most certainly its art direction do not reflect it. Me personally, despite being a relatively new fan of the STALKER series compared to many, am not new to 2000's game jank. I myself don't really care as much about the teleporting items, the lack of smooth animations. Not they wouldn't be NICE, of course, but that's not what those games were about, and that's not what the original STALKER trilogy was about. It was about you, a stalker, in the zone, afraid and exploring it for the first time. I want an expansion on that. I want a spooky zone that challenged what I knew without straying from that original formula, and for it to visually reflect that without a need for rtx-slop. You want le cool animations and graphics from a game during its time, go play Crysis. You want the gameplay equivalent of molten lead poured down your urethra, go play GAMMA or Tarkov. Basically, this is why it's just confusing to me that people are completely satisfied with this game, long-time fans especially. It is "STALKER", yes, but only in essence. Its identity changed, its artstyle... "changed", and even some numerous staple features are now missing, all those changes without somehow deeply changing the central gameplay loop all that much making a somewhat disconnected feeling game. I don't have that "new and scary" feeling I'm looking for, where I did with the trilogy. If you want to argue with me on anything, that is the most important thing here. The merit it has in light of that though are its completely open world, emphasis on exploration (a lot of locations are interesting and unique in how you come across them and are meant to interact with them), streamlined gameplay, and somewhat QoL features compared to the trilogy. It's not a bad game per se, but it's not completely STALKER. I'm not asking for mil-sim tacti-slop stuff, I'm not asking for constant inventory management, I'm not asking for ball-crushing difficulty, and I'm ESPECIALLY not asking for ray-tracing, super detailed animations a la Cyberpunk or TLOU. I'm asking for an emphasis and expansion on the original IDEA and IDENTITY of the original games through its own original features and art direction, and it just only sort of does that. 5 new anomalies and the super anomalies, a sizeable expansion on the guns, and a somewhat more engaging story... good, awesome! But only 2 new mutants? New factions that my character doesn't give a shit about because he just wants to go home and fix his apartment? Why all these new guns if all I'm shooting is comparably less advanced AI? It's like akin to Minecraft modpacks where they have all this new shit but the same 7 hostile overworld mobs. The fuck? It's... decent, it's good, overall, if I was just looking at it by itself. But the fact it only kind of did it with sacrifices in other regards from where it came from is somehow just so much more bothersome than if it just failed in all those aspects. At least then, I could just go "it sucks" and move on. But I can't do that, because I know it's there, and it's painful. At least, all we can do now is wait until GSC amends these, or they release the modding toolkits, and modders fix those parts for us. I might just even consider doing some myself, honestly. In the meantime I'll just mostly be playing Old World Redux. If you want a version of Stalker with Anomaly's bigger zone, but closer to the OG games mechanically, play that, you won't regret it.
One game that I'm, comparing it with is the upcoming KCD2. KCD2 has better visuals, less strain on the the CPU, better LODs. The NPC's also have a life of there own and more interactivity. Just shows how much better Cry engine is vs UE5
We don’t get many new games released using Cry Engine, it’s gonna be interesting to see how it turns out. Kingdom Come has a pretty big scope, it’s not easy to pull off something that looks and performs well like that.
Unreal Engine is no longer a game engine. The stunning amounts of detail everyone likes to try and reach is simply funny, how are they expecting the game to run well when there's so much detail everywhere and everything is so demanding at all times on your hardware that even the vanguard of hardware struggles with it. I don't hate STALKER 2, I don't think it's a bad game, but coming of off something like Anomaly it's a huge let down when I can achieve the same gameplay, visual fidelity and immersion in a community made mod based on trial and error
i was so disappointed by the art style in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. i played the original trio for the first time about a year ago and thought they looked awesome despite their age, the SEVA suit especially looked super badass with its mirrored one-way visor and just the general shape of it. now it looks like a generic space suit from Starfield or something. i want games with less emphasis on the graphical fidelity, and more emphasis on good lighting and art style. Elden Ring kinda looks kinda rough when you stop to zoom in on textures, but the art style and lighting make the game look absolutely gorgeous despite that.
Things i miss most:
1. Good old human AI
2. Flashlight shadows (have no idea why are they missing)
3. Longer day
4. Darker nights
5. Slower day/night cycle
6. Wet ground after rain
7. Choosing how long to sleep in bed
8. Better performance
9. Night vision
They said to be working on (performance costing) AI fixings.
Longer day / cycle mods available.
Darker Nights: ReShade or NVidia Freestyle
Better performance comes with updates both game and driver. Or... Hardware.
And night vision: You can do your own with ReShade or Freestyle, but surely some mod incoming.
I advise you to just wait longer and keep your eyes both on game updates AND mods.
Good hunting, Stalker!
@@RoyalPredator Being the pet of a company who doesn't give a shit about you and defending them like you work on their products yourself is crazy.
@dosdoğruyup I do not defend them at all. I even blame CDPR all the time for their straight blant lies today! ;)
@@RoyalPredator But you say they're working on it like you've been in their office and looked at their work and you talk about mods players made. Those mods don't mean anything in this situation. They put the work on the players. I mean granted some of these things don't require too much work and/or it is matter of choice but still. I just don't like it when people talk any good of any company or just parrot what a company says to other people. I just don't trust them and I think for most of them, they don't wanna make good games, create worlds and tell stories but they just want money and nothing else. I honestly find small passion in the STALKER 2. I certainly can't say it is as soulless as an EA or Ubisoft game but it is certainly as soulless as it gets when you consider it among games with less budget.
@@dosdoğruyup Their latest patch (15Gb, jeesh!) is mostly about performance patches. So first things first they try to fix the most important stuff.
I'm not even sure that they will release feature improvements later on.... CDPR did with cyberpunk, but their "efforts" are mostly ridiculously off demand and just stupid.... So a way lesser team as GSC? Who knows? I wouldn't bet.
Meanwhile I am a former developer, I'm also a modder ofc. We do fix things if possible. So I replied with some tips for the fella in hope he (and others) get some temp solution in the meanwhile.
We good? ;)
remember kids, artstyle over graphics, gameplay over slop.
A simple mantra that could solve a lot.
I want to play RE7 again after seeing Ethan's beautiful pearly whites in your profile picture. Thanks 👍
What's that go to do with this game?
Best single player shooter in years even with the bugs.
@@workhorse7134 No. It isn't. It does not hold a candle to Witcher 3, or Cyberpunk 2077. I enjoyed 2077 more when it came out. I didn't instantly think about 15 different necessary mods to make the game feel better. How is there no night vision? Why do all artifacts feel the same? Why is the gunplay so despicably poor? Why am I shooting nerf darts out of a shotgun at a chimaera and spending 35 shotgun shells? Why is artifact hunting the most boring experience on Earth? Why did I have to install a mod to detach the scope from Valik Lummox's garbage piece of shit AK to put on a normal AK because the normal AK has better stats?
@@workhorse7134 It's an unfortunate and bitter truth but modders have always been the bread and butter to sandbox games. They never come out good these days.
Ah yes, radiation. The loud, noticeable, honestly kind of annoying killer.
Whats really gonna upset GSC is when modders simply recreate Stalker 2 in the Anomaly version and it ends up being the better way to play the game.
That's what I'm hoping but it'll be 400gb and I can accept that.
@@Bob-t8l it propably be weighting less than original😂
thank god a review of this game that isnt just suckin off the game.
im a LONG time stalker fan and S2 seriously made me sad for awhile. i refuse to play it again until its fixed/important series features are added. Got a refund thank god.
Welcome to the channel, glad you enjoyed my opinion piece. I also just wanted it to be good, believe me.
stalker 2 feels like a fallout 4 mod
Ok i finished the video. Glad im not crazy.
Yes
Honestly you guys have so much fuckin rose tinted glasses. And it's always the virgins who've never felt a woman's touch thinking calling something fallout 4 is an insult
So glad I'm not alone in thinking that 😂
People were praising this half baked game I don't know if they are on copium or just have shitty standards. Some say just the graphics are upgraded but it just looks like another generic unreal engine looking mess to me. After years of waiting Stalker 2 is just massive disappointment, I had my doubts when I saw they are using unreal engine and here we are.
Yeah, it’s understandable the community wanted this game to be good and succeed but pretending won’t get us the sequel we wished for. The original games lived off unique gameplay, atmosphere, and some cool technical features for the time. That’s the identity they should’ve probably built upon.
Maybe people lowering their standards for stalker 2 because of war situation right now
I feel the exact same way like wth am ı the only one who didn't like this game at all? Is something wrong with me? Did ı have unreasonable expactations or smth? But yeah ı didn't really enjoy it and just did a slightly altered Gamma 0.9.3 completeionist playthrough after finishing Stalker 2 which was a lot more fun.
@@Andym1911 their studio had moved to prague 2 years prior to release. Also could have indefinitely delayed it.
100% agree. Stalker fans are pretty ignorant. Stinking up for this game is outrageous.
Just an FYI most of the devs from the original Stalker games went on to the Metro series. All of the immersive features in Metro were meant to go into Stalker 2 as far as the original creators were concerned.
