S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Stalker) Thread

[Heem 'em all.]

"
Some fixes from patch 1.0.1:

• Fixed bugs in the behavior of NPCs that could get stuck near a shelter during ejection and die.
• Bürer will no longer be able to knock quest items out of the player’s hands.
• Fixed bugs that could cause quest NPCs to freeze, make it impossible to interact with them, or block quest completion.
• Performance has been optimized and potential crashes in densely populated areas during long game sessions have been fixed.
• Fixed bugs that caused NPCs to incorrectly assess the player’s position and fire at his hideout to no avail.
• Fixed an issue with invisible NPCs/mutants appearing in the field of view when aiming.
• Fixed visual effects of fire that were not displayed at certain camera angles.
• Fixed about 100 different game crashes, including potential memory leaks.
• Fixed a bug where the battle music did not stop even after the end of the battle.
• Prices for equipment repair have been reduced and prices for artifacts have been increased.
• Cash rewards for most quests have been doubled.
• At difficulty level «Novice», the efficiency of the player’s equipment has been increased and the damage received from mutants has been reduced.
• Increased the resistance of suits by 12.5% and added a silencer to certain caches.
• Rebalanced exoskeletons — now they don’t slow down and are more efficient.
• Reduced the weight of some quest items, including the weight of scanners.
• Reduced damage and protection from shots for Bloodsuckers, reduced their regeneration outside of combat.
• Health indicators for Controllers, Buers, Flesh, and Boars have been reduced.
• The distance for melee attacks with a buttstock and knife has been increased.
• Fixed more than 20 different bugs in cutscenes.
• Fixed problems with unreadable text and failure to save graphics settings in the menu.
• Fixed the physics of destructible objects and interaction with them.
• Fixed issues with quest blocking, inactive NPCs, getting stuck in doors, etc.
• Missing fast routes have been added, including the transition between the Cement Plant and Mukhomor.
• Fixed the behavior of enemy NPCs during missions in the Arena, including the tactics of bandits.
• Fixed a bug that allowed merchants to sell items at inflated prices.
• Now the flashlight remembers its on state between save uploads.
• Restored missing facial animations and voice acting cues for certain characters in quests.
• Fixed texture flickering, movement issues, and getting stuck in different locations in the game world."

Shotgun swastika spreads are thankfully un-nerfed.

 

[Snekposter]

View attachment 6692815
I AM SO MAD

STALKER 2 fucking spawns bloodsuckers in lesser zone like FUCKING NIGGERS IN DETROIT! and btw they give niggers slavic names which makes me mad that how come Ukraine nigger devs cant get diversity right like introducing niggers as mercs? Instead of fucking "they were always there chud" approach?

I HAVE ENCOUNTERED 5 BLOOD SUCKERS! 5!

There are supposed to kill you in 2 strikes back in Call of Chernobyl! THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE RARE and blood curling! and what is with mutants being bullet sponges? ESPECIALLY PIGS! Pigs are entry level mutants which i killed with a fucking shit pistol back in OG!

I am starting to hate this game, i am so angry.....

They throw a goddamn bloodsucker at you in the tutorial section for fuck's sake.

Although if you think that's bad wait until you hit the late game and every single goddamn human enemy is wearing an exo.

Some fixes from patch 1.0.1:

Well, that's the worst shit fixed, but this game desperately needs proper modding. The weapon selection is terrible, gun stats are all over the place and horribly gamified, and there's not nearly enough types of drugs to satisfy my autism.

How the fuck do you have the 7.62x39mm round but the only weapon for it is a damn machine gun, the AKM nowhere to be seen?

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

Bloodsuckers can now be killed with less than a single magazine of AKM fire.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

There's no night vision in this game. Wow.

 

[Oceanic Navigator]

They throw a goddamn bloodsucker at you in the tutorial section for fuck's sake.

Although if you think that's bad wait until you hit the late game and every single goddamn human enemy is wearing an exo.

Well, that's the worst shit fixed, but this game desperately needs proper modding. The weapon selection is terrible, gun stats are all over the place and horribly gamified, and there's not nearly enough types of drugs to satisfy my autism.

How the fuck do you have the 7.62x39mm round but the only weapon for it is a damn machine gun, the AKM nowhere to be seen?

