New to the stalker series have question regarding difficulty.

[Cvxbio]

Will the difficulty settings change how the enemies fight besides making them do more damage?

Also, PLEASE don't tell me difficulty makes enemies become bullet sponges. I'm all for Insane challenges but not the bullet sponge type challenges, I'm not here for an IRL endurance test.

All good If It just increases damage you take but the latter part about sponge enemies Is hopefully not apart of It.

[Rootbeer Safety Team]

Not much information has been released on this yet. It is hard to say because the only comparison we have is the older games which worked on an entirely different engine. Old Stalker was hard to newcomers because the AI and gunplay could be very unpredictable at times

The older games were tough, mainly because of a scarcity of resources and sometimes just unlucky AI behaivor.

But the new game, will still be tough on all levels, there's the addition of an "easy" difficulty too, which is said to be noticably more forgiving than the other settings.

This is paraphrasing something a GSC employee said recentley on discord. They are playing the game in their off time but they aren't playing it on the easy setting.


if memory serves me correctley, the difficulty settings at least in the XRAY engine games (original trilogy) mostly revolved around how accurate enemies were, how much extra protection you had. and the spawning of loot. but even on its highest difficulty settings, it was very fair. you could die in a couple lucky shots, but so could the enemy, this is one of the things that made stalker so beloved among singleplayer FPS players.

[Cvxbio]

Originally posted by Kastrenzo:

Not much information has been released on this yet. It is hard to say because the only comparison we have is the older games which worked on an entirely different engine.

The older games were tough, mainly because of a scarcity of resources and sometimes just unlucky AI behaivor.

But the new game, will still be tough on all levels, there's the addition of an "easy" difficulty too, which is said to be noticably more forgiving than the other settings.

This is paraphrasing something a GSC employee said recentley on discord. They are playing the game in their off time but they aren't playing it on the easy setting.

I'm looking forward to a tough game, my only concern was the bullet spongy part. If the difficulties just make enemies more spongy then I'm gonna be super disappointed, but overall the game looks great.

[Rootbeer Safety Team]

some of the earlier press demo reviews mentioned the mutants being kind of bullet-spongey, that was the case in the last game too but its often about getting -good- hits on the mutants, with the right weapon.

panic mag-dumping a bloodsucker with a 9mm smg and making half the shots hit the arm or miss, is not the same as getting 8-9 consecutive hits with a mid tier AR.

I'm not worried about the human enemies at all, though. if you encounter a "bullet sponge" stalker, its probably because his armor has totally outclassed your shooter, The last game had some enemies wearing Sci-fi Exoskeleton armor, expect to see them again, they were an iconic staple of the franchise.

thats why different weapons and even different ammunition types exist

old game, and new game has FMJ, Hollowpoint, and Armor Peircing ammunition. Each has its strengths and weaknesses against different kinds of enemies. (as well as the relation to economy)

[Cvxbio]

Originally posted by Kastrenzo:

some of the earlier press demo reviews mentioned the mutants being kind of bullet-spongey, that was the case in the last game too but its often about getting -good- hits on the mutants, with the right weapon.

panic mag-dumping a bloodsucker with a 9mm smg and making half the shots hit the arm or miss, is not the same as getting 8-9 consecutive hits with a mid tier AR.

I'm not worried about the human enemies at all, though. if you encounter a "bullet sponge" stalker, its probably because his armor has totally outclassed your shooter, The last game had some enemies wearing Sci-fi Exoskeleton armor, expect to see them again, they were an iconic staple of the franchise.

thats why different weapons and even different ammunition types exist

old game, and new game has FMJ, Hollowpoint, and Armor Peircing ammunition. Each has its strengths and weaknesses against different kinds of enemies. (as well as the relation to economy)

I don't mind the enemies being spongy naturally, I just don't want the enemies to BECOME sponges just because I increased the difficulty. I'd rather die In 1 shot from everything then enemies going from needing 1 magazine on the easiest difficulty to 20 magazines on the hardest.

Maybe I'm In the minority saying this I don't know, but making difficulties increase health of enemies Is just a lazy way to make things harder. Increase their damage and If you wanna go above and beyond make the ai smarter the higher difficulty you're playing on.

[Rootbeer Safety Team]

Well. Again it's almost useless to speculate unreal engine vs xray engine until we see for ourselves. But in the xray games. Bad guy fell to the same amount of shots to the same weapon most of the time. Regardless of difficulty

Sometimes RNG would curse you. But in short. If it's anything like the old game. I think your concerns will be alleviated.

[Grubbs008]

Originally posted by Cvxbio:

Originally posted by Kastrenzo:

some of the earlier press demo reviews mentioned the mutants being kind of bullet-spongey, that was the case in the last game too but its often about getting -good- hits on the mutants, with the right weapon.

panic mag-dumping a bloodsucker with a 9mm smg and making half the shots hit the arm or miss, is not the same as getting 8-9 consecutive hits with a mid tier AR.

I'm not worried about the human enemies at all, though. if you encounter a "bullet sponge" stalker, its probably because his armor has totally outclassed your shooter, The last game had some enemies wearing Sci-fi Exoskeleton armor, expect to see them again, they were an iconic staple of the franchise.

thats why different weapons and even different ammunition types exist

old game, and new game has FMJ, Hollowpoint, and Armor Peircing ammunition. Each has its strengths and weaknesses against different kinds of enemies. (as well as the relation to economy)

I don't mind the enemies being spongy naturally, I just don't want the enemies to BECOME sponges just because I increased the difficulty. I'd rather die In 1 shot from everything then enemies going from needing 1 magazine on the easiest difficulty to 20 magazines on the hardest.

Maybe I'm In the minority saying this I don't know, but making difficulties increase health of enemies Is just a lazy way to make things harder. Increase their damage and If you wanna go above and beyond make the ai smarter the higher difficulty you're playing on.

If you hit most humans in the head with a bullet, they are toast unless they got heavy head armor on, a mutant, may take serveral shots. I don't think this game will go the (Every Big AAA Developer Difficulty Slider) Route for spongy enemies.

[Cvxbio]

Originally posted by Grubbs008:

Originally posted by Cvxbio:

I don't mind the enemies being spongy naturally, I just don't want the enemies to BECOME sponges just because I increased the difficulty. I'd rather die In 1 shot from everything then enemies going from needing 1 magazine on the easiest difficulty to 20 magazines on the hardest.

Maybe I'm In the minority saying this I don't know, but making difficulties increase health of enemies Is just a lazy way to make things harder. Increase their damage and If you wanna go above and beyond make the ai smarter the higher difficulty you're playing on.

If you hit most humans in the head with a bullet, they are toast unless they got heavy head armor on, a mutant, may take serveral shots. I don't think this game will go the (Every Big AAA Developer Difficulty Slider) Route for spongy enemies.

See that's all I was curious about If anyone knew, thank you. I didn't play the first game so I didn't know whether It was something they do here, devs can make the enemies as tanky as they want but what Infuriates me Is when they just do the classic "Higher difficulty = higher health pool" route. I wanna play on the highest difficulty but If It just ends up turning the game Into a bullet sponge fest and actually add no real challenge besides that then I'd rather avoid It.

[Dovahkiin]

I just played this for the first time on Xbox and when i grabbed that anomaly a mutant came out of no where and I have it set to recruit as the difficulty setting so i can scope out the map better. These mutants go invisible and I think Imo that they are a bit too hard for the difficulty setting I'm using. The humans aren't that bad but the mutants will take you out almost immediately. I think IMO that they should tone that down a little. This is just what i have experience first time playing it. Others may have different opinions.