Thats bullshit. Devs who left for Metro went before Clear Sky. They left while making first Stalker. And it wasnt deffinitely majority.
the game was developed 2 times before it actually released this year, so almost none of the devs of the old games worked on S2
@@tlap1508 most metro devs lost before stalker was even called shadow of chernobyl,most metro developers left after they made stalker oblivion lost
@@octaaka4757 exactly
that's a lie.
Im glad I’m not the only one that thought stalker 2 felt like fallout 4 with a floral overhaul mod
It hadn't occurred to me till now, but this is a far cry game in terms of both visual and mechanical aspects.
And one of the recent ones, because even Far Cry 2 back then felt more like stalker.
when I first played STALKER 2 I immediately thought "this feels like a ubisoft game"
obviously no thanks to the missing A-Life and lack of general atmosphere, just felt super bland and soulless
@@splifff445 Yeah, the a-life is pretty bad, but the atmosphere? Music, locations, ambient, dub, everything is there, not sure what you mean.
@@adambadam4870it feels like fallout 4 with a floral overhaul mod and metro exodus beats stalker with locations sounds etc
@bencopeman-x3e Ngl Metro Exodus had phenomenal locations. Hard to beat that.
That ain't S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 that's a S.T.A.L.K.E.R 76 except there's no Multiplayer...
Fallout 76 гораздо лучше.
Джунгли; ядовитое болото; длинный хребет вдоль всей карты; шлаковая бездна; ядовитая долина; центральная луговая часть; западная лесная часть.
Помести персонажа в случайную точку мира Фаллаут 76; поверни камеру на 360 градусов; и игрок сможет указать регион где находится эта точка.
Помести игрока в случайную точку мира Сталкер 2; поверни камеру на 360 градусов; в 90% случаев игрок скажет "непонятное плоское место, трава и чахлые деревья".
А в Фаллаут 76 не только проработанный открытый мир, там еще много интересных уникальных локаций.
В плане игрового дизайна Фаллаут 76 на несколько голов выше Сталкер 2.
Oh about the blinking icon to lead you to goals? They will always add that. Corporate game creation rule number 7: Dumb down the masses using dumbed down mechanics.
there was a big ass minimap with quest icons in the original :D
@@autismofinn3144 I don't know why people keep ignoring this. You couldn't even disable the minimap without modding.
@@autismofinn3144 The minimap was not very big, and it was in the corner of the screen.
turn off the radar then
that campfire scene isn't even in the game 🤣
Even though it would’ve been perfect! The originals already had dynamic NPC dialogue and anecdotes around the campfire, crazy they didn’t make that into a core feature but then made a trailer completely built around the same idea.
@@SaintJulesDaythere's at least one dynamic campfire dialogue I encountered, but it might be the only one.... When you come back from the poppy field the stalkers relaxing on a campfire will comment about some philanthropist stacking the energy drink stash or about someone greedy looting it all. They even comment if you fill it but keep the note that explains the purpose of the stash. Makes it feel like a good 20-40% of the time in the game's development went into the poppy field because it's beautiful and memorable.
Disappointing isn’t it, modern AAA game development has obvious problems. Unreal Engine seems to be a common factor. All the demos promise so much however the developers aren’t able to get close in a final release. It’s maddening
Yeah, development of big titles has gotten very expensive and I guess Epic are trying to counter some of that by providing features out of the box. But if we look at most of those recent UE5 titles, it doesn’t really seem to work out so well.
While it is disapointing, GSC is not a AAA developer and expecting Stalker 2 to have the quality of a AAA game, especially in the conditions they are working under, is a little unfair. What they pulled off is still incredible and has the foundation to end up a legendary game, on par with the first three Stalker games, as long as GSC sticks with it.
Dude they made this game during a war, did u not see the end credits where they honor the dead people because of the war? Its a miracle this game doesnt have micro transactions or is as bad as a ubisoft game or as boring as starfield
@@Reflection554 No it was made in Prague, not Kiev. So, not "during a war" (which was started by them back in 2014, btw.).
@@Reflection554 So what they honor their death by making such a piece of shit?
"No cooking, crafting, harvesting mutants, changing filters, washing dirty socks". Reminder that it's Stalker 2 not my favorite busywork simulator mod.
Game mechanics are half-baked, too many bugs and graphics are sometimes beautiful, mostly meh. There is a lot of work to be done but the skeleton of a great game is there.
If I can’t individually remove the rotating lock head from the bolt assembly of my rifle and clean it by hand, _is it even a game?_
Why should any player kill a mutant then? At least when we kill a stalker we have the chance of reselling their gun and taking their ammo. There's no incentives at all for mutants other than bullet sponges.
@@pira707 They are usually guarding valuable loot. Otherwise one should avoid them. They are mostly just animals, no need to incentivise killing them
@@pira707 That's good, player should avoid killing mutants - they are just animals. He's rewarded when they have some loot in their lair or he's on a mission to kill them.
@ "player should avoid killing mutants" nice bait bro
The PDA really is a massive oversight, its iconic to stalker and now its a full screen 2D map, what a shame
It’s one of the many oversights that are also a step back, like the flashlight. The PDA in the originals was a pancake but it didn’t pause the game. Practically, they did what we later got with the Anomaly 3D PDA, just with the cheapest implementation for the time.
@@monolithgooner when I first saw new PDA I was thinking that they replaced PDA with ipads
Metro is started when part of the first Stalker team desided to build their own game. It feels to me that Metro is build based on continues experience, and on the other side Stalker 2 team is almost all new people.
By the way another part of original Stalker geme started company Vostok games (I think it's renamed).
I hope the next Metro game is good, because Exodus was like a solid 9/10 to me, hoping they keep it up.
GSC should have cooperated with 4A Games and get a license to use their engine instead of going with UE.
Selling an unfinished game, following by a disaster update, a month in silence, hiding behind the fanboys praising whatever they spit at them.
Then they will want to sell expansions with the reputation they are creating nowadays.
Good luck greedy people at GSC. 60€ is all you gona get from me
2 mil sales and this kid thinks he's up to something
GSC didn't make CyberPunk2077, what are you on?
@@imsimenjoyer Sausage earned. Good boy
@@heztorm Haters do be hatin'
I'm an idiot that has never played a Stalker game, I got excited for this one, I have an Xbox and never had a gaming computer. I paid $98 usd for the ultimate version. I was loving the game, then the bugs started, failure after failure, immersion breaking details constantly being underwhelming. I consider myself an average joe when talking about games and I am very disappointed how this turned out. I feel like I paid $98 for a game to play on my phone.
So.. did i understand you right ? You didn't played the game by yourself ?
THERE WILL BE NO MODS LIKE WE HAD BEFORE. Its over.
Graphics peaked in 2015. All we have now is DLSS and Raytracing.
it's a miracle of marketing to convince people running your game below native resolution is a feature.
I thought “finally a big RUclipsr finally reviewing the game and not just glazing it with eyes half closed” then saw the channel size and was blown away with the quality.
Thanks a lot!
Here is my point of view: ive never played a STALKER game before, it somehow flew under my radar despite being an avid gamer for the last 20 years. I HAVE however played metro 2033, last light, and exodus. I love the metro series. I picked up STALKER 2 on gamepass after hearing so many people talk about it, and its all i have played for the last month. It feels like i am 15 again experiencing fallout 3 for the first time, but with gorgeous graphics on my OLED TV (not compressed yt clips) and actually super well done satisfying gunplay. I have the same sense of wanting to go back to curiously walking around to see what adventures i can find, like fallout 3 did for me 15 years ago. It makes sense to me that long time STALKER fans might be disappointed, but from a person coming from my background, this game is incredible and i wouldnt want it any other way. Im not the type of person to play games where a core game mechanic is dying repeatedly, that annoys me. But here i am still returning to STALKER 2 even though i have died over 150 times so far. I dont care that i die all the time, i want to keep exploring. GSC have truly made something special with this game, and im sad that some longtime STALKER fans dont feel that way.
Now go buy the og stalker trilogy and play it. It's super ugly, but those games are better overall experiences.
I am a long time stalker fan. I am liking the game as it is pretty true to the originals. The issue is people confuse anomaly with stalker.
“Truly something special” 😂😂😂😂 always amazes me what people slurp up
@@bwhelan237nope. That’s a cope narrative you’ve created
"...but with gorgeous graphics on my OLED TV"... says all that needs to be said and it really is just about the gyst of your long comment.
... And that's rather curious given you've tasted (and loved) actual quality within the same genre in the past, it being the Metro series: Better visuals, better and more cohesive gameplay systems, quality assured in regards to bugs and performance, a story that doesn't flipflop on itself throughout the entire game... and yet somehow here you are letting the "prettiness" do all the talking on this one.
As someone who hasnt really played the older Stalker games I like stalker 2 a lot. But I can see how someone who has played the older games a lot might be disappointed. I really wish these modders would just work for these game companies because they do such a good job.
Little clickbait-y title IMO, but thx for stating it's an unfair and superficial analysis both in video and description. After over 100 hours of playtime I agree with your point on old marketing, flashlight, radiation mechanic and UI and that UE5 is trash.
Still tho I don't get your comparisons.
Stalker 2 is an open world game on budget of 100 mil, developed over 14 years, being cancelled when studio closed in 2011 for 3 years, through covid, invasion of their country, moving to another country and members of their studio being in active military duty and/or still working remotely from Ukraine.
Comparing graphics to 16 years of work of modders from all around the world, on already done gaming trilogy is silly.
