Don't want to beat a dead dog but

[Mörkö]

Disregarding quests, wandering around the game feels like random bubbles of senseless deathmatch wherever i go. Mutants on one side, friendly stalkers on another and bandits on another; all duking it out without any thought until they are the last one standing. Rinse and repeat. Feels very artificial somewhat unlike the older games, where it felt more believable because you could meet the very same dudes later still wandering around and getting fat from looting or hear from them in radio chatter etc.

But in S2 they respawn in player's bubble out of thin air and then vanish again. It gets quickly stale and just doesn't feel like the old games somehow. NPCs don't even loot corpses as far as i've seen so every corpse waits for the player to be looted.

That A-Life update better be substantial because S2 is totally incomplete without it.

[ImHelping]

NPCs looting stuff in the old games would have them hold those, just like selling used SMG for sausage to a non hostile bandit in CoP would let you recognize their eventual corpse by the mountain of used guns you recognize in their inventory.

Enemies not looting guns in stalker 2 isn't "Too easy for the players", it is "If they looted things, those things would be erased from existence instead of persistent" when the NPCs despawn. So they probably don't loot things because of how much it broke ♥♥♥♥ if they let them.

Hell we already have enough issues with "So much enemy spam that you can't even look at the body inventory anymore for half of them" problems. Imagine an NPC grabbing half the guns in the middle of a firefight then his body turning into "Can't loot me, ♥♥♥♥ you" status.

Most of your problems are legit, but years have taught me to put a LOT more thought into considering anything "Too good for the player". NPCs not looting anymore is a band-aid on the fact if they could, ♥♥♥♥ would be turbo ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Not "Casual for consoles" design.

[Snoopkirby]

The worst is the 100m distance and lack of persistance.
Even by 90s standard this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥, no other way around it and it makes snipers weird to play because their range and precision advantage cannot be used without risking the AI despawning.
For reference Stalker GAMMA has 650m by default i believe. Dunno what the default is for Stalker anomaly but it has to be higher than 100m.

[Mörkö]

Snoopkirby님이 먼저 게시:

The worst is the 100m distance and lack of persistance.
Even by 90s standard this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥, no other way around it and it makes snipers weird to play because their range and precision advantage cannot be used without risking the AI despawning.
For reference Stalker GAMMA has 650m by default i believe. Dunno what the default is for Stalker anomaly but it has to be higher than 100m.

Default is 85m afaik which is pitiful. Bullet ranges are also pretty gamified and reduced.

I've tried various A-life mods that increase the distance for both NPCs and bullets, which make it a bit better. Modders will probably fix it sooner than devs if they ever do. Look at Gamma, that thing looks super fleshed out with less nonsense afaik. Even the animations are not worse than S2 and hell you can even crawl and see your dude in 3rd person.. would be the dream if it had the same graphical qualities as S2 (with no forced MB, DOF, upscaling and eye adaptation jank though).