Buy now or wait for A-Life update ?

[Itchy_Scrotbag]

Worth it yet ?

[DomEReapeR]

It's still fun but flawed, I had a good time as a fan of the originals, no a-life was just very frustrating very often. Still glad I played and finished on release, just more excited to do a patched and modded second playthrough later.

[A TIN OF JAR]

The A-Life update could be months away so really its if you want to wait that long, I have been using the A-life Extended - Hostile Edition mod, while its no A-Life substitute its does make the world feel much more alive.

https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/273?tab=description

[DragynDance]

A-Life is never going to get that update. Stalker 2 uses the unreal engine, which is incapable of having working A-Life. Just for a referance of just how badly botched the current iteration of mock a-life is, older stalker games A-Life have a safety bubble of 75-100 meters around the player where squads/mutants CANT SPAWN, so if you bump into something, it's because you wandered into it patrolling, doing it's objective, or just living it's life. In Stalker 2, there is a 75-100 meter reality bubble around the player, where only that area is loaded, and things can ONLY SPAWN inside of that bubble, because unreal engine can't handle having AI running outside of that distance.

[TriGGrPuLLa]

Originally posted by Itchy_Scrotbag:

Worth it yet ?

Well, true S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans will tell you it's worth it. We have dealt with jank and bugs since 2007 since the series started. Others will probably tell you "No". Ultimately. It's going to be your call. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

[DragynDance]

Originally posted by TriGGrPuLLa:

Originally posted by Itchy_Scrotbag:

Worth it yet ?

Well, true S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans will tell you it's worth it. We have dealt with jank and bugs since 2007 since the series started. Others will probably tell you "No". Ultimately. It's going to be your call. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Yeah, "true STALKER fans" all are scrambling to play and worship stalker 2. Thats why when STALKER GAMMA had it's update last night, MODDB nearly went down from the sheer amount of traffic of people trying to update their modpack . Jank is one thing, we're used to jank. Stalker 2 is full of broken promises, and outright lies. Still stringing people along with lies like A-Life 2.0 is totally coming for real guys, just buy the game and hold tight.

[A TIN OF JAR]

Originally posted by DragynDance:

A-Life is never going to get that update. Stalker 2 uses the unreal engine, which is incapable of having working A-Life.

Well that is strange because on the official Discord one of the developers actually confirmed that A-Life is very much in the game just its broken at the moment and obviously not working as intended.

[snares]

Steam refund exists, if you're that on the fence then just get it now and keep an eye on the time. If you're not having fun and feel like it needs more time, then refund and repurchase later?

[Zordiark Darkeater]

Originally posted by A TIN OF JAR:

The A-Life update could be months away so really its if you want to wait that long,

I think they will fix it before holidays to be honest.

It would be suicide for the company to not to. or they will lose ALLOT of trust and this game will go down in history as a meme, its allready happening, not having A-life makes the game world very generic like all the other looter shooter games.

After a few months nobody gonna care about this game outside the few hardcore Stalker fans or people that just don't care about the state of the game lol.

People allready going back to moded stalker like Gamma for example.

[DragynDance]

Originally posted by A TIN OF JAR:

Originally posted by DragynDance:

A-Life is never going to get that update. Stalker 2 uses the unreal engine, which is incapable of having working A-Life.

Well that is strange because on the official Discord one of the developers actually confirmed that A-Life is very much in the game just its broken at the moment and obviously not working as intended.

Yeah, of course the people trying to sell you the game are lying to you. The game was made with unreal engine 5, which you can download the devkit for and look at the code for a-life. It's not actual a-life, it's an dynamic enemy squad spawner. It waits for a random amount of time, rolls some random numbers, and spawns a squad or two inside of the players reality bubble based to simulate a squad of enemies/mutants/friendlies bumping into you, or two squads bumping into each other. The actual a-life from older titles spawned squads and enemies at random points of the map, and then gave them an objective. For example, it might spawn a squad of loners at point A, and give them the objective to go to point B and look for artifacts, which btw if they get there before the player, they'll totally loot it, and then you can find it on their bodies if they die. It might also spawn a group of bandits at point C with the objective to go to point B and look for loners to hit up and mug, and maybe a squad of mutants at point B that just live their as a nest. And then the player might never come across any of those squads because they just never head to point B. Or they go to point B and it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Stalker 2's dynamic squad spawn system would simply, as the player is travelling from point A to C, for example, spawn the loners on one side, and the bandits on the other side right next to the player to simulate this code from the original games.

The unfortunate truth is that unreal engine 5, as an engine, can not handle the sheer amount of power required to have all those AI calculations going on in unrendered terrain. So a-life as it was in the older titles is actually impossible. They can refine this dynamic squad spawn system to be good, and if they just straight up told us that it was just a squad spawning system instead of lying and palying up "a-life 2.0" then I Would have no qualms with it.

[A TIN OF JAR]

Originally posted by Zordiark Darkeater:

I think they will fix it before holidays to be honest.

Well I hope so, I hope I am proven wrong and I will be pleasantly surprised however I just don't think its something that can be fixed quickly or easily, I think it is going to take time.

[xii]

Bought it long before launch, and although a few crashes on my second system made me curse, it`s like the old stalker games "feel".
On my main gaming rig, it works sofar good, with only minor graphic faults using 4K.
It can be better, and as promised, will improve. Stability on my second system is 99% after patch 1.02, with minor graphic glitches.
Keep this up, I`m stll happy, even after waiting for a year or so.

[󠀡󠀡]

Tbh if you wanna listen to random people online saying they "work on UE5" or another random person that says "untrue, UE5 is capable of that".

Just try to come to the realization yourself:

do you think it's not really possible to create an offline AI living system on UE5? Only because the NPCs in this game are really CPU heavy, doesn't mean there can't be optimizations.

What if there can be a way to offload NPCs models and make it less CPU heavy while they still roam offline creating the A-life we always knew-

idk, point is, I'm not a developer neither an UE5 enthusiast, BUT, I truly believe that the developers will come to something that will make it work, that will make the game feel more alive, I'm hopefully wishing for a A-life like we once knew, I'm still hopeful.

This game was unfortunately pushed to release earlier than excpected, I still love the game, but A-life it's whats needed to make the game feel more alive and more " free".

Who truly knows at the end of the day, are the developers, I also read someone clamining "making A-life on UE5 is totally possible but it needs a lot of work and optimization".

So who knows at this point, only the developers knows. And as I said, I'm hopeful.

[Your Neko Hentai Waifu §NYA§]

Originally posted by Itchy_Scrotbag:

Worth it yet ?

there are too many bugs, wait 4 to 6 months and see after

[Armoth]

I would highly recommend waiting till the A-life update. Otherwise the zone feels really empty other than the quest set pieces.

[Sirius Black]

Well it feels a little empty without proper A-life simulation. I still enjoy the game though