Comparing it to Silent Hill 2, 18 hour long linear remake of an old game is silly.
Comparing animations to Starfield, a 400 mil game made by 7,5 billion company with four studios in both USA and Canada is silly.
Comparing faces to Last of Us, a 220 mil character driven game made by subsidiary of Sony is silly.
Comparing characters animation to Dying Light 2, another postapocalyptic open world game is actually on point, well done.
Comparing PDA, an electronic device that works as your map, journal, upgrades screen and task manager to some drawn map on a piece of paper In Metro or SH2 , or same 2D UI from old games compressed on texture of 3D model by modders (see the first comparison) is silly.
Comparing gas masks visuals, a feature that was never implemented in any official Stalker release, to another game made by another studio is silly.
I'm not trying to completely defend the game, there are many things wrong with it but the atmosphere, story, gunplay, world building and yes, many visuals are amazing. Some of people hating on it are just as blindfolded as people calling it a masterpiece, and all both sides are doing is stopping any meaningful discussion or critique.
Either way a very silly video, but I hope that someday you'll enjoy Stalker 2 as well, being official release patched up or heavily modded. Good hunting stalker.
Lets be real. Stalker 2 is a generic console shooter with a lazily put together stalker skin on it. It has a terrible pc port and the only reasons for the scale of the hype it got are:
1. The war (which i still find incredibly distasteful to use as a marketing angle)
2. Microsoft backed xbox exclusive for the losers that still engage in console wars
Im pretty sure a lot of real stalker fans already knew what was coming or were at least highly sceptical once the game got announced for consoles.
Edit: Great video. Nice use of fallout and metro for the analysis. Enjoyed the stalker vs stalker comparisons (cop vistas to this day can still be absolutely gorgeous) and nice editing. Not too flashy but still stylish
Yeah, it’s thoroughly sad but that’s been my point of view as well. The reason I didn’t even think about buying on release day (though I checked Steam reviews right away) was I had a feeling it would end up exactly like this. Big promises of a sequel, trailers that were almost exclusively cutscenes, vague talk about features without ever showing off a proper demo. It was an almost formulaically bad release. Feels strange now to think I was ever worried about mods becoming irrelevant :|
@SaintJulesDay Yeah exactly. The fact their prelaunch promo was basically just nostalgiabait with cinematic trailers, paying off youtubers and constantly reminding us they were working on the game during a war was a clear giveaway the game would turn out to be a dumpsterfire on launch.
Its such a shame cause we could have gotten something great with all the tech available nowadays.
Oh well at least we have the originals and mods
@@SaintJulesDay Same here. The gritty trailers made this my most anticipated game ever and when we started seeing gameplay trailers running at 30-60fps, i got the feeling it wasn't going to be good. I no longer get excited for games because 90% of the time they have performance issues, bugs, etc
I will never understand why people get mad when comparisons to the mods are being made. Yea sure modes are IMMENSELY different from the games, as the names would suggest "total conversion" "overhaul". But still they're from the community and stalker franchise has always been more about its community rather than it is about itself. It is a cult classic for a reason. we love GSC and how they pulled of an actual game of this size during wartime and we appreciate that. but that wont stop us from criticizing its design, shortcomings and all. Simply because we love them and critique is the best way to achieve growth. stalker modding is at an insane level and you could argue that it had already became part of the stalker franchise's identity as much as the book/movie are. today we are making comparions to bethesda ubisoft and various UE5 flops whilst we needed it to do it against metro or the mods and thats the main disappointment for me
A wonderful perspective, I agree. We can all be on GSC’s side and still think the game is lacking. The team has gone through a lot to get to this point, but the point can still be subpar. I personally would’ve loved to at least see some genuine ambitions, like the stuff we know from Oblivion Lost, all the big plans they had that couldn’t make it into the original ShoC. I don’t really see anything like that in S2, just a game that wants to appear like a STALKER game.
lets be honest , GAMMA spoil all of us
yeah, it was inevitable
Not really, i would argue that the game industry has neglected us.
nah, GAMMA is the worst of the anomaly/call of chernobyl mods. Too much bloat for what is essentially an 80+ gb collection modpack
Comments about Stalker2 looking bad are wrong. It looks good enough to make a great game. Sometimes it even looks awsome.
The problem are not in graphics, but in gameplay. The story is boring but clear sky and COP stories were dull too. The real issue is that the zone feels empty and you can travel anywhere , even at night, and never have to worry. It's lifeless, it's safe, so it removes the main aspect of the trilogy, that feeling of relief and joy when reaching the camps after a scary walk in the woods.
There is more minor issues (useless loot, too much supplies, too much cut scenes...) but the lack of danger and the emptiness are really annoying.
For me,most crucial was Alfie,in comparison with OG games, it's not 2.0, it's 0.2,zone just feels much worse than trilogy,so I stick with anomaly now,hope things will change
I just sent a link to this video to GSC. You hit the nail on the head! I started playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, got a little ways in, and then I just stopped playing, because it felt like something was missing. It wasn't drawing me in the way the original trilogy did. I couldn't place what it was, so I blamed it on A-Life being broken and decided not to return until they fixed it. That was back at launch. Then, I saw your video. Your comments on, and examples of, lighting and shadows hit me like a bolt to the forehead. THIS IS IT!!! Gods, I really hope they watch your video. I begged them.
This is what being in the GAMMA server does to your brain. I've got to strongly disagree with over 70% of the video. 3D PDAs, gas mask heavy breathing, crafting, oh god no. Thank the Monolith that none of that is in the game and that STALKER 2 is genuinely more STALKER. I guess you're disappointed because you wanted to be from the start.
I think it’s fairly obvious from the video I wanted S2 to be a great successor. Only GSC can give us an official continuation, a fresh story. But what’s actually on offer here? All I see is a pretty broken release that’s even missing things we had in the originals. And I’m not even a GAMMA player, I’ve built my own mod packs since Misery, I even list them all. I think we can expect more.
Agreed. It's moders vs old fans having different expectations.
It's okay to be retarded we get you buddy, not everybody has high standards. That's what fanboyism does to your brain.
@ Perhaps I came off with some hostility in my comment. That was not the intention, but I do want to stress that it's not a universal desire of fans to canonize misery, which is what I thought was fairly obvious that you were asking for. But for everyone? Not at all! I think Misery is pertinent to a specific minority, and good for you guys for it. But there's a reason Anomaly is divisive and at the core of the issue is that it did just that: canonize misery.
The "modders will make the game great" mindset is already pessimistic and often starts with insatisfaction with the base game before it is even fully played. I mentioned the GAMMA server because everyone there seemed to be perpetually disappointed with EVERYTHING about STALKER 2 even years before release, saying "mods will fix it" as consolation I suppose. This mindset then leads to very specifically tailoring the game to what you want with mods while thinking that everyone else wants the same thing. But please stop and think about the bigger picture.
I like that the base game is straightforward, bloat free, simple, and FULL of handcrafted content. I've probably played 400 hours at this point on different platforms and still can't get enough all of it vanilla still. But this strong yet simple foundation of a base game is what allows for mods to branch out. Sure, let misery come, let the CoCs, NLC7s, Gammas, Gunslingers, and all others do their thing. Let them branch out, but start with a simple yet strong base. It's been 15+ years of the OG games branching out into specific niches so give S2's community time to make special things of their own. In the meantime, embrace a positive attitude, and actually play STALKER 2, for that first playthrough try to see it for what it is, not what you want it to be. I assure you, just like one suffers more in imagination than in reality like Seneca said, many of our disappointments come from our prejudices.
Frankly ı can't agree. I didn't even like Gamma until ı started heavily modifying it myself and was (and still am) of those guys that kept screaming ''start with the OG trilogy vanilla first! don't even touch the mods before that!'' But Stalker 2 disappointed me by making my predictions true.
Before the game launched ı was thinking stuff like forced lumen shit is gonna kill performance making everything depend on DLSS and god awfull thing that is Frame Gen. Seamless open world is gonna make A-life basically impossible which we saw with A-life not being there at all. If it has the same amount of equipment, content, stuff as CoP it'll be too less and in turn actually cause a inverse bloat where you loot the same things over and over again wondering making late game problem of CoP where you don't even loot stashes, corpses etc. because you know you are going to get another sausage and bandages again instead of something new and exciting.
Stalker 2 feels bloated in a way that its wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle. There should've been more and they could've achieved it without copying mods either. There could've been weaponry boosted by artifacts that give it different propities giving more reasons to ''junk'' artifacts and lower tier weapons, maybe you could craft a cloak via bloodsucker skin or make a potion out of its meat that gives you temporary invisibility giving a reason for mutant hunting and a reward for defeating higher tier mutants. Because there aren't anything like this they made it artificially longer by making quests give you jack fucking shit in terms of money and making repairs super expensive with them being tied to the items value making it literally better to use Skif's Makarov for lesser zone and Garbage like wtf.
Worst though is the bugs and the performance. The whole ''its not a bug its an anomaly'' thing is only funny when a body is weirdly glicthing and levitating off the ground not when the game forces me to use the console command 5 times throughout my playthrough to continue playing. And as ı've said before DLSS and Frame Gen dependancy is horrible and even with those on the frame rate is trash and somehow even with those off you can get up to whooping 30MS of input latency ... in an FPS!
