I’m a massive Stalker fan, and the state of the game pains me. What they have is so good. The world is beautiful and immaculately designed, the vibe and the atmosphere is all there. The guns feel good. The story is good so far with interesting characters and good performances (at least in Ukrainian) and the animations and presentation in main story dialogue quests has been good and immersive. Not cyberpunk levels maybe but good and a huge step up from previous games.
But man, there is so much that reeks of unfinished and half-done. They likely would have needed another year at least but I think they just ran out of money. It also looks like being forced to comply with console parity for the Xbox meant they couldn’t get performance under control and had to rip out A-life (or abandon it when it was clear it wouldn’t work on Xbox).
With how great the good parts are it pains me doubly.
The other interview did suggest consoles are the problem. It’s wild to me that real developers are putting effort into those things, literally no one owns a PS5 still and the xbox is basically worthless. They’d have a better excuse to put stalker onto the switch than those ancient relics. Hopefully they get abandoned soon and the developers put all their effort where it matters.
Console should stop running a proprietary OS that needs a special SDK to develop on.
Take the Steam route : use Linux with their flavor on it. Makes life easier for devs, more games can run on your console and we get (hopefully) better optimized games
The ai isn’t the biggest problem IMO, it’s the balancing of things. Even many easy early-game enemies are absolute bullet sponges and can kill you in 3-4 hits. The whole game right now is just finding ways to cheese every encounter, which doesn’t feel good.
And both buying stuff and repairing things is so ridiculously expensive that it’s impossible to keep up.
It feels like they didn’t do much playtesting of the actual game at all, more like they tested specific things in exclusivity.
Yeah I had to install like a dozen mods to attempt to even remotely address things, but it’s clear from a myriad examples that there was basically no QA testing done. From the bugs, to the fucked up balance to stuff like the day/night cycle being 1 hour realtime for a full 24h in game (!!!) there are just so many things that would have been brought up hour one of testing.
Even for games with fast timescales that is insanely fast. You barely have time to take in the environment and scenery before weather changes and the sun goes down or rises again. You can start a gunfight in the morning and finish after nightfall. For a game that lives and dies by immersion it completely pulls you out - at least it does me.
Witcher 3 had 96 minute days, which felt fine for that game. Any game I play for immersion usually ends up needing a mod though because timescales are often a problem. RDR2 shouldn’t have 48 minute days either, that one was even worse than Stalker 2.
If you play slowly and focus on immersion - and the game has survival mechanics - I find somewhere between 4-6 hour days to be perfect.
1.01 rebalanced the game significantly. Repairs are way cheaper, every payout is doubled or more, prices have been adjusted. Human enemies take just a few rounds to kill, even mutants have had their HP reduced, while the player’s armor has been buffed and the degradation of weapons and armor is now much lower so you’re repairing less.
I watched someone play a little and the open zones almost made me go buy it immediately, but yeah I’m holding off until they’ve got the ai working.
I’m a massive Stalker fan, and the state of the game pains me. What they have is so good. The world is beautiful and immaculately designed, the vibe and the atmosphere is all there. The guns feel good. The story is good so far with interesting characters and good performances (at least in Ukrainian) and the animations and presentation in main story dialogue quests has been good and immersive. Not cyberpunk levels maybe but good and a huge step up from previous games.
But man, there is so much that reeks of unfinished and half-done. They likely would have needed another year at least but I think they just ran out of money. It also looks like being forced to comply with console parity for the Xbox meant they couldn’t get performance under control and had to rip out A-life (or abandon it when it was clear it wouldn’t work on Xbox).
With how great the good parts are it pains me doubly.
The other interview did suggest consoles are the problem. It’s wild to me that real developers are putting effort into those things, literally no one owns a PS5 still and the xbox is basically worthless. They’d have a better excuse to put stalker onto the switch than those ancient relics. Hopefully they get abandoned soon and the developers put all their effort where it matters.
Console should stop running a proprietary OS that needs a special SDK to develop on.
Take the Steam route : use Linux with their flavor on it. Makes life easier for devs, more games can run on your console and we get (hopefully) better optimized games
The ai isn’t the biggest problem IMO, it’s the balancing of things. Even many easy early-game enemies are absolute bullet sponges and can kill you in 3-4 hits. The whole game right now is just finding ways to cheese every encounter, which doesn’t feel good.
And both buying stuff and repairing things is so ridiculously expensive that it’s impossible to keep up. It feels like they didn’t do much playtesting of the actual game at all, more like they tested specific things in exclusivity.
Yeah I had to install like a dozen mods to attempt to even remotely address things, but it’s clear from a myriad examples that there was basically no QA testing done. From the bugs, to the fucked up balance to stuff like the day/night cycle being 1 hour realtime for a full 24h in game (!!!) there are just so many things that would have been brought up hour one of testing.
What is wrong with a full 24h in game in 1 realtime hour?
Even for games with fast timescales that is insanely fast. You barely have time to take in the environment and scenery before weather changes and the sun goes down or rises again. You can start a gunfight in the morning and finish after nightfall. For a game that lives and dies by immersion it completely pulls you out - at least it does me.
What are some games you play with longer cycles?
Witcher 3 had 96 minute days, which felt fine for that game. Any game I play for immersion usually ends up needing a mod though because timescales are often a problem. RDR2 shouldn’t have 48 minute days either, that one was even worse than Stalker 2.
If you play slowly and focus on immersion - and the game has survival mechanics - I find somewhere between 4-6 hour days to be perfect.
1.01 rebalanced the game significantly. Repairs are way cheaper, every payout is doubled or more, prices have been adjusted. Human enemies take just a few rounds to kill, even mutants have had their HP reduced, while the player’s armor has been buffed and the degradation of weapons and armor is now much lower so you’re repairing less.
Oh man that’s sad to hear