I was disappointed there was no FN2000, the cut minigun from the original games, and a few other guns that would surely still be in use less than a decade after call of pripyat. The Weapon selection is pretty sparse when over half of them are just named variants of the stock 20 guns and the AKM is just as rare to encounter as the Gauss Rifle in the wild. I only found 1 of each over the entire game wielded by monolith soldiers in pripyat and an alternate AKM chambered to a different round caliber past the point of no return.

The Gauss rifle was an extremely rare sight that I only encountered once over my playthrough on Veteran. It nearly took my head off and was quite scary to suddenly see a GIANT beam of light take up half your screen so I looked over, quickly domed the monolith exo's skull with my SVS, looted the gauss rifle, and repaired it at the merc camp right upstairs while the mercs mopped up the rest of the squad. Though you can't upgrade it at all. It made boss fights and mutants quite easy to take out whenever it didnt take a trillion years to charge up another shot. Definitely a boss DPS gun only and was not helpful against groups of standard enemies. I hope they add in the older model from the first game that they do mention at SIRCAA alongside the older exo suits. It was also a hitscan weapon but had a higher rate of fire. Though im not sure what to look forward to for the 2 announced expansions.

 

[elrond hubbard]

Did they contract sweet baby inc to write the loading screen and achievement text? I'd genuinely prefer a mod that removes the loading screen text at this point

 

[Sooty Soot]

the lore in stalker 2 was absolutely butchered, it just feels like they brought all the familiar characters so they could have bells and whistles to keep the veterans who were starving for another game happy.
here's a quick rundown
>scar survived, and he's the leader of a faction
>nimble survived and is one of the guys who ambushed you in the beginning
>ward and that other faction whose name i cant be bothered to remember are offbrand duty and freedom for some reason
>you have to find strelok
>professor hermann helps you for some reason
>artifacts lose their power outside the zone, just making them shiny rocks whose look you can just replicate and nullifying the reason they were valuable in the first games
>despite there being no monolith and no psiemitters very few people make it to the wish granter
all of this is only after watching the first 20 minutes of this video, at this point they might as well add 'another settlement needs your help' style repeatable quests, companions, and basebuilding to make it fallout-slop

 

[Super Hans v2]

Uh oh, somebody is getting in trouble
View attachment 6701049

I don't see what the problem is, it's just GSC standing in solidarity with Azov Battalion.

 

[PHILLIP BANKS]

the lore in stalker 2 was absolutely butchered, it just feels like they brought all the familiar characters so they could have bells and whistles to keep the veterans who were starving for another game happy.
here's a quick rundown
>scar survived, and he's the leader of a faction
>nimble survived and is one of the guys who ambushed you in the beginning
>ward and that other faction whose name i cant be bothered to remember are offbrand duty and freedom for some reason
>you have to find strelok
>professor hermann helps you for some reason
>artifacts lose their power outside the zone, just making them shiny rocks whose look you can just replicate and nullifying the reason they were valuable in the first games
>despite there being no monolith and no psiemitters very few people make it to the wish granter
all of this is only after watching the first 20 minutes of this video, at this point they might as well add 'another settlement needs your help' style repeatable quests, companions, and basebuilding to make it fallout-slop

Stalker should rename itself to finding sterlok

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

I was disappointed there was no FN2000, the cut minigun from the original games,

Even small details like the PKM belt not being animated when shooting is missing in that video. There's just a lot little things that add up that make STALKER 2 a bit of a let down. Little stuff adds up. If the game wasn't so buggy; you'd overlook it.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

I'm pretty surprised at seeing how many people are still playing. Along with myself, I have a few friends that are still putting some serious hours into it.

 

[Oceanic Navigator]

Im just waiting for people to meme the "strelok mocking the dark one" scene when you shut down the stalker program in game.
They try to get all 4th wall meta braking, but its just silly and strelok playing with a dead corpse from an assassin he killed earlier in the story to demonstrate how the stalker program works via remote tv screen somehow hooked up to his vision without any implants. Just magic nanomachines and subliminal brainwashing son.

 

[Sooty Soot]

who even is the guy standing atop the CNPP in that one trailer?

 

[Heem 'em all.]