ıdk why ı ranted so much in some random comment, guess ı can't understand why am ı the only one who seems to not have enjoyed it at all making me wonder if somethings wrong with me or if I just have too high expectations or smth.
As a 40yo huge long time fan of Stalker, Metro and Fallout agreed 110%. Been playing Stalker 2 for a couple weeks now I find myself going back to GAMMA. While I do agree Stalker 2 shouldn't be Misery, Anomaly, or GAMMA it honestly feels more like True Stalker for those who don't understand it feels more like Far Cry or any generic open world action FPS.
It feels like Far Cry 2 which is a good thing.
It feels nothing like Far Cry 3 and the rest of the dumbed down sequels that followed.
Stalker 2 is the best single player shooter in years.
I thought I was crazy as a massive stalker fan having played all the games and Anomaly an ungodly amount when I saw the steam reviews and other reviews being so postive. I was so disappointed, I felt so down, I haven't felt like that since I was a kid. Happy to see that other fans of the series that others are feeling the same way. I tried to get into the game 3/4 times and I think it's just not going to happen :(
I feel you! I’m also just mainly disappointed with how it turned out, especially with those weird promises around A-Life, first they marketed it, then it disappeared from the website, then we got the excuses. We’ll have a home with the mod community for many years still, and maybe GSC will pull this barge around some day. Thanks for your comment!
This game is just like Fallout 4. Not actually a good "Stalker" game but instead dumbed down and well-marketed to increase the target market.
There are a lot of things to be disappointed about in Stalker 2 but you chose to compare the least disappointing one of them all, visuals. And cherry picking screenshots then showing them to prove it is just pathetic. Behind all those lens flare and bloom and billboard grasses cranked up to maximum density, Anomaly still looks like a DX9 title, Fallout 4 still looks like a barren land with grass stattered here and there. Any sane man who played the game would say Stalker 2 definitely looks way better than those two titles, might be a bit worse than Metro Last Light on the worst cases and way better than Metro Exodus in the best cases.
The game uses ray traced lighting which is why the rooms are way dark than it should be. Lighting and reflection is definitely broken due to the fact it is hardware lumen raytracing is broken so it falls back to software ray tracing, hence the poor performance and lighting. Typically light bounces around multiple times and more the bounces more accurate is the raytracing. Hardware raytracing can achieve a good balance by limiting number of rays emmited and number of bounces and let the denoiser fix it. But software raytracing is way slower so to get playable fps, number of rays emitted as well as bounces must be reduced drastically, resulting in blurry oil paintings in reflection and rooms being way darker than it should be. You can enable ray reconstruction by downloading the dll and pasting it in the stalker folder. It gives you an option ingame to enable it. But since its already limits the number of rays and bounces, the only improvement you will see is clearer blobs of reflection.
Flashlights can cast shadows but since lighting is broken they haven't implemented the raycasting flashlight. All other games mentioned in the video implemented fake shadows (except Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition where they went full raytracing) which you can enable in Stalker 2 as well with a mod which looks as fake as it does in the other games. As for lightings indoors, again lighting is broken but closed rooms are essentially pitch black. When you go inside the auto exposure correction goes overdrive to atleast let you see whats inside. Even nights are dark but auto exposures just increases the brightness to maintain the same brightness at all times. You can easily adjust the gamma to your preference and once its calibrated majority of the problem go away. Infact majority of the rooms are too dark even for flashlight and ideally if lighting was working as intended, point lights from lamps and other background sources would bounce multiple times to illuminate the room, where right now its only taking place once or twice.
Facial animation is same as all the other games, even Unreal 5 titles. In open world sandbox titles, you can't expect every single actor to be motion captured. They probably will implement neural faces when it becomes available but honestly I prefer the current animations over better animations in uncanny valley esque faces. What game is lacking is in other animations which are a bit stiff but it really didn't bother me a bit.
Otherwise I agree fully on the interface. I know its just a superficial review, but probably don't compare visuals by watching youtube videos. Stalker 2 has the problem of having too much detail on mundane items which they could have scaled down to have better performance. Stalker has a lot of problems in performance, optimization, bugginess, AI, economy, loots and balancing. But apart from raytraced lighting, its perfect in terms of visuals. Maybe wait a year before buying the game, if you want perfect visuals.
Oh, shut up. S2 has many problems, sure, I'm not going to deny that, but calling it a massive disappointment is an overstatement.
It is... Stop cope
Ever played story mods? Misery and freeplay are just a drop in the bucket when it comes to Stalker mods.
Also I may be disappointed by S2 as well, but that comparison with Anomaly is nonsensical. A landscape screenshot of a heavily modded Anomaly during sunset looks nice, but when you look closer you see it is ultimately a mod derived from a 2009 game with copious amounts of makeup applied to it. At 4:57 you can clearly see the low poly door with very pixelated textures. And you can see this everywhere. You've got shiny shaders and guns taken from CoD MW and whatnot, but then you have level geometry and character models with polygon count from a 2007 game. It's very ununiform, while S2 is visually consistent, even if it means having 4K textures on objects that don't need 4K textures.
Of course it’s a subjective thing, what you find appealing in a game could be special to you, some like the look of Terraria, I think it’s an ugly game. But for that part of the video, the point isn’t that Anomaly with specific mods “just looks better”, my question is, why does S2 look so horrible while even the original engine can be made to look great.
Not many, I’ve always leaned towards the free play ones. I tried a few that I don’t remember the names of, something with “story” in the title where you started in the cordon military checkpoint, like a prequel story. But besides that, it was Stalkersoup, CoC, Autumn Aurora, and from the ashes of Call of Misery, we got Anomaly I think.
Did you people forget about piracy? Just download the cracked game, try it out, then don't bother playing you don't like it, simple. No money wasted, it's your fault you keep paying the developers for shitty products. If you want things to change for the better, speak with you wallet, don't give a single cent ever.
I never played stalker, tried Stalker 2 and felt like a mix between a Ubisoft game and a Bethesda game, exactly what you said. So, what stalker should I play then? Anomaly? Stalker anomaly, is that it?
STALKER Anomaly is free, and in my opinion is one of the best routes to go if you're interested in the series. It combines assets and maps from all games.
Did I mention its free?
Well, I played Stalker 2 and I would say the game for me was far from disappointment. Sure I missed some mechanics, fancy animations and the graphics indeed could be better but the developers created A HUGE world full of interesting things to do. Totally agree with you regarding UE5. I feel like this engine doesn't provide developers with the full freedom and limits a lot of things they want to implement. I would much rather prefer if they develop / upgrade their good old x-ray :) Hope future game updates and modding can bring us what we both expected from Stalker 2! Thanks for the video, was interesting to listen to your feedback!
Thanks for your comment! It’s good you had a good time with it, totally fine. Let’s hope for some Cyberpunk/No Man’s Sky level update roadmap from GSC and see where they can take it.
Tell me one thing of that world FULL of interesting things.
Completely agree with your points Bro. They should've kept trying to improve it before release
Its mid af. New Vegas stomps
I’m gonna give them a pass because of the war. Most people forget that. Stalker 2 should need another year of polish but they didn’t get that.
Also Fallout 4? Eww….
ukropigs live in prague now , never saw war
The right course for GSC would’ve been to just not release the game in a state that doesn’t meet standards. We can all excuse delays but a release like this, cross-platform, at full price, not so much.
As always...leave it to the modders to fix their shit for free and make a better game.
What I would like to see in the game:
- Weapon disasemble & maintenance mechanics similar to Anomaly or Metro: Exodus
- A lot more modular wepon attachments like dual (short,long range) sights (In stalker 2, attachments don't come off on any unique weapons)
- A-Life actually working and AI improved
- The character in the game having personality and more difference in appearance
- Mutants having IQ > 0 and being deadly horrible creatures that will fuck your shit up
- The developers stoping to make the game a propaganda tool
Let’s hope GSC keeps at it and delivers more than just bug fixes, yeah.
… but after all: i enjoyed playing the game. It was truly the best singleplayer experience i had for a long time. I was so immersed not missing all the issues you mentioned. I didnt feel ANY need of change in the mechanics.
Agree. Complaining about the ui and how you open the map was confusing and not well explained why that was a issue and looks like a neat pick. Also I didn’t fell the graphics were bad or the animations(like something was missing). The only thing that I agreed was about the gas mask that could be more interesting but not having it doesn’t make that much difference but alife does.
Agreed.
These negative comments are weird and it's like they aren't playing the same game as me.
Easily the best single player open world shooter on console since Far Cry 2.
@@workhorse7134 The fact is that you people are weird. It's like you watched the video but were listening with your ass or something.
@@grimoireweiss5203 It's nothing more than propaganda. Because the devs are Ukrainian, NPCs will love it no matter what. If Russia never invaded Ukraine nobody would be glazing this game.
I think they can pull off a cyberpunk 2077
Let’s hope they can. STALKER is such a unique franchise, there’s a reason it has such a lively and persistent mod community. Even after 16 years of other games, people still love to play them, nothing has managed to take its place, not Fallout, not Metro, not EFT. I think what GSC has to pull off is closer to a No Man’s Sky than a Cyberpunk but let’s hope for the best.
