I'm not a stalker guy, just came into the thread to reccomend the short novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatski brothers, which is the story that directly inspired the setting in the stalker games (though from what I gather the games are VERY different)

I've come to terms with the fact that we just don't live in an era where games are finished when they're released.

I'll look to play the game in a year or two after it's been officially patched and after a COMPLETE mod comes out to fix that.

I'll just be playing Anomaly, if I get the itch for a stalker game. that, or metro exodus for the millionth time. what a good game exodus was.

I'm like 8 hours in and comparing it to Gamma makes it feel real bad. Even if the performance was fixed, it's just not on the same level feature and depth wise.

after it

and a couple of hours of it, i gotta say im quite surprised that the faction that is associated with the Ukrainian military seems to not be portrayed in a good light at all lol, they're shitty cops who keep trying to keep the good stalkers down and you get plenty of opportunity to fight them

It's amazing how easy it is to make gamers believe that fucking dogshit is a video game genre lol.

"Slavjank" is understandable and forgivable if you're making video games during the global financial crisis, but you've got no regional excuse in the 2020s for making games that don't work and require 6 months of patching, you're just every other dishonest video game company at that point.

You gotta be an indie game studio of like max 5 people now to get the loveable jank excuse.

I think it is actually pretty alright. It's a beautifully realized world, it is very atmospheric and moody. The story so far has been pretty lame (I think they are going for a "oh no the zone is getting commercialized we punks need to fight against it" kind of plot, which is kinda meh as far as where they could have taken the story), although there is some character to it (but there's also a pretty regressive streak to the whole thing, with there still being no female stalkers or any real diversity to speak of).

The more pressing and obvious problems the game has are balance and the complete absence of A-Life. Supplies are much too plentiful, while repairing any of your equipment costs way too much and without roaming bands of mutants and stalkers the game really does lose a lot of what made Stalker special (endlessly respawning enemies is hopefully just a bug).

COPER: Cope of Copecopebyl copecope

Its genuinely quite shit

• Game doesn't run on a 4080 super and doesn't even look good enough to warrant the performance it looks like any copy paste unreal 5 dreck. Frame pacing is all over the place so even high and capped framerates feel awful
• UI may as well be from far cry completely misses the aspect of what made the original games interface so good
• stealth is broken enemies see you from miles away through foliage then aimbot your brain and has that stupid 360 degree ubisoft enemy can see you ring that i hate
• mutants eat bullets makes bloodsuckers frustrating rather than scary
• game has forced on mouse accell and smoothing with no option to disable without messing in the configs
• no muzzle flash lighting or shadows cast from the torch which were very big features of the original game
• buttons don't register sometimes and need to be pressed twice weather this is to open or close inventory/pda or even worse to fucking quicksave where many times i realised it didn't save at all cos i have to press it twice
• difficulty modes copy modern game difficulty make you weaker and enemies bullet sponges and has nothing similar to the original trilogies master difficulty
• first encounter with a poltergeist went terribly unlike in shoc where you meet one in that bunker and it ynow levitates the object then throws it to give you time to identify and move.... This one the physics object moves AFTER IT HITS YOU so you only see it reacting BOUNCING OFF YOUR BODY and they are impossible to avoid like completely aimbot buckets
• english va is somehow worse than in the originals
• its made by nazis
• a-life 2.0 is reported currently as broken so its just a random enemy spawner ring around the player which is another significant staple of the original games
• stupid animations for inventory and PDA that really don't need to exist and just get in the way
• Even breaking open crates for stuff feels bad the model just disappears into a few particle effects rather than ynow actually falls apart into physics objects like the fucking original games managed to do
• fuzzy ass image like every fuzzy ass UE5 game

Positives:

• guns sound nice and have good animations

If ur getting the game pirate the gog version but its not worth it just play the originals. The design language adopted for this game was to make it more like a ubisoft game than take what made the originals so impactful.

I got the list above from the prologue i didn't need to play anything else

They paid an Azov member as a voice actor and also one of their employees volunteered for a fascist brigade and got deservedly killed.

If you want to play this game, pirate it.

This sounds like an excellent homage to the original, which IIRC was a buggy dumpster fire for quite a bit after release.

Chornobyl

Is that another thing like Kiyv vs. Kiev? Or just typo and I'm reading too much into it?

I pirated the game, changed some settings, then the game had to compile shaders again. Found out that's a bug that makes it do that every single time and it takes like 5 minutes after opening the game. Decided to wait for it to be fixed before ever starting a new game because that did not bode well for what else I could expect.

Shame. I love the original games, even played SoC right at release in 2007, and played Anomaly with my own curated mod list for years.

I haven't played it myself because my PC is still an i5 4690k and gtx970 lol but I was looking forward to it eventually

I would be optimistic if it weren't for the complete lack of a-life, it was the thing that really made stalker special but who knows what modders may be able to do in the future.

I tried it. Died too much, quit.