If anyone is still playing this broken piece of shit, and hasn't reached the second half yet:

After the end of the first act, you will get notified for a quest in Zalissya. As you travel back to Zalissya, you will pass through a marker called Eastern Checkpoint. SAVE BEFORE YOU REACH EASTERN CHECKPOINT. There will be a group of enemies in the checkpoint. DO NOT STOP TO LOOT ENEMIES OR LOOK AROUND. Run straight to Zalissya, because if you do not, there is like a 90 percent chance the quest will break and Zalissya will be locked for the rest of the game.

 

[Snekposter]

Just magic nanomachines and subliminal brainwashing son.

Yes, because psychic bullshit doesn't exist in the Zone, nor were the scientists in the Zone experimenting with psychic bullshit. Have you forgotten the GIANT FUCKING BRAIN in Lab X-16 in Shadow of Chernobyl that you need to wear special protection against?

 

[Chapalapachapa]

im going to buy it when its fully patched and at like 5 bucks or something

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

80 hours in and I'm on the final mission. This game has been a mess, but it's kept me playing.

There are moment where it almost feels like the original Stalker series, but then something will happen and that moment is ripped away.

The zone feels dead, A-Life is either missing or broken. Enemies will spawn in a few feet away when you're not looking, sometimes a friendly squad will spawn in next to them, it's pretty comical.

It also feels overly long, while also being bereft of content. So much of the main quest time is just spent sprinting kilometers across the empty map to talk to one NPC, shoot a few mutants then sprint back. There are very few meaningful side quests, other than vendor quests that give a pathetic amount of money (pre-patch it was worse with the economy, it's a bit better now).

Stashes are mostly useless, most of them seemingly contain just some vodka, a box of 9x18 and some bread. I understand not all of them can have top class gear, but make less of them so it's either to find blueprints.

There have been some awful bugs, one stopped a door from opening and I had to abandon the quest, another failed a quest I had just completed. Frame rate would drop to unplayable levels during some fights, or just wandering around a camp.

There's simply no reason for factions to exist, you can't join them, you can't see your faction relations.

All that said, there is fun to be had. The guns feel good. Once you get a Saiga 12 you can start melting mutants, but it takes an age to acquire one.

Firefights are fun, so long as you don't need to differentiate between allies and enemies as they all look alike at higher levels (everyone gets exo's before you do).

The zone looks the part, if it wasn't so empty it would be perfect.

Maybe in a year or two it will be fixed, or the modders will make it actually feel right.

5/10

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Put this in your /AppData/Local/Stalker2/Saved/Config/Windows/Game.ini to skip those bullshit loadscreens

[/Script/MoviePlayer.MoviePlayerSettings]
bMoviesAreSkippable=True

[/Script/GSCLoadingScreen.GSCLoadingScreenSettings]
FadeInDuration=0.000000
FadeOutDuration=0.000000
MinShowTime=0.000000
PreLoadingScreenSound=

Optional: Put this in your Engine.ini (same folder as above) to skip shader compilation

[SystemSettings]
csv.trackWaitsGT=0
csv.trackWaitsRT=0
fx.Niagara.DebugDraw.Enabled=0
r.EyeAdaptation.ExponentialTransitionDistance=2
r.InstanceCulling.OcclusionCull=1
r.Nanite.Streaming.MaxPageInstallsPerFrame=16
r.Refraction.OffsetQuality=1
r.VRS.Enable=1
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.DownsampleFactor=25
r.Nanite.AllowWPODistanceDisable=0
D3D12.InsertOuterOcclusionQuery=1
D3D12.MaxCommandsPerCommandList=20000
r.OptimizedWPO=1
r.Shadow.CacheWPOPrimitives=1
r.HLOD.MaximumLevel=1
r.Nanite.Streaming.StreamingPoolSize=768
r.Nanite.LargePageRectThreshold=256
r.Nanite.Streaming.Imposters=1
[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]
r.PSOWarmup.WarmupMaterials=0

 

[Fastest Hand In The East]

Dunno if this was asked already, but what Stalker 2 has over Stalker Anomaly except for graphics and more animations?

 

[The Foxtrot]

Dunno if this was asked already, but what Stalker 2 has over Stalker Anomaly except for graphics and more animations?

This was my big question, and I'm thinking that given what other Kiwis have said here, I am giving a hard pass to STALKER 2 for at least another 6 months. My baseline was "Is this at least on par with Anomaly?", and as it stands it seems STALKER 2 isn't even on par with Shadow of Chernobyl.