Yea I’d say they can and will first just let them fix the broken stuff then hope for the best
I doubt it because Cyberpunk on release at least had a great story that you could enjoy if the game worked without gamebreaking bugs, and while I couldn't finish the Stalker 2 story because of performance, many people say it's shit compared to the games before it.
@@exoticdachoo007 Personally I liked the story more in Stalker 2 since it actually has a story.
Like the OG trilogy had some nice lore, but the story in itself never interested me much, very bland, very straight forward.
Cyberpunks bugs didnt really matter that much, the game was trash either way. The bugs were just cherry on top of shitcake.
I think you are being way too hard on Stalker 2. Stalker 2 can be enjoyed at leisure even on veteran difficulty. Stalker Anomaly takes hard work to enjoy. Stalker SoC is similar to Stalker 2 in that it is accessible. I get that there are flaws on release and soft-locking bugs, but these this are being worked through in patches and the community has made mods for performance. So I get that you are well versed in the Stalker Series, but why not just relax and enjoy the ride. Look man, I love Far Cry 2, but there is not going to be anything like it again and it has more sequels than I can count, and it's near impossible to mod. So just put Stalker 2 into perspective.
I appreciate your positive look. Seems we just have different taste in the games we enjoy and how we like to play them, what we like to see - that’s fine.
I pretty much agree with what you said in this video, obviously there are bugs and performance issues that better be addressed. But, I've been playing it for over 100 hours now, haven't completed it yet, and I don't wanna stop.
I agree that STALKER 2 has a lot of issues, I was salivating towards STALKER since 2003 demo releases.
But, fact is, its never gonna be anomaly or any other modded STALKER CoP. Its going to be STALKER.
Radiation in most modded CoP survival games are unrealistic, you aint gonna drop within a second walking into a radioactive field, thats not how this works. The guy in 1986 who literally walked into the room to check the exploded reactor lived for days before succumbing to his injuries.
I think GSC always had a good balance between reality and gamey mechanics.
The art style is also fine, STALKER was never a looker, it always was a drab looking world, the lighting and unreal issues are there yes I wont deny this, but the art style, is on point. In fact STALKER 2 does not even look like an unreal game, that's a good thing. Can they fix the lighting system? Of course, and they probably will go back to baked in light maps, as they have hinted towards such would give you 40 fps extra performance because nanite is awful.
But I do not get these other critiques because they are wishes for an entirely different game.
It's literally just more of what the original stalker games were. With no visual clutter, no inventory bloat, no "hardcore immersion' aka I breathe heavily in a gasmask and my pda isn't fullscreen etc. When was the last time you played the vanilla games? Almost the entire video is you wishing the game had what huge fundamental overhauls have (that you tailored to your liking on top of that). A lot of people bought it, a lot of people liked it, and the only people on the internet criticizing it for anything other than its optimization and some graphics features (which is valid and is hopefully eventually ironed out) are either russian bots, people who can't run it well so they lash out at everything they saw on youtube (lol), or people like you, who don't even want a stalker game but some other game built from its foundation.
Both the og games and its mods are deeply important to me and have heavily influenced my taste in games, and I have many things I like and dislike about their mechanics and visuals, I have played them religiously ever since I touched misery, but for crying out loud, did you enjoy the original trilogy because you were free of bias that came from tailored mod experiences that came out years later? That most people don't play and are a labor of love from the community that has countless layers purely because vanilla was made in the first place? Then we have a problem, because 5 years from now when stalker 2 gets all its new shiny and customizable mods you'll suddenly think it's a unique and gripping experience again, you like the idea of your perfect stalker, not the actual stalker the developers made. And outside of features that are missing from the originals, they did an outstanding job.
Do you wish for stalker to be something many people love and relate to? Then ask your girlfriend to play it, or your non-gamer friends, and then ask them to play misery or gamma. What will they like more: the focused and crystal clear story, the dangerous but traversable world (where you can actually see something at night without your flashlight), sprinkled with light rpg mechanics and small unique sidequests, on a hand-made map where nothing is ever the same, OR will they like the 300 different items you have to sort and track in your inventory, the oneshots from mutants, anomalies, random headshots, the constant visual filters and heavy breathing, and the infinite loop and tedium of the money grind on repetitive randomly generated missions and artifact selling just so they can afford to EAT, and worst of all, the insane amout of time it takes to start using a new gun.
I love mods, I love hardcore experiences where nothing is easy and I love making my game look gritty or vibrant with reshade, with overly dramatic hbao that makes every object in the game look like it has a personal photographer casting light on it, with dramatic color and contrast corrections, with bloom and lens flare, and wiping my mask every 20 seconds that removes a quarter of my peripheral vision. But stalker 2 is a game not for niche tarkov cbt autists like me, it's not about how depressing and scrappy it would actually be to live there, it's for everyone to experience and for all to see what the zone and its story is, which is why when I recommend to play the og trilogy to my friends I always ask them to play it as vanilla as possible/tolerable.
Having such rich history with stalker games for more than a decade now, I enjoyed s2 thoroughly, despite its numerous flaws and terrible optimization. I genuinely do not understand how a fan of the original games can not enjoy stalker 2 if they look past its broken and unfinished state and I hope this wall of text conveys my discontent with your point of view (and half of the gamma discord frankly) clearly enough
Bruh ... the video was mostly about the visuals with even the whole gasmask, interface etc. thing being at most 1/3 of what the video talked about. You kinda went on a unrelated tangent here talking about so many other things. The comment also comes off a accusotary and combative with lots of ''you'' and even stuff like ''Then we have a problem'' so much so that it feels less like a criticique or a reason why you actually prefer this to straight up trying to pick a fight with the video's maker.
@noobguy9973 and my comment is mostly about the gameplay and mechanics, why is that a problem? Also yes, it is accusatory and combative, if he can criticize devs for not putting a gasmask animation into the game as a genuine argument against its design then I can accuse him of having a weird and outlandish opinion.
I'm passionate about these games and I wish its community would stop dogging on the devs for doing the same thing the old games were doing. And it's an incredibly recognizable pattern in anomaly/gamma fans (me being one of them), which I'll remind again, are not official games, and their whole point is to NOT be the same as vanilla, but to be a treat for the hardcore fans
@@noobguy9973it’s disingenuous to write off the entire work of a dev team because of small trivial features like no pda or gas mask huds especially when other parts of the game are very well made such as the map and branching paths in the story.
I've got to agree. As a hardcore fan of the originals, since childhood and then mods, etc... i was one of the first to scream top of my lungs when i saw first trailer for stalker 2. I am from Georgia, Eastern europe and i want to state that basically original stalker was a phenomenon in all the ex USSR countries, same as half life was for the west. It was revolutionary. AI, the graphics that hold on even today with amazing textures and lighting effects and general atmosphere that was not that strange and foreign for us. I saw same architecture, buildings, landmarks that basically i could see outside my window but it was different.. broken.. like a parallel reality and that was why milions of people on this side of earth loved these games. Hell even my father who is 50 already and never touched a videogame in his life LOVED these games and has probably over 4000 hours at this point because they are all he has palyed for like 10 years.
BUT! When i launched the game and first few hours were pretty amazing, it became stale really quickly. The world is huge (that is not a bad thing) but it is like 60% same looking. same trees, grass, bushes, cliffs... few interesting lcoations but mainly all the same looking factories with really small distinction. I know its going for the realism, i get it but Art style was swept away basically. all of the game lacks character. how to explain it... Like in original trilogy, the specific locations had specific character to them. Because of the map is smaller and you are going through same locations couple of times during a in game day for example, you know approximately what to expect at what location. Which one may be scary - horror fest, (for example cement factory on the Jupiter map always gave me chills, even looking at it from far away throught the sniper scope ) because mutants tend to lair there. so you are already tense while approaching it 10th time because A life is amazing and you never which of many scary things can be there. Or which locations will be good to visit because bandits usually stay there and you can grab some loot or have a quick sweet shootout. i don't know if i explained this enough for you to understand what i mean. Basically because of A life and smaller map, the locations are more distinguished, familiar and have character. and you know what type of atmosphere you are stepping into on in each and every one of them. Also i agree that areas are more interesting because they have visually distinct style. In S2, except for prypiat and swamps area, the map i roamed and explored is like 70-80% copy-paste bushes and trees. They are similar looking. have no character. nothing distinguishes area you ran from 10 minutes ago, from the one you are now after running like freaking MILES. ART style should be a priority, not the photorealistic graphics.
Plus optimisation issues, ( on my rtx 4070 ti super and i9 14900kf the game can't run 1440p above 60-80 fps on high without crap DLSS and crappy upscalers that have their miriad of visual artefacts and destroy visuals while moving. and you would think my system is a beast) I know its the devs, not the engine itself that are to blame, but honestly i would prefer if they went with remade X ray engine 2.0 or something similar to retain some of the characteristics the visuals of original games had.
And i won't even go into all the small details regarding the - A life system, which is literally non existent.That was what made the games heart basically, so to speak. And couple of hours in, i noticed that enemies literally just spawned behind my FOV liek 30 meters and isntantly went aggro. They later patched this and made the radius of their spawns bigger and called it A life and called it a day... Shame, especially considering the features that the original games had.
