How is the current state of the game?

[Sarokan]

Lets talk frankly, how is the current state of the game?

1. Too much bugs? Too much crashes?
2. Playable until to the end?
3. Ingame Performance?

I wish frankly and true answer, so me and others can decide whether we can buy the game now or should wait.

[Mephisto-Luzifer]

Performance is quite individuel cause of pc's, but i experience better frames and less stutters after latest nvidia driver update.
Bugs on the other hand, theres still a ton of it. A-life broken af, stealth broken, enemies spawning randomly around you and having instant aim and aggression on you, several other bugs.. Gameplay mechanics broken or annoying af.
But if the game shows its good side, its good and makes fun.
But wait till summer sale is what i would recomment.

[Mechanique]

1. Not many bugs that have actual impact on the game, no crashes
2. Story progress is still blocked at around 20-30 hours mark
3. Good performance on a modern hardware

[Silenius]

game started feel heavy even after DLSS frame generation don't know why and like 30 fps at best, when before it worked somewhat ok

[Sarokan]

Originally posted by Mechanique:

2. Story progress is still blocked at around 20-30 hours mark

Thanks for your anwers!

Can you explain this point further?
What you meant with "blocked at around 20-30 hours mark" exactly?

[Raz]

The game is really rough right now. If you're on the fence I'd personally recommend waiting, but that also kind of depends on what you're looking for.

If you're a casual player, new to the series, or just want to play the new trendy game that your friends might be talking about and some of your favorite games would be vanilla FO3/FO4 at launch then go for it. You'll probably have your fun then move on to whatever the new game is. If you're a long time fan of the series and or have a lot of hours in modded/sandbox versions of the game, you'll probably end up more frustrated than having fun.

I have no idea what version mechanique is playing but his experience is very different than just about everyone else's including my own.

To address your points directly:
1. There are a lot of bugs right now. Most of them are fairly minor and the expected level of jank from a modern game on release, but there are many that break side quests entirely. There are some side quests you are forced to interact with that just don't work at all, will not start, or you will not be able to finish because various items or NPC's don't spawn at all. Another notable bug which is a pain in the ass is using items, having your character go through the animation of using said item, only for the item to not actually be used (eg. you have 10 med kits. You press heal. Your character goes through the whole animation. You still have 10 stimpacks and your character did not actually heal. No this wasn't canceled from sprinting or taking other actions, this will happen frequently while standing still. Seems to be most prevalent with energy drinks and anti-rad).

2. Kind of? Theres a key story mission roughly midway through that's going to have you make some choices. The game is relatively stable prior to that but the bugs really start setting in super hard after that point. If your only goal is to play the main story it should be mostly fine.

3. Performance is good until it isn't. I want to qualify this and avoid anyone in the future just saying "hurr upgrade your pc" - I'm running a 7950x3d, 128gb ram, and an overclocked 3070 - my hardware should not be an issue. Most of the performance issues don't seem to be directly tied to graphics either as playing with various settings, turning upscaling or framegen on/off, or using different AA technologies didn't make any tangible difference. The game runs smooth for the most part, will have some hiccups every now and again, but regularly ♥♥♥♥♥ the bed anytime any significant amount of NPCs are in your vicinity. You will go from stable 60-100fps to about 4fps. Sometimes this can be "fixed" by saving and reloading or quitting to main menu and reloading until the game decides it wants to behave and give you a stable framerate again. Sometimes this wont work and you just kind of have to power through it and deal with the slideshow ontop of all the dropped inputs due to this. Sometimes things will be working fine and then it will just suddenly not be fine anymore for no obvious reason. Sometimes the game will experience a memory leak and just crash and lockup entirely requiring it to be killed with task manager. This is pretty rare, but has happened enough times that its worth noting. The random stutters/frame drops in populated areas is pretty miserable though especially as progression in the main story puts you in a lot of populated areas.

There are some other things that you should take into consideration as well. I'm sure they've been beaten to death in this and every comments section but are worth addressing if you somehow missed it.

Game balance - Its all over the place. The patches have helped, 1.0 honestly felt as if no one play tested the game at all. The in game economy is pretty reasonable at this point, but some things are not really fine. Weapon degradation is a bit silly, but not that big of a deal. When fighting human enemies you might as well be playing fallout or call of duty. The game ♥♥♥♥♥ health items at you and after you get past the very beginning of the game and get your first decent armor set gunfights are more or less a joke. Mutants are the complete opposite. Many of the higher level ones will be able to 1-2 shot you and and have obscenely unrealistic amounts of health. Even when using the proper weapon/ammo types to fight certain things, they can just end up being tedious. I'm talking multiple magazines of ammo and grenades and certain things will still be alive. So many people will be quick to call out "skill issue". The thing is the mutant AI is not very good or complex in this game. Most mutant fights are not hard once you learn the right dance - they just become incredibly tedious and a waste of time/ammo. You will see many people dismiss this with "just run by them", "you don't have to fight them", "they're intended to be bosses/roadblocks so it makes sense they're hard to kill". First you need to ask yourself if that sounds like fun gameplay/game design to you. Then you need to realize that there are quests and instances in game where you will not be able to ignore/run by the mutant and will be stuck in a very long loop of dodge, shoot, dodge, shoot, dodge reload repeat x30.

