I realized the #1 issue of this game

[Harris]

It's bloat. It had no business being bigger that the trilogy combined. 60 square kilometers of land is not a feature, it's something that actually hurts the game in many different ways. Call of Pripyat showed Stalker works best as a focused game - taking place in a condensed area, with much more emphasis on side content. Despite sharing pretty much the same gameplay concepts and mechanics, CoP is fun to play and has a lot of potential for replayability, while the new game oftentimes is not.

Stalker 2 is a theme park where "the story is the game". There's no reason to ever go anywhere outside of the story as you're not going to find anything but an occassional side quest. The "wild goose chase" quickly becomes tedious and you stop keeping in mind the names of NPCs and why are you even doing this anymore. You just move on.

The same bloat applies to gear. Exoskeleton alone comes in half a dozen varieties! Like, what's the point? I'm obviously going to wear what's best and sell the rest. The game devolved into a looter shooter - it showers you with gear, which breaks the economy. And worst of all, there's very little identity to all of that. I can name just two interesting and unique upgrades across all the gear - accuracy boost of Operator exoskeleton and full-auto mode for the M14. I expected night vision, even thermal vision to trivialize bloodsuckers later on - the game has none of that. Truly "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle". The only way to counterbalance the loot shower was to make ridiculous repair prices. This encourages you - instead of upgrading your favorite guns - to just ditch them when they degrade and use something else. This clashes with Stalker's gear-based progression, as investing in upgrades is punished, but that's actually your only way of progressing in this game.

Veles detector is something that divided my game into "before" and "after". And this is because unlike CoP, where anomalies are kept to dedicated "artifact farming" areas, here they are scattered everywhere and you literally run into them all the time (and you want to run - the Zone is huge). Running into anomalies is by far the #1 source of gear degradation, and Veles just eliminates that. And that's just one of many examples how you're encouraged to rush the story. You don't have to work for an exoskeleton - the game just hands it to you when you meet Strelok.

Out of all Stalker games, 2 has the weakest freeplay/sandbox element. You can do a "radiant" quest for like 1-2k every once in a while - or you can get 30k for doing a trivial task just because it happened to be located pretty late in the story, and the game scales awards accordingly. But it's not just the quests that are the problem. The game wants you to go from A to B, preferably with no shooting in between. Fighting mutants is counter-productive as they don't drop any parts; and even people will not contain anything beyond a bit of ammo and a few bandages. As a result, your economy is reliant on main quest rewards and artifact farming. Problem is - CoP hands you a Veles after a couple quests in the first area, while here you will have to wait for it until late game.

After CS and especially CoP, the IP was well on its way to becoming this "survival sandbox" not unlike Fallout 4. For example, with this world size, having fast travel would be a must in 2024. Instead, 2 ditched all that and went "back to the roots" of SoC. As a result we have tons of this obsolete, two decades-old game design decisions that end up dragging the game down as much as all the "anomalies", that were in hindsight inevitable for a game this size.

[JackieTheDemon]

I believe the word you're looking for is "content"

[Harris]

The word I'm looking for is "depth". There is no depth when it comes to side quests (Leash project quest chain being an exception that confirms the rule), and there is no depth when it comes to progression / gear upgrades.

In CoP, there was a side quest chain consisting of 4 quests you could resolve in favor of Beard, Sultan or neither. In the rare, skippable case of the player choosing ot go for neither you opened another quest with Morgan, the Duty trader. Meanwhile Stalker 2 has one quest for Beard, one quest for Sultan and the final for Sonya where you end up killing both of them. These are technically a chain, too, but these quests are now linear and will not play out differently on future playthroughs.

Same goes for suits. PSZ-9D Duty Armor comes with upgrades that replicate the function of the best healing artifacts even though it comes with no artifact slots of its own; allowing it to compete with exoskeleton for the best combat-focused armor. Exoskeleton is an all-rounder with a strong emphasis on carry weight. And some players even swear by SEVA or Wind of Freedom for mobility and having 5 artifact slots. Every setup has some perks of its own, be it a better night vision or the enemies getting marked for you on the radar. This choice and complexity is gone in Stalker 2, as it pushes the philosophy of armors that are universally good and come with no downsides. No reason why you shouldn't use SEVA-I for most of the game and swap it out for Diamond Exoskeleton in the end.

What I'm trying to say is you shouldn't make a world of 60 square kilometers if you can't fill it with life and things to do. And you shouldn't make a couple dozens guns and armors if they'll end up being reskins of each other. If GSC opted for a more focused game, it would be way more stable and polished, replayability would be much more feasible, and minute-to-minute gameplay would just be more fun.

[[82AD] ♤Stonewall♤]

That may change when they get A-life working properly.

[Daej]

Yeah this is one of the things I'm disappointed with. Overall I can't say this game is as good as the originals. Zone feels totally empty, there have been very few moments where something felt 'alive' but they almost always seemed to be scripted. Between this and the atrocious story and retconning I'm not terribly happy. Not unhappy either, but I can't give this game a 9/10 or anything like that yet. Maybe if they fix A-life, but then the story is still always going to be holding this game back tremendously. Just much worse than the original's stories.

[Harris]

Daej の投稿を引用：

retconning

Not gonna lie, it was cringe to see so many beloved characters getting killed off or having the option to kill them so trivially. I swear almost the entire cast of CoP was dead by the end of my run.

I also disliked how our certain choices are considered canon. For example, not many players would align with bandits at Zaton and help Sultan take over - yet the events imply the bandit choice is the canon one. Same for the stalkers who formed Iskra - it is assumed they all survived the events of CoP. I mean, one of CoP's major strengths is replayability and multiple outcomes to pretty much every quest and the game generally supporting the player's "what if" curiosity. I dislike this being done as it feels Stalker 2 just borrows familiar names left right and center (only to kill them off later) in a desperate bid to ensure continuity.

Overall, it cared too much about being perceived as Stalker and did not care enough about being a modern game.

82AD ♤Stonewall♤ の投稿を引用：

A-life

You guys keep repeating A-life like it's the end all be all, however at best all A-life is gonna give us is immersive enemy spawns. Which on is will do nothing to change how fighting mutants is a waste of ammo, and fighting humans is the same, if we're being perfectly honest. it will equally do nothing to change how there's no "builds" to speak of due to constantly being showered with gear of nonexistent identity.

The problem of Stalker 2 is not some "anomalies", it's that it's fundamentally the same 2007 game but with a bigger budget and trying to be pretentious.

[John Nightreign]

What i hated was the illusion of choice when there actually wasnt any. Early on you get the impression that you are in control over what happens to strider, but the same thing plays out no matter who you side with.

[Lior]

Actually after signal it makes some sense, cause you-know-what-guys rush through the zone killing everyone they see. I'm walking here and there to loot stashes and hit some occasional meetings here and there - stalker pretending dead when met new "friends" or a guy who's hiding from a mutant after asking for ammo. Should become better with a-life introduced btw