JUST TO NAME A FEW: The world was truly alive around you. You could stand around and do nothing and witness tons of things happen around you, LIVE in real time. Firefights, AI enemies actually moving around the map and acting like a squad, flanking, camping, sneaking up on you from behind, ( had milions of funny jumpscares because of that, when they shot you the moment you turned around and AI registered they have been seen XD ) falling back and USING ACTUAL COVER if enemy had sniper or long range weapon, Switching WEAPONS AND AMMO TYPES DEPENDING WHAT ENEMY THEY FOUGHT, and distance they fought at.
Mutants feeding animations, dragging bodies of their prey to more secure location to feed, AI stalkers talking, bantering, dynamically moving around the map, not just from point A to point B, looting and CHANGING WEAPONS if they found that they were better on the dead body than what they had already equipped. i can continue for a looooong time but you get the picture.
And all these features WERE IN THE ORIGINAL VANILLA TRILOGY... let me make it clear !!! so all the "You've played too many mods and have too high expectations" people don't just jump on the hate train in the comments.
i'm NOT going into how the modders basically made one of the best things ever in video game history which is Gamma/anomaly/EFP, ETC. so yeah, i agree with almost everything you've said in the video. And i really do hope that GSC Game World can really put their shit together and patch the hell out of this game and add features, A life ETC. and trully make it worth the legacy originals had and MODS have KEPT from dying and dissapearing into the obscurity for all these years.
P.S. I hope the devs are thankfull for the modders since it was them who basically updated the games and made them hit mainstream in the western countries and kept them alive.
Absolutely, thanks for sharing your perspective! Even ignoring all the fantastic games and mods of the last 16 years, just putting Call of Pripyat against S2, the contrast is immense. The vision of the Zone back then seemed to be a world that feasibly exists _without you,_ a place with a life of its own. The memes used to be how STALKER was a hardcore series, uniquely immersive, with a punishing difficulty - somehow, that eroded with the release of S2.
Georgia is in Asia not Europe.
@@ia285 Bruh Our culture, traditions and mindset is like 90% more EU and western oriented and have almost nothing in common with asia. All of the georgians are going to tell you we are on the edge of eastern europe.
@@sandroedilashvili3651 geographically most of Georgia is in Asia, like 97%. Most of the population lives in the Asian part.
Genetically Georgians are closer to even Iranians than to Ukrainians or Romanians.
Culturally Georgians are distinct but have more in common with other Kavkazis followed by other North West Asians. The only thing "European" about Georgians is that they follow Christianity like Europe. But then again Armenia is also Christian but doesn't larp as European the way Georgians do.
Bruh i am Georgian. I literally live in a capital. Why are you lecturing me on the things about my people and MY country? that you, as it appears have got no freaking idea about except some wikipedia page copy pastes. what are you proving here? wtf
It's the world itself I started to find disappointing. Even after the patches it feels lifeless compared to the originals. Most places look the same, there's less enemy variety, less AI variety, more shallow NPC interactions. Aside from the larger map and graphics it doesn't feel like a step forward.
Anomaly is a Tarkov knockoff that completely ruins the atmosphere of the zone. It's a game for Twitch streamers more than fans of the Stalker games.
All graphics mods look like graphics mods, because if they had professional art direction, they would be games.
The attention to detail to the environments in stalker 2 is astonishing.
I think GSC is willing to support this game for years with new DLCs etc. I don't agree with you on visuals at all though. Visuals are magnificent to me, especially storm moments. Never ever seen Storm implemented like that in any game.
Only problem with visuals is rendering capabilities, upscaling and performance issues as well as UE5 strange rendering pipeline. If you have supercomputer and would just like to assess graphics and immersion of the world Stalker 2 is 10/10 for me.
Now there are things that I dislike, like characters not wearing a mask most of the times so we see how generic they are.
Some animations as well as NPC combat .
Further believe it or not, I've found parkouring in stalker 2 to be quite engaging and fun. Maybe significant mods can create obby like maps or some stuff like that :D
I appreciate your input, I generally want to be optimistic about the game’s lifetime, too, I tried to formulate this careful hopefulness with the end of the video. Right now, GSC seem to be focussed entirely on game-breaking bugs and performance but maybe they’re moving to more substantial changes after that.
As a Stalker fan, if that game was not so bad optimized (I have a 4050, I could play high 60 fps, but due to 6gb I got lags in 1-2 hours of playing) and If A-life was ALIVE
Gameplay in burned forest was horrible. Any 15 meters- new group of enemies. That’s why it is 7/10, could be 9/10
If that game don’t have that stalker atmosphere and almost perfect exploration and stashes, it would be like, 5/10
It absolutely uses ray traced lighting. That's exactly why the interiors are so dark. It's also a big part of the reason that there are performance issues, because you can't turn off the ray tracing.
Plot of the game so far- walk 500m talk to that guy , then go 2km talk to that guy , then go 1km talk to the other guy
1. The visuals need improvement.
2. The ai needs to be overhauled. A lot things that the old ai used to do, such as mutants eating bodies, simply doesn't occur anymore.
3. The fanboys seriously need to calm the fuck down. I don't think it's a good thing that this is basically a 2007 game with a 2024 coat of paint. If we want the gaming industry to be revitalized and not remain in the current slump it's in, then we need to demand that developers implement new ideas and give us new things to do. They don't need to completely change the game, but they need to build upon what's already there.
I'm not saying Stalker 2 is a bad game, but it can be a lot more than it is.
im working on a overhaul, my heart was stolen by misery too brother
Beautifully said, brother. Did you also love the radio music that always played at Skadovsk and Yanov? That became my favourite part after a while when I first played it. Little piece of home.
I knew I was going to hate it so I wish listed it and hope for the best. Dying Light 2 let me down. Starfield was a massive disappointment. There is little innovation these days in the AAA scene.
Yeah, I see a lack of direction, creative vision, and ultimately polish. I wonder what their game design document had, if it was actually ambitious and they just failed to realise it or if you could read it and it’d sound just like something out of Ubisoft.
i am getting tired of youtubers who have absolutely no idea how Unreal engine 5 works, make videos on this topic for clicks
UE5 is just a blank canvas you can paint anything you want on it, it's all on the devs, not ue5
You can modify it, rewrite it's source code, add any system of function you want to it
Look at The Finals using UE5, one of the most optimized and good looking shooters ever made, i have 140+ fps on max settings at 1440p using rtx 3070 there, and even when everything around you destructs you have 0 stutters, because devs know what they are doing
I’m saying I’m disappointed, not that UE5 is a bad engine. The disappointment comes from trailers that look incredible, UE demos that promise the world, and then a notable number of releases having major problems. I’ve seen many UE tech demos and showcases and it’s impressive work, I’m all for progressing dev tooling. I’m just highlighting this disconnect between what’s promised and what’s delivered. If we have to agree that it’s all on the devs, that’s fine.
@@SaintJulesDay the guy is full of shit, the finals having 140 fps on max at 1440p is main menu benchmark
UE5 sucks.
UE5 provides cheap, fast and easy solutions (Lumen and Nanite for example) and studio executives WILL made devs use them. We can see this in almost all UE5 games with only few exeptions :(
I have a few things to say as someone who has the game. Someone with a 4070ti and high end cpu / hardware.
First of all i had no issue running the game for the most part on first few weeks. I had maybe a few moments of memory leak but sadly i expect this from every company now.
Secondly the game is stunning to play. I don't know who you were watching but it is possible they had issue with rendering during the uploading of their content. Ultra and high graphics are amazing. I feel immersed. I really love it. A good video to watch does comparisons: ruclips.net/video/IxA-wzay1mw/видео.html&lc=UgwiU7ewCCqdHAVnxjt4AaABAg.
I think the Ui is whatever, simplistic, informative it gets the job done. I think you get a geiger counter when you get irradiated as well to show when you are being irradiated. Also its just good game design and feedback to the player to be like "hey man, get the fuck out of the radiation ridden swamp". In regards to the pda. You mentioned anomoly as a comparison for good pda usage. the vanilla titles never implemented this. This was just something the mods picked up. I hope however its gets picked up by modders in stalker 2.
All in all this comes off as nit picking at things, from my perspective of this video you haven't played the game? You kept showing other people's videos so i assumed you took a stance to not play the game. In your closing you mention what makes a great game for stalker,
appealing and interconnected mechanics - the radiation and hunger impacting player movement and vision (i could go on)
meanigful player engagement (my assumption is you mean how the player reacts to the world around them) - alot of stalkers will treat you as untrustworthy , sometimes even telling you to "fuck off", the anomalies impact vision and other senses depending on the type
Deep narrative writing - the deep narrative is there but to explain it would ruin the story, what your stance is on the zone. What do you think of the zone, who do you side with? who is using you? who isn't?
I love Gamma, I like SoC, but i really fuckin like stalker 2. It ticks all the boxes. it needs work on a-life and i think there are still memory leak issues. Its doing a great job, and the updates are insane.
Some stuff S2:HoC needs: portable repair items that can be used in the field, headshot multiplier damage for all enemies, ability to harvest mutant parts just like the old days, functional sights on grenade launchers, make the M26 underslung shotgun straight-pull bolt-action, make the M26 able to use all shotgun ammo types, give the M26 the same damage and range stats as the sawed-off, boost M26 mag capacity to five rounds, boost the pump shotgun's mag capacity to eight rounds (seven in the tube plus one in the chamber) since it has a 20" barrel with a flush-fit mag tube, and bring back the ability to "dodge" pseudogiant pseudostomps with perfectly-timed jumps just like you could do in S:SoC.
