Your Review as Stalker trilogy and Anomaly/Gamma/Custom players.

[3XistencE [-GöRZ-]]

Hi Stalkers,
My question is for those people who spent hours, days, years on stalker trilogy, anomaly and so on.
What do you think about Stalker 2? It's what i can expect or it's too "modern" (easy or what you truly feel about it)?

Example
The economy: It's more easy to repair, sell damaged weapons (or it's the same?)

Give me some honest PoV from people who love (i can't use the past) all the previous stalker games

[Othobrithol]

Fantastic

I played all at launch. Clear Sky had more bugs than Stalker 2 at first.
I am playing it just fine on a 1080ti.

The Zone is huge now. And it is nice to revisit old locations.
Many new and creative anomalies.

ALife is still buggy so the zone seems a little emptier, but not as bad as some make it out to be.

The current repair costs seem balanced to me, but the recent patch made money a little too easy - easier than Clear Sky but harder than Call of Pripyat.

Faction reputation seems very simplified. I hope a DLC expands it.

[Lior]

It's lovely. With all fixes gonna be even better. As for now, balance kinda sucks, so does economy - at least repairs still cost a fortune for some things. But the plot is intriguing, quests are interesting (except maybe CoD-like ones, but even they have some idea)
But you're gonna need patience. Lots of it :D

[LeadHead]

Played the original trilogy multiple times over and dabbled a bit with modded versions. Have not finished (I feel like I've barely started even) STALKER 2, but my couple thoughts.

Current implementation of NPC spawns is worst of all STALKER games. It's very obvious they are indeed just spawning around/behind you in a set radius. The current speed at which time passes also means that stalkers physically do not have the time to do anything on the world map, which further makes me think that there pretty much is no NPC persistence.

Mutant combat, which I feel was never amazing in the originals, feels exactly the same if not worse. Mutants do not seem to have any wounded states or "fear" state where they retreat (ie, like blind dogs and fleshes did in the originals), combined with their massively increased survivability and no reward just make them not fun to engage with.
Combat with humans on the other hand feels amazing. Their vision does not appear to be impaired by foliage or nighttime however and accuracy feels too high. No matter how small a part of yourself you expose, they will see you and they will hit you. This is compounded by the short engagement ranges (far as I can tell, enemies straight up de-spawn at a certain distance). Likewise, as far as I can tell it's impossible to make enemies lose track of you. Once spotted, it seems they know where you are in perpetuity.
Overall, as good as the combat feels, it just isn't very deep, strategic or balanced.

Inventory and upgrade system looks like is pretty much the same as the original, which I guess isn't entirely bad. The interface however is just barely serviceable. Too much wasted space, slow to navigate and item statistics bars rarely represent anything meaningful, arguably even worse than in SoC. I don't think we need the excruciating item statistics detail MISERY-likes had, however at least some numbers would be appreciated rather than vague bars.

The narrative so far feels much better fleshed out than ever and is probably the game's highlight. The little side quests and activities feel like an expansion of what we saw in CoP and they seem pretty well done.

The atmosphere is absolutely amazing, giving me the same vibes I had 10 years ago when I first played SoC and CS. The detail-packed environments and stellar sound design absolutely help here. I am generally not much of a graphics snob, but I can't help myself feeling some sense of beauty when looking at the game in stormy weather for example.

Overall, it's okay. I don't know how much appeal it will find to non-fans of the series as the game still has a good amount of jank, but as a souped up and very faithful sequel it seems pretty solid so far. A lot of the game's problems feel also like problems the original trilogy had. Still needs a good amount of patching, but I can see myself sticking around, especially if future DLC expand on the game mechanics as well.

[Shake Caine]

I like Stalker 2. There is a lot of love put into small details but it is all held back by bugs and AI simply not working. I would deal with AI being dumb but currently many of them get stuck between some ledges(because they spawned there) and they cannot ascend. A lot of NPCs also just stands around doing nothing besides idle standing animation.

Some things also got cut due to early release in my opinion and hopefully can get back into the game like NVGs or stats screen and im sure there is a lot more. There are some details and mechanics that definately lead to something... which is bugged or disabled for the time being. Mutants like people said do not feel rewarding to fight too. I avoid many mutant fights if I can as they are just bullet waste. This can be fixed by mods but im sure they can add mutant carving back into the game.

I love the atmosphere and if not the AI bugs it would be a lot better.

[Sagrit]

My opinion - if you love STALKER universe, play it right now, no need to wait for anything. For 80h i haven't faced any crucial bugs. I know that if you'll read social networks, you must be thinking that game is bugged, unplayable etc. No, that's not true. You should test it yourself, because I believe that lot of players have issues, but also lot of ppl don't. Maybe some composition of hardware and software, I don't know. The game just runs normal for me in 4k on middle-high settings with 3060. Just be ware that SSD is a MUST, it's not a recomendation, it's requirment, otherwise you will see real bugs, not just longer loading screen.

As for game... It's great. Simply great. And it's huge! I was prepearing myself for something like 30-40h. story driven game like Metro etc, just because that's how modern games are made. But on release I got the same old good STALKER. I'm 80h so far and it feels like I'm not even in the middle (well, maybe just a but over the middle). I haven't even scratched 6 locations like at all. Huge world, tons of locations with very well hidden stashes, tons of small cool things not even marked on a map. It's really interesting to explore, especially if you are a STALKER fan.

[GrapeFruiT]

I really like it, the atmosphere, the world, gunplay, ai and everything else about the game, there are some bugs here and there but they are not ruining the game experience, the game runs really well with DLSS(quality and balanced) with high details (RTX 2080), and Amd frame generation set to enabled, on 2k or Full HD resolution, when i try to play it on 3440x1440 (21:9), the performance sucks and i guess in 4k it isn't playable. Except for people with too much money who did spent their money on 2000€/ $ graphic cards. I think game rating and devs should be punished with bad optimizations at least 20-30% of there rates in reviews. Devs can't expect that everyone has a 3000 -5000 € rig. They should optimize their games for mid class pcs and not just for upperclass rich rig ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥. BUT TO STAY ON POINT...STALKER 2 is a very good atmospheric game. (played also Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl, Call of Prypjat, Clear Sky)...

[Ray tracing is faster]

I refuse to buy it without offline A-Life