Armor & Health

[Yrjarik]

First off. YES I can understand the following changes is to save? resources, time and yaddayadda. Its a minor thing, yet IMO brought a degree of immersion.
Why merge Health and Armor? Seems like a streamlined yet less immersive, boring way to manage the status of our character

Not sure if Halo 2 started this streamlined armor, health trend. Oh yeah, Master Cheif have about 500kg of armor and yet cant take a beating withouth the puny shields. Basically a glass canon. Could take 1-5 hits after shields gone. There were a shield bar and... an invisible " health bar "

Example two is the recent WH40k Space Marine 2. Your " Armor " is actually energy shields made of 1-4 segments. While your true armors stats are MERGED with Health. Bonus example. Deep Rock Galactic. Armor is just fancy dressing, dosent do gameplay impact at all just fashion.

And now we have S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2.
I fear, that they seemingly have ditched the armor bar/ segments or wathever and fused the Armors once separate status bar, combined with the Health bar. Its like our armor, clothing and the body is just a fascade and that its all combined into our characters flesh instead.
I glimpsed from the recent gameplay videos that this seems true. Skif does have armor on his characters inventory paper doll. Yet NO armor bar like in past games gameplay representation. I dont even know if we can upgrade and repair amror, which I found awesome! Apply different capacities, resistances and that it was explained in text WHY you got that by the materials needed.

Hope this is gameplay Moddable, because YET again modders is the saviour and can reverse mind boggling, wack desicions. Because I truly want the S.T.A.L.K.E.R stay CONSISTENT throught the games even down to Amro, Health and Stamina bars and not ape after other franchises like COD and Metro.


Thoughts?

[CoatCzar]

From what I saw in one of the recent Q&A compilation videos, It seems that the armor and resistance bars do exist but to see them you need to hover your cursor over the armor in your inventory. So, apparently they do exist but they just haven't shown them to us yet.

[GlowWorm]

STALKER games have your armor be a resistance to various types of damage. One particular type of armor might reduce incoming electricity damage by 30%, reduce incoming impact damage by 15%, reduce incoming bullet damage by 25%, etc. The armor would also have statistics on how it behaves when hit by armor piercing bullets, vs. normal bullets.

The statistics for the armor are chosen to try to "realistically" model how such a piece of armor would actually behave in the circumstances of the game if the game were "the real world". But also, they can't spend a lot of CPU to execute an actual simulation of the ballistic impact, they have to just choose some various resistance numbers so the calculation is quick.

Finally, armor itself will take damage and degrade, so needing to repair armor will be a thing.

[StormhawkV]

If you get shot you will still get hurt even if the projectile doesn't make it through the suit. This wasn't different in the old Stalker games. The armor bar in the inventory only displayed how much armor the suit offered and it went down together with suit durability when taking hits.

[ImHelping]

When did stalker ever have a DOOM style armor meter? I mean that not as an insult to doom, but a comparison. Did I miss them making it more "please insert armor shards" in the trailers, or forget about that in one of the big mods I have not played in ages?

Armor has always been a flat resistance (possibly durability loss issues aside). Even this has more unironic depth because armor isn't just anti bullet/bite stats. But a variety of enviro resist stats including PSYCHIC.

Which is why baby's first jumpsuit, the sunrise suit, is always trash against attacks. but could upgrade to an amazing budget lightweight anomaly looter suit. With value even when I had a SEVA sci-fi super enviro suit to save on repair bills running laps around the map.

This also leads to why there are so many min/maxer pretending to care about lore players debating duty vs freedom. They tend to have unique suits that are solid armor without sacrificing enviro and artifact slot capability vs traditional body armor you can always find which can't even carry artifacts at all until upgraded. The path of peace means getting shot less, but also means no one of a kind midgame super armors. (oh well, will just have to settle for my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EXO SUIT)

[Josh]

The system is fine. The progression was always nice and steady. You felt yourself slowly getting stronger, with jumps here and there when you finally get the new rifle or armor set!! That's mostly how levels work in the game, as far as humans go. Harder enemies have better weapons and armor, which makes sense. Its not like Fromsoft where rats still easily kill you=) Eventually you stomp all the scrubs. I'm hoping the AI is good enough and not just lip service that enemies will see what you're packing and just run or back off if you're heading their way, and your reputation actually matters, like John Wick. If they want immersion, that's how you do it.