Edit/Note: And A-life! Gotta have A-life!
12:25 That gas mask is set up in left-handed configuration.
What I want immediately is a HUD toggle, cigs, and more places to sit.
Everything else will come in time.
Funny that there is a single torch in the entire Skyrim that casts shadows while the rest of the torches don't.
So maybe they will add a flashlight that casts shadows in a dlc, but you will have to find it in a cave.
The lighting seems to be focused around HDR and it looks much better with it. Also increasing GI to the maximum level (which steals half FPS) improves visuals considerably. Even on High level it looks better than previous parts of Stalker. The lack of glow from fireplaces can be explained too - increasing reflectivity of surfaces plus HDR would prevent us from using flashlight almost entirely.
saw your comment on the ai comparison video, totally agree with all your talking points. S2 is so half baked when compared to the earlier games systems. not just the AI, but the inventory (holding f1 and f2 down to use your secondary quick access item is stupid), and the way mutants were integrated into the game. love the comparison you made about F.E.A.R. too. two masterclasses at turning the uninteresting into something very interesting.
Sweet that you found your way over, welcome to the channel!
It lacks the darkness of the originals, looks too pretty and not enough grit
The story wasn't bad but it feels unfinished or rushed, a lot of fan service but no deepening of the lore and I don't like the retcons
dude this video is so underrated, you need more subs
Glad you enjoyed it, Jassx!
As long as people keep buying modern games, the focus will forever be trailers, advertisements and graphics rather than gameplay
don't waste your time playing stalker 2 !
Im both a Fallout and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. veteran my two favourite franchise and its so sad that the newer games are a flop. Another unfortunate similarity is a cult like fan base both the Todd cult of the bugthesda Fallout fanficts and now the Stalker 2 ones seems like they cant accept any criticism of the games. Bethesdrones allways yapp and hate on about the OG(Fallout 1, 2) and NV "elitists" while now the stalker fans would like to gut anyone who dares to mention that Anomaly (a free mod by modder fans by the way) did something better thatn S2. I just want good games that are like the originals I fell in love so many years ago(at least S2 looks and feels like the originals unlike "Fallout" 4/76) and defending unworthy lazy developers who makes slop "sequels" are the death of the gaming industry! It being an "industry" is a big source of the problems of course but lets not start that conversation now...
Thanks for the video!
I was also surprised by some of the reactions, it seems to have split the community a bit.
I think it really comes down to wanting innovation over re-releases and simplified look-alikes. Fallout 4 also more wore the skin of a Fallout game than it actually was one at heart, but it still dared to try stuff like base building and an official survival/hardcore mode. We’ve seen the Ubisoft open world formula that’s just a casual shooter with some minor gimmicks a thousand times now. I could just reinstall Far Cry 5 if I wanted just that. Meanwhile, STALKER has all this immense potential for interesting and unique gameplay and yet they use almost none of that.
@@SaintJulesDay The worst thing is that there are thousands of mods not to mention mod collections like GAMMA they could easily be insipred but they choose not to!
Can people stop blaming Unreal please? It's a tool. Its like blaming a pen for mediocre novel or drawing. Unreal can exceed in everything, but doesn't do it automatically, including graphical fidelity, or AI of animation or game play and so on.
The game was cracked 15 minutes after release so I downloaded that (sorry for not supporting the devs but $60 or more was too unaffordable to me), and I have to say I was dissapointing, not just because of the gameplay, but also the optimisation, the story intrigues me and I want to play more, but I can’t if the game runs like hot garbage on a potato after 15 minutes of playing, and gameplay is straight up bland, didn’t like the gunplay, mutants are too strong (fixed with a mod), it just wasn’t what I wanted from a “Stalker game” and I expected it, but I used to think it could change, I later dug deeper on the Eastern side of the community and look for the leaked version, played the 2021 build and guess what? It’s almost the same, it made me disappointed even more
Welcome to the channel, Lynn! Yeah, I think it’s the opposite angle this time compared to when STALKER was still called Oblivion Lost. Back then, they iterated over wildly different concepts and eventually evolved into the games we know. Ambitions were sky high (fully autonomous NPC AI that can also do quests, drivable vehicles, branching story) but they had to trim it to ever get to release. With S2, it seems to be the usual MVP approach, what’s the minimum that still qualifies as a game, that’s what I see.
I didnt like stalker 2 now I really don't like it. Well done
I'm sorry, but the landscape under the overcast sky is supposed to look bleak and flat just because that's how the light works.
And also because of how the light works, you're not supposed to see the grass shadow while having the sun behind your back (4:18)
So I'd be rather interested to see the comparisons for identical or similar lighting conditions because those you've shown tell almost nothing to me.
To be fair Stalker 2 does use a form of ray tracing (Lumen) but it's running in software only. Case in point puddles use a combination of screen space reflections with lumen reflections as a fallback. Those blobs the game fall back on is the simplified game works rays are traced against for both diffuse and specular lighting.
Since it's software only the internal resolution is very low, prone to firefly artifacting, temporal smear, light leakage and limited light bounces to name a few. The overall asset quality is high but the lighting breaks too often for the game to look good.
Hardware Lumen could allow for more accurate lighting. Unfortunately hardware Lumen has a higher upfront performance cost. In its current unoptimized state there's probably not enough performance headroom, even with the latest PC hardware, upscaling and frame generation technologies.
Thanks for your technical comment, I really appreciate it! I presume GSC originally wanted to go all in on everything UE5 had to offer at the time and as release rolled closer (despite multiple delays), they never switched to a suitable alternative that would fit their hardware budget. With static environments, they could’ve gone with something like The Division, baked lighting for various times of day, and some nice screen-space or planar reflections. There are so many good and proven options out there. But to pick the mix they picked and have campfires, puddles, the flashlight look like that, that’s just rough. And I didn’t even get into the overall performance in my video.
Im tired of sequels realeasing with less content than the original, stalker 2 has less guns ,mutants,human enemies nothing new just slop
After 77 hours, im pausing my playthrough. it's just repetitive and boring... i was initially enjoying the hell out of it, but something just clicked that it was not the game we wanted.
I mean, the problem of the game is that it's so big. They couldn't make all the cool stuff because the project itself is massive, and because of other problems too.
But the core and the atmosphere are great already. They just need to add more lacking content and optimize it a bit.
I honestly completely agree with you. I'm 70+h in and haven't completed the main story, I enjoyed every second of it but still think a shorter, more focused experience would have been better.
Honestly i love stalker 2. It has the stalker feel and its definitely a success for their studio. Anyone who disagrees is either a call of duty movement demon requiring constant action or just a random ass guy who did a few missions and decided that the game is too hard.
I really wonder why you have to append that whole “anyone who disagrees”. If you love the game, that’s completely fine. Why do you also have to repose it as if it’s _the one right way_ to think about it?
All that with the shittiest optimization ever
Ive said this 7 years ago and i will say it again. when Black ops 4 got introduced to the scene i knew the gaming industry would crush down and gaming industries would just have Money in mind and not make games for fun. This occurred to because CoD one of the best Multiplayer games back then started to do all this futuristic stuff but the singleplayer campaigns were so bad i cant even remember the intro of it right now.And as years passed by and new highly anticipated games came i knew i was right. Nowadays its all about hyping the game up,making it almost uninstallable if you dont have 23 gazzilion zettabytes of disk space which i dont even have an idea where all this stuff goes to.And dont let me start on the optimisation of games,its like the companies dont care at all for it. No game that came out after 2020 was or will be what everyone anticipates. to end it all, Dying Light 2... after all these Updates these years the game feels like dogcrap.. they couldnt even get the ragdolls right and had these stupid premade animations the zombies do everytime you hit them its ridicilous. but yeah.My rant here is over if anyone read this fully.
Shooting your pistol doesn't light up the wall with its muzzle flash in a dark environment on max settings short of enabling Ray tracing features, 7900xtx...
The awful pop-in in the opening area, where you take control of the character: you look towards the anomalies... As you walk closer, things start to pop-in...
These were the first two experiences for me, and that's where I hit quit.
I'll check back after a few more patches.
And yes, the shadows from the flash light... That too was missing...
ZERO immersion. Stalker is all about immersion.
9:14 good vid but a few points
1.) Im kinda iffy on comparing open world games to linear ones that allow for more graphic fidelity even though i agree lack of casting shadows was just a dev choice
2.) At 9:06 they over used alot of this sort of static facial animation as a result of it being a dynamic system in alot of areas yes but its not a fair comparison to compare the open world dynamic lipsync with hand keyed animation for story cutscenes in other games, you shoul;d of compared one of the MANY scenes in Stalker 2 with mocap.
Thankyou so much for adressing the UI, the shift to boring black boxes from its incredible design of the orignals.
Best review I have seen yet. I think the description of stalker 2 as an assassins creed looking and feeling game is very on point. And why is nobody talking about the colors that they are using for the compas and hud. The yellow and blue is soooo off, it does not fit to the setting at all. Moreover, their curency looks like a cyperpunk currency.