A-Life (or lack thereof) - This is a hot topic and I'm not going to say much about it. If you're not a series veteran and didn't spend a ton of in the modded games this probably wont mean much to you. Currently the game will only spawn enemies in a relatively close sphere around the player (usually behind you) at random. There is no real continuity of NPCs or mutants that are spawned. Once you get more than around 120m away from any enemy they will poof out of existence and may as well have never existed. Overall it will feel very lifeless as you'll walk through nothing for a bit, have a "random" encounter, then repeat. Certain areas will generally have a presence of certain human enemies but beyond that its just the spawn system. You will not be able to "experience" the zone as you did in previous games like finding a vantage point and seeing everything thats happening in the map you're currently in and trying to base your pathing on that info, seeing or hearing about factions engaged in combat or calling for help in certain areas, or any of the more immersive behavior the original games had. Furthermore GSC to my knowledge has never confirmed yet whether A-Life 2.0 is supposed to be like the originals or is just going to be a better version of the current spawning system - so if you're hoping for a model like the original games had there is no real guarantee that you'll ever be getting that. As I stated previously though, if you're a big fan of games like fallout and never really spent significant time with the original stalker games this probably won't matter to you that much - just something to be aware of.

Patches have helped some things a lot, but have left a lot of other issues unaddressed. More patches are on the way I'm sure, but there's no 100% guarantee they'll fix everything.

Is it worth getting right now with the current state of things? That's up for you to decide. If you hate bugs or having broken quests then yes. If you don't mind troubleshooting then maybe. If you're a casual player and just want to experience what everyone talking about right now and can afford it - sure you'll have some fun. If you're a casual player who hates dealing with issues or jank - best to wait. If you're a series veteran and wanting to get into a more modern iteration of the zone - personally, I'd say wait. You'll have some fun with it, but honestly feels like it was rushed and released well before it was ready.

[Dr.Abscondus]

Finished the game yesterday after 130 hours with a couple of crashes, no blocks, no real problems. I went with the Ward. Your choice of who to side with changes your path through the game and some of the missions are different. All I can say is that following the Ward path was not a problem. I didn't do a lot of side quests and some of those seem to be where bugs did appear although a lot have been patched. I also play on GeForce Now so I haven't had any technical issues because I think a lot of those are due to the endless variety of PC configurations players are using, and that a lot of people don't know how to maintain their computers. Playing on a computer maintained by IT professionals tends to eliminate user error.

[brian71mm]

I can't beat the game bc I keep getting getting an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION when the game crashes, getting all the win codes and a kernal issue too. i've reinstalled the game twice, all mods disabled. stuck on the 2nd to last main story mission 'down below' as soon as the cutscene ends to go fight some peeps, after leaving the security room, boom game crashes every time no matter what

[Lior]

Finished the game in 80 hours (start rushing at some point), faced some bugs though not critical, some maybe had 2 or 3 crashes thorughout the game (i was the reason for some of them), it'll get fixed soon anyways. It still has to be developed, there's still lots of work to do, but I finished it, I'm satisfied, I had a lot of fun, I enjoyed the story and the characters and I still love this game, though there's lot of ways to make it better.
Ryzen 5 5700x, GeForce 3090, 32gb RAM just FYI

[juskom95]

Originally posted by Sarokan:

Lets talk frankly, how is the current state of the game?

1. Too much bugs? Too much crashes?
2. Playable until to the end?
3. Ingame Performance?

I wish frankly and true answer, so me and others can decide whether we can buy the game now or should wait.

If you have a top end rig with a 4090 you will have acceptable performance. With anything less, don't expect anything above 30fps.

[󠀡󠀡]

1. Too much bugs? Too much crashes?
Yes way too many

2. Playable until to the end?
Nope

3. Ingame Performance?
On my PC 0 issues but tbh all questions are user dependent, I can't progress my game any further, I'm fed up to use console to manually load each quest even I finish it game doesn't recognise it so again I need to manually type in console to finish quest.

[Pheex]

I'm at the final mission in the game after 70+ hours so I can give you a decently informed opinion.

Bugs and playable to the end: There are bugs. Some minor ones, and a small hand full of somewhat major ones.

I've encountered two instances where important quest npc's turned hostile, I've had one (unimportant and with nothing unique) trader die, I've gotten softlocked a few times because of getting stuck in unintended places (between a handrail and a wall for example) and a fasttravel npc vanished. Sometimes weapons reload with 1 less bullet than the mag can hold. Two times world hazards vanished until I did a quicksave and quickload.

So nothing that prevented me from getting to the end of the story, but always keep a bunch of manual saves (at least 5) so you can go back if you really have to.

So yes there's definitely bugs. But the game is still playable and fun imo.

Performance: I'm on a 3700x with 32 GB, and NVME and a 3060TI waiting for next gen to upgrade to a monster pc. On this 4-5 year old budget system I can play with everything at high including render distance, a few things at epic, using DLSS Quality and AMD frame gen and a framerate cap at 60 fps. Buttery smooth gameplay, never, ever, ever drops below 60. Not in massive settlements, not during massive battles or tons of anomalies with particle effects. Not at 4k of course, but anything below 4k on a similar system should play great using DLSS and FSR.

[Mog]

Originally posted by juskom95:

Originally posted by Sarokan:

Lets talk frankly, how is the current state of the game?

1. Too much bugs? Too much crashes?
2. Playable until to the end?
3. Ingame Performance?

I wish frankly and true answer, so me and others can decide whether we can buy the game now or should wait.

If you have a top end rig with a 4090 you will have acceptable performance. With anything less, don't expect anything above 30fps.

I'd say I'm getting around 45-60fps most of the time. I'm running a 8700K, 2080ti and 64gb ram. That's running everything except hair on epic and using quality DLSS... It's a complete lottery imo.

However the game is completely unplayable due to EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION and similar crashes. Sometimes I can play for 20mins and then I get in a situation and its crash crash crash every 2mins.

[Joeker579]

after patch down below cut scenes cause hard crashs still