I completely agree with you. I pre-ordered the most expensive version of the game, played all the older games a long time ago, and also played Anomaly. I played STALKER 2 for about two weeks. The first 3-4 hours were amazing, but later it felt like Cyberpunk at release. You see so much potential, but the game itself feels lifeless, with zero soul. I played STALKER 2 with about 30 mods. Nearly all weapons you find are broken, but why don’t they jam in NPCs’ hands? You cannot sell broken weapons? No random side quests? I still haven’t heard any campfire stories. Usually, when I arrive, all the NPCs leave the campfire. Radiation is just for show. The day-night cycle is terrible. Performance is awful, and I played on an RTX 4090. So for now, I’ve just left the game until they finish it. The biggest immersion breaker for me was the British accent in the Eastern European Chernobyl zone. It’s just funny to play and hear NPCs cursing in gunfights with a British accent. I understand why they did it, but it is just immersion-breaking.
One of the less mentioned issues that I encountered was in relation to Ukraine's Soviet past. Due to the war GSC basically removed anything that could be associated with the USSR and specifically Russia (for example the signage in the world has been changed to Ukrainian language). This is terribly immersion and lore breaking. It feels like a STALKER skin suit more than anything. What a shame.
Something that nobody is talking about is how much retconing S2 does that ruin the lore. The map, artifact and characters have been completely changed.
Dude, regarding the vegetation, it seems to me that they removed it on purpose, because if it had been added like an anomaly, the game would not have launched at more than 30 fps, which is obvious
Finally someone with some common sense stalker 2 is NOT a good game. It’s missing so much and the devs literally lied about a life 2.0. And still 3 months after launch we have yet to receive major updates to the ai. This game sucks. They stole our money and ran off with it and I’ll stick to that till I get real a life because I refuse to play this game without proper ai.
I really liked that STALKER 2 UI and gameplay feels more smooth and polished, less jank than that feeling the OG games have, even though I like those too. Plus, the fact that it even got released is cool, given world events and all. On the other hand, I really dislike how UE5 games often end up as demanding and unoptimized messes. I know, I know, you can use the engine well if you put in enough effort... except like 80% of devs out there don't seem to and whereas previously you'd get games that both look and amazing and play well (from Doom 3 to the newer Doom games, honestly one of the best examples), now you basically just need framegen and a beefy GPU.
Amen brother. This is exactly why I want to bring back the Fallout feeling to Fallout 4. So far I'm doing well according to the reviews of my mod users.
You mentioned your mods for STALKER. What mods, where? I would like to know, because as I see it, you have a reasonable opinion on things and not because I fully agree with you but because this is reality.
If they were honest and released it in EA I’d of happily spent the money.
yeah they ruin nights I can't get it dark enough anymore, it happens in many games cause ppl complain" i cant see anything" but i get it the lighting sucks, Metro Exodus was so good
I think for me after nearly 70 hours in STALKER 2, I really wish we got the 2012 version that never got to see the light of day. Not to say what we got doesn't have potential, but in it's purest form, it isn't STALKER the same way the trilogy was, and ideally what 2012 STALKER 2 was going to be.
STALKER 2 is more akin to a soft reboot than a true successor to the original trilogy. It has shifted some from the original culture of it. Despair, hopelessness, maybe. But exploring, and perseverance through grit in light of that scary dark world is what the original STALKER was about. For purpose, and ultimately above all, self-reflection and carving your role and name into the zone, regardless of whether or not you were recognized for it. A reflection, maybe, of the environment GSC originally found themselves in through a post-soviet society and its collapse in the 90's. It was grim, the collapse led to a lot of economic struggle, government corruption, increases in the crime rate, and other bullshit... sound familiar? But there was a longing to push through in spite of that. Whether or not the story beats in the original trilogy wholly reverberate this idea is up in the air... for all we know, they also just did it because it's cool as shit. And I wouldn't blame them, that's how you should make something you're passionate about in the first place. But in that regard, one difference being, STALKER 2 does not reflect the what became the original's idea as much. Whether or not it's due to the new publishers, Microsoft's involvement, or the politics of the Russo-Ukrainian war, I'm uncertain. Probably a mix of all of them. Regardless, it has all no doubt affected the development of the game in some way. And this all happened midway through that, is the thing. Because of that, STALKER 2 is something that struggles a bit to find its identity, in my opinion. Not that it doesn't have one, but it is most certainly not the exact same one the original STALKER had.
In it's struggling emphasis on immersion and graphical fidelity, it lost features like A-Life, complex group and individual enemy AI, expanded mutant variety (planned in 2011), performance (ffs I have a 4080 and I don't get past 30 in settlements without framegen, that should not be a fucking standard for something you can run and you know it), and so much more. And the artstyle especially, it just doesn't have that same... eastern European GRUNGE. I largely dislike how I can even see the eyes of stalkers wearing gas masks, it feels wrong, I shouldn't be able to see their eyes. It's not unsettling enough. I feel like I'm not supposed to know. The textures are almost smoother. I dislike how the grass basically all looks the same everywhere compared to E3 2021 trailers, the use of color looks nothing like even the that build of the game which, so many argue "pre-rendered"... but like, why then? If it sacrificed so much of that identity in doing so. Yeah, you can argue STALKER 2 still has those themes, like oh you go around with a gun shooting stuff up for coupons, but its parts of its attitude in writing and most certainly its art direction do not reflect it. Me personally, despite being a relatively new fan of the STALKER series compared to many, am not new to 2000's game jank. I myself don't really care as much about the teleporting items, the lack of smooth animations. Not they wouldn't be NICE, of course, but that's not what those games were about, and that's not what the original STALKER trilogy was about. It was about you, a stalker, in the zone, afraid and exploring it for the first time. I want an expansion on that. I want a spooky zone that challenged what I knew without straying from that original formula, and for it to visually reflect that without a need for rtx-slop. You want le cool animations and graphics from a game during its time, go play Crysis. You want the gameplay equivalent of molten lead poured down your urethra, go play GAMMA or Tarkov.
Basically, this is why it's just confusing to me that people are completely satisfied with this game, long-time fans especially. It is "STALKER", yes, but only in essence. Its identity changed, its artstyle... "changed", and even some numerous staple features are now missing, all those changes without somehow deeply changing the central gameplay loop all that much making a somewhat disconnected feeling game. I don't have that "new and scary" feeling I'm looking for, where I did with the trilogy. If you want to argue with me on anything, that is the most important thing here. The merit it has in light of that though are its completely open world, emphasis on exploration (a lot of locations are interesting and unique in how you come across them and are meant to interact with them), streamlined gameplay, and somewhat QoL features compared to the trilogy. It's not a bad game per se, but it's not completely STALKER. I'm not asking for mil-sim tacti-slop stuff, I'm not asking for constant inventory management, I'm not asking for ball-crushing difficulty, and I'm ESPECIALLY not asking for ray-tracing, super detailed animations a la Cyberpunk or TLOU. I'm asking for an emphasis and expansion on the original IDEA and IDENTITY of the original games through its own original features and art direction, and it just only sort of does that. 5 new anomalies and the super anomalies, a sizeable expansion on the guns, and a somewhat more engaging story... good, awesome! But only 2 new mutants? New factions that my character doesn't give a shit about because he just wants to go home and fix his apartment? Why all these new guns if all I'm shooting is comparably less advanced AI? It's like akin to Minecraft modpacks where they have all this new shit but the same 7 hostile overworld mobs. The fuck?
It's... decent, it's good, overall, if I was just looking at it by itself. But the fact it only kind of did it with sacrifices in other regards from where it came from is somehow just so much more bothersome than if it just failed in all those aspects. At least then, I could just go "it sucks" and move on. But I can't do that, because I know it's there, and it's painful. At least, all we can do now is wait until GSC amends these, or they release the modding toolkits, and modders fix those parts for us. I might just even consider doing some myself, honestly. In the meantime I'll just mostly be playing Old World Redux. If you want a version of Stalker with Anomaly's bigger zone, but closer to the OG games mechanically, play that, you won't regret it.
One game that I'm, comparing it with is the upcoming KCD2. KCD2 has better visuals, less strain on the the CPU, better LODs. The NPC's also have a life of there own and more interactivity. Just shows how much better Cry engine is vs UE5
We don’t get many new games released using Cry Engine, it’s gonna be interesting to see how it turns out. Kingdom Come has a pretty big scope, it’s not easy to pull off something that looks and performs well like that.
Unreal Engine is no longer a game engine. The stunning amounts of detail everyone likes to try and reach is simply funny, how are they expecting the game to run well when there's so much detail everywhere and everything is so demanding at all times on your hardware that even the vanguard of hardware struggles with it.
I don't hate STALKER 2, I don't think it's a bad game, but coming of off something like Anomaly it's a huge let down when I can achieve the same gameplay, visual fidelity and immersion in a community made mod based on trial and error
i was so disappointed by the art style in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. i played the original trio for the first time about a year ago and thought they looked awesome despite their age, the SEVA suit especially looked super badass with its mirrored one-way visor and just the general shape of it. now it looks like a generic space suit from Starfield or something. i want games with less emphasis on the graphical fidelity, and more emphasis on good lighting and art style. Elden Ring kinda looks kinda rough when you stop to zoom in on textures, but the art style and lighting make the game look absolutely gorgeous despite that.